#6 - PT-1 : Project Management for Product Managers

Driving overall execution of their product is one of the critical responsibilities of product managers. Driving the execution of your product not only means doing whatever it takes to make your product win, but it also encompasses a set of core project management responsibilities.

Lets talk about some of the core elements that an APM/PM deals with on a day to day basis.

EPIC

• Epics are statement of things we are building that clearly shows features/functionalities that we need. It is nothing but a PM lingo for grouping one or more features/functionalities we want to build.
• Usually a product team builds 3-5 epics in a PI.

EX Epic: 1 Translate the app to spanish

EX Epic: 2 Implement photo sharing in direct messages

EX Epic: 3 Allow users to upgrade to pro version

This sounds a lot like features of a product but we call it an epic because it can include other subtasks as well such as migrate backend from SQL to Snowflake etc etc..

• Epics are usually a piece of work that takes longer than a sprint to build. If something can be done in a single sprint, it is called a user story.
• An Epic contains an Epic Spec sheet or a PRD (Product Requirement Document). This document explains what we are building and why.

PRD - Product Requirement Document

- Anyone should be able to understand what you are building just be reading it. It also serves as a guide to your own team as you build "things".
- It has 4 main areas :- Intro, Product Requirements, Design Requirements, Engineering Requirements. As a PM you are responsible for the whole PRD but you are specifically responsible for Intro and Product Requirements.

1) Intro:
Summary of what feature or set of features you are building and why. It should tell what metrics you are trying to improve. You can also put links to the supporting documents, marketing plans and legal requirements if required. You can also include some early wireframes or something that shows what it looks like in the ideal state down the line.

2) Product Requirements:
Here we go deeper into the features/functionality we are trying to build. We can state the requirements in detail eg: this feature should generate or store this type of data etc etc

3) Design Requirements:
These requirements are filled out by you in collaboration with the design team. It should come more from the design team since they are the experts. This is where you can include early wireframes, prototypes or sketches.

4) Engineering Requirements:
This is mostly filled out by engineers after the discussing the product and design requirements with them. Here database and tech related requirements are written.
        

USER STORIES

• This comes under Epic. Epic has PRD but user stories help developers get the requirements. A user story describes a way of what and how we are going to build what we want to build. It contains something that delivers some kind of functionality to the end user.
• User story follows the format "As an X. I want to do Y so that I can Z"
• PMs are responsible for What and Why and Tech team is responsible for How. Hence we write user stories as a "user" so that we can avoid saying How something can be done on a technical level.
• User Stories, sometimes also called as Tickets, can be moved from To Do -> In Progress -> Done. More stages can be added in between depending upon the team and process such as Q/A testing, PM Review etc.
• Before user stories can be considered "Complete/Done", we need to make sure it does what it intends to do. Hence within a user story we have Acceptance Criteria.

Acceptance Criteria is a set of conditions that the feature must satisfy to mark it as done. Acceptance criteria are very detailed.

EX:
1) Given I am a user, when I click on "Add Photo" button in Direct Message window, I am presented with a pop-up window to choose the file I want to upload, Upon clicking "Upload" button within the window, I see the preview of the uploaded photo. 

2) Given I am a user, when I successfully upload the photo from my device, the image is sent to the person through the direct message when I click the "Send" button and appears in the chat window.        

To be continued...

#7?- PT - 2 : Project Management for Product Managers