As a product manager, one of your key responsibilities is communicating the product vision to the engineering/tech team. It all starts with an idea, which lurks somewhere in your brain as an abstract thought. You thought of something that users might love, use and pay for it! Everything is cool, your day is suddenly amazing... What then? Who is going to work on this? How do you convince all the stakeholders in your organisation to go through with your wonderful idea? Most importantly, how do you execute on it?
you will probably feel like the confused dog and Einstein multiple times a day
That's where engineering plays a very important role. They are the people who make ideas happen. Therefore, communicating properly with them is of essential value. People from an engineering background might find it easier than others, but don't let that discourage you. As long as every perspective needed is there in the team, you can be sure things will go right.
In this post I'd like to introduce one technique that I find useful when it comes to communicating broader product ideas. In his book INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love, Marty Cagan calls it a framing technique. It's the customer letter.
The Customer Letter
Briefly put, the customer letter is what the name says. The catch is that you are the one who is writing it, and the customer is a fictional customer (who you'd love to have).
The purpose of this letter is to try to establish the boundaries of the product and to answer: Why are we building the product? What would a successful implementation of this product look like? How does the customer see it? What makes the customer so happy?
You can find an example of such a letter at our website blog:
The structure in this case is a customer testimonial. However, you can also use the press release style favoured by Amazon.
The goal is similar, to think of the product in the customer's mind. The testimonial style will usually specify parts or use cases of the product that make it successful. Those parts and use-cases are then more easily translatable into user stories and tasks, and then the engineers will have more understanding of how a certain story fits into the big picture of things. It also connects that user story more closely to customer satisfaction, by presenting the story as a cause of the satisfaction. This is also a nice motivational tool for people in general, because everyone who works wants to do it successfully.
I hope this is one tool that you, especially newer product managers, might find useful in your journey of building awesome stuff.
Keep in mind, everyone has their personal style. No matter how it is, if it's authentic and is oriented to making your company and its people successful, go for it!