
Welcome to the Course! This is a high level introduction to Digital Project Management, my background as your instructor, and the general categories we'll be covering.
Suggestions for How to Use this Course.
What Product Managers Do. Goals, Objectives, Strategy, and Tactics. Product Manager Goals.
The Product/Market Fit Pyramid. Problem and Solution Spaces. Where Product Management fits strategically, The Product Process, Product Management Frameworks.
Product Management Roles. Product Manager, Product Owner, Technical Product Manager, Product Marketing Manager, Project Manager, Program Manager.
Overall goals. Traditional vs. Digital Product Management. About Stakeholders. The Big Not-So-Secret Secret of good Product Management.
What should is Strategy and what is the value of Strategy? The difference between Strategy, Goals, Objectives and Tactics. Strategic focus areas and frameworks.
Top Strategic Frameworks. Porter's Five Forces, The Value Net, SWOT, PESTLE, BCG Matrix, Business Model Canvas; descriptions and examples.
Strategic Product Roadmaps. What are Pivots, when might you pivot and how do you do it? What is the "Innovators Dilemma."
Defining Your Market Position. Market level analysis. Competitor/Product Analysis. Competitive Analysis Tools and The Competitor Array, and Brand Positioning Maps.
User Personas and the Customer Journey. Building Personas and Customer Journey map visualizations. About ZMOTs, (Zero Moments of Truth).
Where are Your Users? (And the Business Value) Using connected devices for Consumption vs. Collection. How Users behave and why. The State of Mobile Users. The Kano Model, and the Diffusion of Innovations. Customer Engagement and Digital Body Language.
How to create value in the marketplace. Creating and extracting value. Types of value; tangible and intangible.
Time, money and strategic imperative with regard to buying or acquiring technology. Chase and the Nature of the Firm. Transactions costs and cost/benefit analysis.
Customers, Teams and Influencers. Stakeholders and stakeholder mapping.
Product Introduction, Growth, Maturity and Decline.
From Customer Acquisition to Inactive. Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. Customer growth and churn. Customer Lifetime Value.
Software product failure rates. Major types of software project failure and reasons for failure.
The Product Manager as Leader. What is Leadership and what is Product Leadership in particular. Leadership styles, traits and behaviors.
What you'll be dealing with as a Digital Product Manager. About your job, about you and where you fit.
Complete a SWOT Analysis Activity. Download the instructions .pdf and then link to the Google Slide Document.
Complete a Brand Perception Map Activity. Download or access the instructions .pdf via Google Docs and then link to the Google Slide Document and the Google Sheets Document.
Complete a User Persona Creation Activity. Download the instructions .pdf and then link to the Google Slide Document.
Complete a Stakeholder Analysis Activity. Download the instructions .pdf and then link to the Google Slide Document.
Just what is a Product anyway? Product Vision and Strategy. Invention vs. Innovation. Product level Vision and Questions. About Pivots, the Problem/Solution Space, and Examples.
Where are you going now? Where will you be tomorrow. High level depictions of product or service feature benefits over time. Value of roadmaps. Agile roadmaps. Roadmap elements and prioritization.
Just what are you offering? Where are you in the software and business "stack?" Are you infrastructure? Platform? Or a Service? A Product Company? Or a Development Company?
You've Got to Ring the Bell! Advertising or Ecommerce. Advertising for Branding and Lead Generation. Ecommerce: Selling Direct and via Channels.
Internet of Things, (IoT), Physical products and online/offline hybrids. Marketplace friction and IoT vs. Pure Digital plus IoT challenges.
Brand Marketing and Channel Support for retailers and manufacturers. Strategic issues of selling direct via digital or only through either or both digital or offline wholesale/retail channel.
Do you have fraud issues? Fraud is pure cost with both direct and indirect attacks and consequences; for both ecommerce and advertising based businesses.
You might not be a lawyer, but you may need to play one on the Internet! Intellectual Property, patents, Ecommerce and advertising law, Privacy, etc.
Create a Product Feature Prioritization
What is Minimum Viable Product? The Lean Product Process and Lean with Agile. Examples and Criticisms.
Business Requirements Documents (BRD), Product Requirements Document (PRD), Marketing Requirements Documents (MRD), Functional Specification Documents, (FSD), User Stories
Organization Information. Sitemaps, Wireframes, Visual Design.
