As a product manager you fit right in the intersection of User Experience, Business and Technical profiles.
As such, System modeling is essential in communicating your understanding of customer needs, business expectation and product outcomes.
The Unified Modeling Language, UML, is a general modeling language for software engineering providing a standard way to visualize and design a system. In UML you have 2 types of diagrams used to describe different aspects of your system:
- Structural Diagrams: Depict the static aspect of a system i.e. the various parts and structures that compose the system.
- Behavioral Diagrams: Depict the dynamic between the different parts and structures of the system.
The following are the most important and commonly used by product managers.
- Component Diagrams: Illustrate the link between the different components of your system. They are very useful to understand the architecture and dependencies as long as, you keep it simple and high level.
- Class diagrams: Depict the system classes with their attributes, operations and instances relationships. As a product manager use this for your data modeling.
- Deployment diagrams: Show how your system is physically deployed. This is very practical to understand the impact of geography on your product performance: Important if you have components of your system that are in customers premises for example.
- Use case Diagrams: Are a very simple way to communicate What your system will do and for Who i.e., the user's possible interactions with a system. As a PM, this also serves to specify the product scope in term of jobs and actions to be delivered.
- Activity Diagrams: Represent a workflow?with the support of decision, iteration and concurrency. As a PM, you model an organizational process or how your system produce a result.
- State Diagrams: Illustrate the different possible states of a component, or business object for a given process. As an example: Ticket in a basic Kanban board can be in 4 states : Todo, In-progress, Pending and Done
- Sequence Diagrams: Depict the sequence of messages exchanged between system components and actors to carry out a functionality or produce an outcome. Use Sequence diagrams to illustrate the typical realization of a use cases for example.
There are many other diagrams in UML with a complete list available here. However, the 7 I've mentioned are the most commonly used in product management.
So keep it simple and High level. Leave the fine details to your engineering team.
