The Sprint Planning meeting is a meeting where the product manager introduces the required capabilities to the development team and the QA teams. A good sprint planning meeting is a meeting where team members understand the feature, why it is essential to develop it, the production environment and product constraints, who the users are, and what characterizes them.

This article list the steps the product manager should perform before, during, and after the sprint planning meeting.

Before the Meeting

1. Write system requirements: The Product Requirements Document (“PRD”) should define the system requirements for the developer, describe the assumptions, and name the different versions…

The product manager is responsible for writing the product requirements document (“PRD”). The PRD writing phase is made after completing a few pre-steps: description of the market opportunities, define the user’s problem, gathering the user’s needs, and analyze it. The product manager and the project manager also need to create separate documents regarding the project management and the quality assurance test plan, addressing schedule, cost, development methods, development phases, deliverables, and testing procedures.

This article describes what a product requirements document should include.

Introduction

1. System name
2. Author
3. Date
4. Revision sheet (Version, date, revision description)

Purpose & Background

This section describes an overview of the…

In one sentence, the PM role definition: “Turning the company’s vision into tangible products that deliver value to the customer”. This article introduces the role characteristics of product managers:

• Define the product long term strategy
• Write the product roadmap
• Analyze market trends
• Analyze competitor’s offerings
• Collaborate with marketing and sales on go-to-market strategy
• Define minimum viable product
• Define KPI’s and how success should be measured
• Define metrics
• Perform user’s interviews
• Gather requirements
• Initiate new features
• Characterize user’s personas
• Perform user’s task analysis
• Define use-cases — operational task analysis
• Define user’s workflow and functional workflow
• Participate in the user experience characterization
• …

This article presents a list of characteristics and traits that define excellent product managers from my point of view.

The Will to Succeed — Winning Approach

An excellent product manager has a passion for winning and succeed in the role. In practical terms, it means:

• Ambition, a passion for delivering value to the market, and a will to answer business goals.
• Ability to learn new things and apply them quickly.
• Lead an innovative and creative approach to the product.
• Ability to communicate this approach to other team members as well.
• Ready to engage and get involved in all the product’s details for the product’s success.
• Ability to…

When the product manager begins the process of characterizing a new system or product, it is his responsibility to research and define a wide range of aspects — for example, understanding the company’s objectives and business goals, technological characterization, setting its technical principles, defining the user experience, and understanding the product’s cognitive principles.

The design process of a new system in terms of user experience characterization is performed according to the following steps:

• Define system terminology/glossary: especially in terms that are unique to the new system, industry, and product content world are used. Please keep it simple; show the name of the word and a description of its definition.
• Define the system’s objective: which includes the primary purpose of the…

I have been working as a product manager for two years. In this article, I want to share my insights and things that I’ve learned as a product manager.

Define responsibilities with tangent role holders

My professional experience includes work as a systems engineer and project manager. When I started work as a product manager, I noticed many overlaps between the three roles.

As a systems engineer, I was responsible for analyzing the system’s requirements and defining how to build the product. Also, I was responsible for determining the system’s design, infrastructure, interfaces between different modules, interface to external systems, and data flow.

I’ve learned that…

The product manager is responsible for the customer value proposition when using the product and to improve it continuously. As our company, there are competitors in the market that provide the same value and aim to the same target audience. The following section explains which questions the product manager should ask to perform competitor research on a new idea.

Competitor Research on a New Product Idea

The entrepreneurs at the initial have to answer various questions. Through the market and competitors analysis, they can be answered.

• Who is the product’s target audience?
• What’s the market size?
• Who are my competitors in this market?
• What is their status?
• …

There are many definitions in the literature about what creativity is, but there are two common characteristics: creativity is to produce something new and beneficial.

It is not as trivial as it sounds; a creative action must meet these two requirements to be considered innovative. Not everything new is creative; instead, it needs to meet the requirement of being beneficial. Here I find the connection point to the product management role.

The product manager is responsible for defining the problem and thinking of a solution that benefits the user every iteration.

For example, to think regarding something that the product’s…