A product manager identifies the customer needs and the larger business objectives that the product or feature will fulfill, defines success for a product, and leads that vision into reality. Mastering the art of product management is not an easy task. Product manager drives the product from its vision to execution, turning a thought/ idea into reality. Here, we will dive deeper into the deliverables that will drive the product success and are the key responsibilities for a product manager./

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Product Vision:  The product vision paints the future picture of the product. What is the As is state, why we are developing this product and what value, it will offer to the customers. A clear vision keeps the stakeholders aligned and motivates the team to do something bigger.

The vision statement should not be a smaller statement, rather it should be a 1-2 pager document explaining the below:

1. As is state of the market and the problem , this product will solve
2. Value, the product will offer to the customer
3. How the product will change the world.
4. How we will reach to this value addition stage means the product roadmap.
   
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Product Strategy: Having a well-defined product strategy is critical for success. Poor planning, conflicting priorities, or failure to understand customer’s changing needs can lead to product failure. An effective product strategy unites various aspects of product development, including market research, design, engineering, marketing, and sales. A strong product strategy helps you prioritize initiatives, allocate resources effectively, and make informed decisions based on market insights and customer needs.

Below are the main key areas to consider while writing the product strategy:

1. Identify problem areas: What specific pain points of the customer, we are trying to solve with this product.
2. Understand the market: Identify the target market for whom, we are building this product.
3. Value Proposition: What is the USP (Unique selling proposition) of the product. Why the customers should go for it?
4. Competitive advantage: What we have, but the competitors do not have.
5. Growth Plan: How will we grow our business and get new customers?
6. Business Model: How the product will generate revenue.
   
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When we initially document these, they should be pretty light-weight. Maybe just a paragraph for each for a total of one or two pages. But as we continue to iterate, we will be able to add significant detail to each based on the learnings from the market.

Customer Insights: Customer insights are crucial because they provide a deep understanding of customers' behaviors, needs, preferences, and pain points. If we understand our customers, we can build a product, that they love and solves their problems.

The task for the product manager then becomes to determine how to leverage the many customer discovery methods at their disposal, including surveys, focus groups, pain point analyses,  card sorting, A/B testing etc, to maximize the discovery of insights leading to a better roadmap and requirements.
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Keep it concise (3 pages max). We need to focus on the motivation behind it and not only the product features.

**Product Roadmap:  ****Product roadmap is a plan of action for how a product or solution will evolve over time. Product teams use roadmaps to define future product functionality and schedule their release based on the priority. To build a roadmap, the product team need to take into account market trajectories, company goals, customer feedback, insights, and engineering constraints. Once these factors are understood, they are represented in a roadmap as initiatives and timelines. The product roadmap should represent the timeline as months or quarters, not the specific dates.. To keep prioritization conversations focused on goals and strategy, instead of timelines, we can even try mapping initiatives to Now, Next, and Later. Roadmap items can includes new features, bug fixes, redesigned or improved experiences, infrastructure or back-end related initiatives, as well as growth and monetization efforts.
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For prioritization, below 4 lenses to consider:

1. Vision: Does this initiative moves us closer to our vision?
2. Strategy: Does this close the gap between our strategy and where we are today,
3. Customer: Will this feature provide value addition to the customer?
4. Business: Will this feature help us achieve business goals like revenue, more customers etc.
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At times, These 4 lenses produces very conflicting priorities and we need to carefully balance them to create the final roadmap.

Product Specs: This describes the product or feature specs in detail. This document is used by the R&D team to know what questions to ask, and what exactly to build. The usefulness of a good product specification cannot be ignored at all. It helps everyone on the team understand what is being built, why, what it must achieve for the customer, and how its success will be measured.
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Product specs are like blueprint for the development team. Every product spec at least contains a detailed description of the problem you are trying to solve, the target audience, the rationale behind the overall solution, and the success metrics on top of the experience details.

Metric Dashboards:

Product managers are responsible for continually assessing, reporting on, and deriving insights from the health of their product and metrics are one of the primary ways of doing so. The best product managers look at the defined metric dashboards on a regular basis to keep a check on the product health and performance, but also to improve on the defined metrics.

While each product needs to determine the right dashboards for their unique offering, most products need at least an acquisition dashboard, reporting on how well users are finding the product and signing up for it, an engagement dashboard, reporting on how often users are using the product on a regular basis, and a monetization dashboard, capturing how well the business is monetizing its offerings.
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Team OKRs: OKRs create clarity and transparency within the team. Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) are one of the best goal setting frameworks that helps the teams stay focussed, aligned and accountable.

Start by defining each objectives. An objective is directly linked with an initiatve. It will explain what we want to achieve with that initiative. Strong objectives are impactful, actionable and time bound. Once objectives are defined, define one or more key results associated with each objective. A key result defines a quantitative result of success or progress towards an objective. Strong key results are specific, time-bound, measurable, and verifiable.

It is best to define the OKR as quarterly for the team and annual at the company level.  This will maintain team members focused, aligned with the big picture, and obligated to their goals.
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Decisions: The team needs to take lots of decisions during the product development process, whether big or small**.** Product managers are responsible for identifying when decisions are needed and driving the decision-making process to resolution in the most efficient way possible. The product manager needs to identify and appoint the person accountable for decisions for different processes. They will take the decision, execute the decision, and will communicate their decision to the stakeholders.
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Product Wins:

It's crucial to remember that a product manager's primary responsibility is achieving product wins: delivering products that effectively solve customer problems while also driving business success. Everything else—like the deliverables we've discussed—are merely tools to help reach that goal more efficiently. Without product wins, these tools hold no value. To achieve success, it takes continuous effort and determination.

When the product team does achieve wins, it's important to celebrate them, no matter their size. The team has put in a lot of hard work, and celebrating these successes helps inspire the next phase of development and reminds everyone of the purpose behind their efforts.

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