How it Looks, Feels, and Flows. Engineering vs. Design. Type of Designers. Visual design elements and design goals. Data Visualization. Value of Visual Design for digital products.
Visual Design plus User Interface(UI)/User Experience(UX). Interaction Design (IxD). Challenges and Limits to UI/UX. Digital devices as Consumption vs. Collection devices. Lean UX. Creative Briefs. Working with your Design Team.
What you say and how you say it. Content Strategy goals. Audience needs and Storytelling. Measuring Results. Editorial Organization/Team. Publishing Venues and User Generated Content (UGC). About templates and tools.
It's more than just a Like Button! The Power of Social and Social Media Venues. Social Proof. The Social Media Landscape. Using Social as a Channel. Are Communities more Inclusive or Exclusive? How to Listen and Social Media Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
Engaging in Social Media. Integrating Social Media into your products. Examples of commercial engagement in communities of interest.
Ecommerce Landscape. Digital Sales. Ecommerce core components. Critical page types. Ecommerce and Mobile. Home Page elements. Examples.
Quick tour of some Examples of concepts discussed in Ecommerce: Part 1.
Engaging in Social Media. Integrating Social Media into your products. Examples of commercial engagement in communities of interest.
Product Detail Pages; common elements, traits and meta data. Product imagery and video. Examples.
Shopping Cart features, required elements, Ecommerce support pages and examples.
Online/Offline efforts, Research Online/Buy Offline (ROBO), Business to Business (B2B) ecommerce.
Mobile marketplace and mobile customer journey.
Deployment options: Responsive, Apps, Mobile, Adaptive, Hybrid.
Page and Element level schematics. Wireframe fidelity levels and prototyping.
Wireframe / prototype tool examples
Easy Does It! Defining usability and factors that affect it. Recognition vs. Recall, categories and types of usability testing. Survey of usability tools.
We find what we seek. Internal vs. External search. Vertical search and other search types. Recall and Precision in search explained.
Deeper into Search... Ranking, Analytics and Microformats
Introduction and Examples. What do Taxonomies Do? Common terms and types. Facets Explained. Goals and Characteristics of Good and Bad Taxonomies.
Standards and Microformats.
Make a wireframe (Or two or three!)
Project Management defined. Difference between Project and Product management. Various Project Management methods defined and discussed.
Introduction to Agile Development Methodology. Discussion of Scrum and its components, and Product Owner vs. Product Manager roles.
About Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall
About technology for Product Managers. Code as the means for Production and how much you should know; at the very least; languages, databases and tools.
HTML explained. What Product Managers should know. Where HTML fits in the Page Display Process along with CSS and JavaScript. Several practical examples of basic page structure.
Focus on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Background and the CSS Box Model. How to tie display rules to HTML elements. Inline, Internal and External style application methods. Depiction of Selectors, Declarations, Properties and Values.
Web Server Basics, Application Servers. Demo of Google Chrome Developer Tools to look into client-server traffic. Explanation of DevOps and Continuous Integration.
The workhorses behind the scenes. Are databases complicated? Some basics of Database technology. Schemas plus some examples. Query Languages and SQL, NoSQL, Graph Databases described.
Schema/Example
Concepts: ACID, BASE, CAP Theorem, Database Model Structure. Graph Databases.
A fast moving target! Client vs. Server Side languages. Service Oriented Architecture, (SOA), and Mobile Development.
About technology for Product Managers. Code as the means for Production and how much you should know; at the very least; languages, databases and tools.
Learning Code Interactively with online services.
Brief intro to the MAMP server / database stack presented in MacOS.
Brief intro to the XAMPP server / database stack presented in Windows.
Using web Hosts for learning and serving coding.
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) explained. Business value of APIs and Key Performance Indicators. XML and JSON and SOAP vs. REST. Business Models for APIs. Implementation challenges and services.
Time is Money. The depth of the problem with sub-optimal page load time. Reasons for slower load times. Testing methods and tools. Business cases and Critical Rendering Paths.
Experience Google Chrome Developer Tools and Run a Speed performance test on your site and that of a competitor.
The purpose of Analytics. Insights and Value. Categories of measurement; Metrics vs. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). How to Measure, Types of things to measure. Business Goals & Conversions.
