Product Portfolio ManagementNeil Gehani - Sr. Product Manager, LinkedIn

@GehaniNeil

Agenda• What is Product Management

• Product Manager’s Daily “Dashboard”

• Core team structure

• Product Portfolio Management

• Example product portfolio

• Automating PM tasks

• Q&A

Product Manager’s “Dashboard”

• Deliver drop dead simple to use products

• KPI’s - Measure and analyze for success

• Track revenue, value, cost, problems

• Adapt to change and re-prioritize

• Ship - fast! so you can learn - iterate, iterate, iterate

• Communicate - roadmap, resource allocation, status

Building Products - Process

Product and UI

• Product - “It’s not up to customers to tell you what they want, it is up to you to figure out what they need” - Steve Jobs

• IX/PM - “I am not a chef but I am a pretty good judge of what is a good meal” - Barney Frank (D-MA former congressman)

Core Team Structure• Product

• Front end (small company) - PM, UI, Eng lead or mgr

• PM & IX = same person

• Front end (big company) - PM, UI, IX, Eng lead or mgr, PMM

• Backend (small company) - PM, Eng lead, Developer Relations

• PM & Dev Relations = same person

• Backend (big company) - PM, Eng lead, Development Relations, PMM

Product Portfolio

• Single product

• Multi product

Source: David Etheridge, VP, Yahoo

Example Multi Product Portfolio

Data Access Layer

DAT

ABAS

E IO

REPO

RTIN

G

ALER

TIN

G

MO

NIT

ORI

NG

LOG

GIN

G

AUTH

N/Z

3rd

Party

App

s

Prod

uct A

Prod

uct B

Prod

uct C

Prod

uct D

Prod

uct E

Architecture & Technology Frameworks

Products - Standardized UX/UI

INTEGRATIONAPI & Libraries Rest / Adapters

PLATFORMC

ACH

ING

Scaling Development• Implementing software development best practices

• Become efficient as a software development org - automate

• Common Design and Scalable Architecture

• Common security procedures

• Common backup infrastructure

• Contributing to common libraries to support code reuse

• Common approach to instrumenting for analytics, monitoring, logging

Product X Product Y Product Z

Identify non-core products

And dump them - fast!

Documentation framework• Product documentation

• Name (easily marketable)

• What it is/does? 1 line description in 10 words or less

• One page product brief (like a press release) - link to full product requirements - “working backwards” - Ian McAllister (amazon.com)

• Requirements doc (wiki)- Explains the what, why, users/activity, stakeholders

• Link to technical design doc (wiki) - Explains the how

Product Portfolio Management• Ship cool products at an ever faster cadence

• Consolidate product, platform, technology stack

• Automate Roadmap

• Prioritize including what-if

• Resource and skills mapping including what-if

• Schedule

• Tracking status

• Full transparency

Prioritization and backlog grooming

Prioritization cont’d

Source

Automating PM tasks - how?

• Connect business goals to business realities

• Establish a single source of truth - JIRA

• Automate the planning & communication process - JIRA portfolio management

Leverage JIRA and Confluence (wiki)

Source: David Etheridge VP @Yahoo

JIRA Product Portfolio Management

Source: Atlassian

Identifying resource needs

Tracking Status

Skills Mapping

Skills Matching

Sprints Tracking

Summary

• Product Management is hard!

• Managing a product portfolio has lots of moving parts

• Identify a single source of truth for data (e.g. JIRA)

• Transparency is key - everyone should see the impact of changes

Thank You!@GehaniNeil neilgehani.me

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