Building Product Manager’s Toolkit

Product people love products.

I mean, not just from the obvious “well, that’s their job”. It is sort of an obsession.

Take me for example, my default chrome page is set to producthunt.com. I can barely resist signing up and ravaging through a slick freemium or trial-based web app.

90-95% of my exploration end up in about 10-15 minutes once my thirst for trying out a new unfamiliar interface and a conceptual model is quenched and I blissfully move back to my old tools. But in those rare 5-10% of cases, I find some true game-changers. Those are the ones that make it into my toolkit.

What toolkit?

Toolkits for product management vary based on multiple factors. Are we talking about frameworks? Processes? Activities? It will even depend on how an organization defines the product (my biggest pet peeve).

The toolkit I am referring to here is a collection of software products that help build other products.

Product management-specific options are scares and arguably limited in their overall functionality. Most of them are rather opinionated and do not allow for the flexibility that plays a huge part in defining effective operations. On the other hand, there are so many general tools that simplify tasks and maximize positive outcomes. These fruits of innovative laborers are popping up in the ecosystem every single day. These are the ones for which I keep an eye out.

Just as with user discovery, a solution for an adjacent process might solve a similar need in the product flow.

A Lucky Find or a Planned Attack?

That depends.

When I review activities by stages of a product lifecycle with my team, we encourage each other to imagine if they could happen faster and more effectively. This pushed us to go into the wild and purposefully look for a tool that might apply. In those cases, we have a clear understanding of the unmet need. We know what we want and plan out the ways to get it. We do not always find anything suitable. In many instances, we realize that removing steps will be more efficient rather than looking for ways to automate.

Sometimes it happens organically. I will be browsing through yet another cool app, the flows map in my brain, I test it out, and if it fits - it goes right into the toolkit for another trial period.

Few, but very good finds would stick. Most will fail or retire after a couple of months falling off down the adoption curve.

How do you know what’s working?

I love walking in the user shoes. When evaluating a new product (that might be used to build another product, ironically), I get a unique opportunity to tickle my brain.

I sign-up. Open the shiny new interface. And dive in.

I swim across the same exact D.Norman’s gulfs as every new user does:

> here I catch a wave of execution (What can this thing do? Where will it take me if I click here?)

> rapidly followed by a wave of evaluation (Hm, did it do what I thought it would do? Might this apply to my case? Is there a case it can work for?)

Just swimming in the action gulfs…

If I get enough ‘aha’ moment or if I discover at least one strong use case - I will take a note and create a task on my planner to play more with this product.

Conclusion

That’s a brief summary of what the toolkit is and how I go about building it. I would like to dig deeper into the next stages of action in the following articles.

Building a toolkit pays off. It innovates the processes, saves time, and, ultimately, allows to create more value to the customer and the firm faster.

At the same time, the discovery of the new tool gives a Product person a much-needed experience of tinkering with other products.