How are we doing? KPIs should answer the question: "Is our performance taking us towards our strategic goals." What's the definition of success and the pathways to get there? Roles & KPI types. Customer segments and funnels. About customer service metrics like Net Promoter Score, Customer Satisfaction Score and K-Factor (a measure of vitality).
What to measure on mobile. Acquisition, Audience, Activity, Conversion, Retention.
Introduction to Google's core analytics tools. Overview, Tricks and Gotcha's. About Metrics vs. Dimensions and Source/Medium.
GA Tricks & Gotcha's, Key Terms defined; such as Metrics vs. Dimensions, Source/Medium, and more. Segmentation and Acquisition Reporting explained; along with demos/examples.
Google Studio, Search Console and additional tools. Overview of Google Studio. Google Search Console and integration with analytics.
Custom Google Analytics Report practice activity.
What is Marketing? Marketing Goals & Perspectives. Features vs. Benefits explained. Classic models such as the Four P's and the Nine P's. Digital Marketing and the new voice of the customer. Digital Marketing Channels/Components and Segmentation. Market Research the and Feature/Benefits Ladder.
Customers & Communications. Business to Consumer (B2C) and Business to Business (B2B) type customers. How to create Buyer Perception Grids. Situation Assessments & Marketing Plans. Marketing technology landscapes and how Product Managers are involved. Brand Values, Marketing Communications, Pricing and Sales.
Branding: A Promise Made Over Time. Brands as Mental Shortcuts and Product Managers' role in branding. Branding Goals, Brand Names and target markets. Name development and brand name types:
Name scoring along with Trademark and testing.
Paid media types and how Product Managers are involved. About tag management. The Display Media Landscape. Search Ad tech and digital ad spend. Challenges of paid media, including ad blockers.
Editorial and Social Media Influence. Benefits of Earned Media. Challenges of Earned Media. How to get Earned Media.
Editorial, Social Media Influence & SEO. Benefits and Challenges of Owned Media. Types of Owned Media and examples.
Video as part of your Communications Strategy. Best types of videos, venues and How To's.
Getting Found, Staying Found. Search Engine Optimization Introduction and major components. Organic and Pay-Per-Click Search working together. Media types, Keyword Research and Link Building. Local Search and Mobile Considerations.
More about the "How" of SEO. Microformats and Schema.org. SEO tools and search engine tools. Search signals and Sitemaps. Measuring SEO performance and ROI.
Today's Customer Service: A lot more than picking up the phone. Digital era channels. Customer Service KPIs.
Create a Product/Brand Naming Evaluation
Additional resources on the web that support the course.
Digital Product Management is a specialty discipline within general product management, but increasingly, just about any business will be integrating aspects of digital into their products and processes. Much focus has been put on digital product management as related to startups and new business creation. However, digital is increasingly a strategic aspect of just about any business from manufacturers to retailers. This course will not only go deeply into various aspects of business strategy, competitive analysis and lifecycle management, but digital specific issues for both pure digital products and digital aspects of traditional businesses. Of course we'll cover product roadmapping and product management for Web and Mobile. And while we'll be looking at a lot of the "How To Do It" technologies, (Minimum Viable Product definition, Agile Methods, Product Creation from Wireframes to Code), we're also going to go over a wide variety of digital business models. We're going to look at a lot of the "Whys" and think about "What are the right things to do." These are the questions Product Managers need to answer for customers, co-workers, their businesses and stockholders.
This course is the result of decades or Product Management leadership, team building and mentorship. Most of the material comes from hands on use in training or mentoring product managers or answering specific questions practitioners have faced in the field.
The slides in the presentation are based on real world presentations done over time. The narrative intenationally closely follows the slides so that anyone who happens to use the course on a small device with challenging display can still hear everything and anyone who wants to skip the listening could more quickly go through the slides.
Your Instructor:
Scott Germaise is a Senior Product Manager leader with experience from Associate to VP level at multiple startups and established digital businesses across content, community and commerce products. As an inventor with six patents and several more pending, he has served as product manager at some of the first consumer online services. He's designed, built or managed some of the world's first ecommerce stores and Internet products. As co-founder of About, Scott has led the product team at what's become one of the longest lasting top information services around. Having led early product efforts at companies from About, (now Dotdash), to OpenSky, Keep and more, plus consulting roles with dozens of others, this course is the result of those experiences. Many of Scott's former direct reports have gone on to Director and VP Product roles.