Product Playbook
i.e How do we think about product features and capture specifications?
Overview
The product manager studies a product category and puts up a case to build an easy version of the product. Once the rationale is clear, the product owner focuses on detailing the product features to hand it off to the engineering team.
Prerequisites
- Understand the Product Experience Principles document. We’ve decided early on that we want to provide a consistent product experience across all easy products. We captured our guidelines in the Product Experience Principles document. Understanding these principles aligns the PM with the broader Product thinking and gives clarity in terms of how the Product should be presented.
- High fidelity mocks play a very important role in our product development process and our PM is expected to deliver them. The PM should do a Figma tutorial or two to get comfortable with the tool.
Details
- Go through the Product Category Research document to define your product category’s features in about a week. This exercise also onboards the PM on the key problems his product would eventually solve and gets him closer to his user’s needs. Duration: 1 week
- Having done the research, the PM will start to form ideas about the core and non-core use cases handled by products in the category. The PM works towards defining the MVP features document. This step will result in a set of MVP user stories + acceptance criteria + low fidelity mockup in Figma. Duration: 1-2 weeks
- Present the product MVP to the team to get an overall GO and incorporate initial feedback.
- Build Figma High Fidelity (HiFi) mockups. The Engineering team does not get involved until HiFi mockups are presented.
- Switch to developing the product marketing website content.
What we love about our Product Playbook?
- Spending time to study the existing products in the market gives a real opportunity to understand the core needs of the users of the product. This also aclimitizes the PM to the problem domain so that he can innovate the easy product experience.
- An important outcome of the Product Playbook is the delivery of high fidelity mockups. Building the high fidelity mockups provides good thinking opportunities for the PM to operate on first principles fundamentally asking the need for desired functionality.
Related Pages
- Product Category Research Playbook – How do we study a product category and understand the core use cases?
- Feature Documentation Template – How do we capture the specifications of a feature?
- Product Experience Principles – What do we want our users to experience?
- Product Design Playbook – How do we figure out the Lo Fi and Hi Fi mockups for our products?