Main takeaways: - Learn how to create a solid foundation for the successful release of a product by applying structured frameworks and user - Center design processes from discovery to roadmap definition phases of the product lifecycle - Learn how to methodically translate empathy for the customer to data for driving prioritization, decision -making, and clear communication for your teams - This will be an interactive session for the audience based on a real-life example from the speaker's work

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Key Tactics for a Successful Product
Launch by Kespry Senior PM

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5. Harmeet Gill-
Sethy
T O N I G H T ’ S S P E A K E R

6. Me + Kespry
● Love to build things: Former engineer
& MBA
○ Using my hands
○ Working with a cross-functional team to
bring something to fruition & scale
● PM for 5+ years: Applications,
Platforms, Analytics in areas of:
○ IoT
○ Edge
○ Visual intelligence
○ Energy, water, transportation,
manufacturing, smart cities, and more
● Founded 2013 in Menlo Park, CA
● Capture > Ingest > Process > Analyze >
Share
● Visual & Geospatial data:
○ Aerial imagery (i.e. drones)
○ Ground based (i.e. mobile images)
○ Videos (i.e. submersibles)
● Computer Vision (CV) & Machine
Learning (ML)

7. Structure of Talk: Case Study
● Real problem I started on my 1st day.
● We’ll work through it together. Focus on Part 1.
● Based on 2 questions I get often:
○ There are so many parts, frameworks, and tools for product management...how does it come together?
■ Answer: We will cover aspects of Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) but focus on 1st
half.
○ What is PM “speak”? What are important terms, frameworks, and tools I should know?
■ Answer: I will highlight standard terms, words, and phrases that represent what PMs think
about and work through day to day.

8. The Situation
No matter the product, this is a
common scenario.
● Product is very strong for a couple use cases.
● Current customers have been hacking
together different capabilities of product for
another use case.
● Many internal teams, such as GTM and
executive leadership, believe we must build
product/features for this use case.
Should we? If so, what? Why?

9. Part 1: Understand the Problem:
Foundational for Successful Product Dev,
Release, & Adoption

10. Day 1 you learn: Our customers can...
Plan & Fly Autonomously > Analyze > Delve into Business Insights
● Excellent for measurements, dimensional analysis, and source of truth of real physical state of location or asset.
● However for the “Planning” use case, users are figuring out own ways to use existing product.

11. Where do you start?
What questions do you have?

12. My PM Toolkit
Frameworks
● External primary, secondary, &
tertiary research sources
● Internal business data & product
analytics
● The design thinking process
● User-centered design
● Prioritization techniques
● Program management practices

13. Step 1: Speak customer’s language & empathize
● What matters most to our users/customers?
○ Product speak: What are the user’s value drivers/levers?
● How does the user perceive and define the problem? For what users/customers is
it a problem?
○ What are the use cases? Who are the target user personas?
○ What is the user experience?
○ What are the pain points? Where could we deliver the most value?
○ What are the target outcomes?
● What do users/customers use today to solve the problem? What are the gaps?
○ What is the current user journey?
○ What is the competition?
○ Where are the opportunities?
○ What are other parts of the user’s ecosystem? Where are potential areas for interoperability and
integrations?

14. Step 2: Map position, strengths, differentiation - Hypothesis
● Are there others with the same or similar problem?
○ Product speak: What is the market size?
○ What are our potential customer segments?
● Where and when can we capture the most ROI?
○ What are our value drivers/levers we can impact by solving this use case? New revenue? Customer
retention?
● What is so compelling about our team/company unique
○ What can be our position? What is our differentiation?
● How much of a ROI does a user need to try a solution?
○ What is the barrier to entry? Get high-level understanding of willingness-to-pay.
○ Who are the target buyer personas?

15. What I did: Study existing data
Customer value + Customer value ++ Customer value +++ Customer value ++
Strengths set 1
Strengths set 2
Strengths set 3
External data
● Industry trends
● Market size
● Competitive analysis
Internal data
● Product usage analytics
● Sales pipeline
● Win-loss analysis
● Feature requests
Question: Is this problem worth pursuing & creating initial roadmap for?
+
Answer: Hypothesis - Yes, because of alignment between customer value drivers, target personas’ needs + our
core competencies, differentiating capabilities, and business goals.
Start here
Grow here
Analysis:

16. Great, we have a hypothesis…
now what?
What would you do next?

17. Step 3: Design thinking & user-centered design
● Primary research
● Talk to actual users & customers
○ Ideal: partner with users throughout process.
○ Ideal: partner with advocates, strategic accounts, target personas/customer segments, power
users who also may be biggest critics.
● Divergent & convergent thinking
Author/Copyright holder: Paris-Est d.school at Ecole des Ponts . Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. Interaction Design Foundation.

18. What I did: Aggressively iterate & gather new data
● Partner with:
○ GTM teams to identify users and customers to engage.
○ Design for research, discovery, & analysis.
○ Engineering for high level feasibility discussions and questions.
○ Champion users/customers for continuous feedback.
● Iterate on:
○ Hypothesis > leading to an initial vision statement/product positioning statement.
○ Understanding of pain points, personas, and opportunities (journey maps).
○ Design concepts.

19. Journey maps
(1) the persona (“who”)
(2) the scenario (“what”)
(3) phases
(4) actions (identify “pain points”)
(5) thoughts (identify “pain points”)
(6) emotions (identify “pain points”)
(7) opportunities (based on “pain points” &
customer ‘value drivers”)
(8) internal ownership
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/customer-journey-mapping/

20. Personas
Persona:
Goal:
[What is persona trying to accomplish? Roles &
responsibilities]
Information: [What data does persona need to accomplish goal?]
Actions: [What does persona do?]
Impact:
[What are value drivers/benefits of accomplishing
goal?]
Remember! There can be
many types of personas:
● User
● Buyer
● Negative/Exclusionary
(“Naysayer”)
● Primary
● Secondary

21. Design concepts
Low fidelity sketches > High fidelity UI designs
Divergent > Convergent
Questions generate ideas, variety of insights > Facts provide clarity, answers
http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/wiiu/miiverse2/0/0
Kits by StickyJots
https://www.invisionapp.com/inside-
design/low-fi-vs-hi-fi-prototyping/
https://www.invisionapp.com/inside-
design/wireframe-examples/

22. Define the Product & Roadmap: Let’s
prioritize!
So many ways...your thoughts?

23. Step 4: Hypothesis > Vision: Product Positioning Statement
My format:
For [persona] who needs to [address need/accomplish outcome], [product name] is a
[product description/definition] that [provides key customer benefit(s)].
Unlike [primary alternative/competitor], [product name] is [key differentiators].
Tips:
● Be specific!
● Make it measurable!
● This is your product vision. Therefore, everything afterwards should be based on this.

24. Step 5: Prioritization
● What exactly are we
building?
● Sometimes even more
importantly: what are we
not building?
● Why?
● Many ways! Use one that
exists, combine, or create
your own.
https://hygger.io/blog/4-powerful-factors-rice-scoring-model/
https://foldingburritos.com/product-prioritization-techniques/

25. My Example - RICE
Potential
customers
Timing of
deals/
customer
purchases
Rev
potenti
al
Comp
position
(if we
build)
Custom
er
Reach
(R)
(1-10)
Custom
er
Impact
(I)
(1-10)
Confidence
(C) (%)
Dev effort
+
complexity
(E) (3 = S,
6 = M, 10 =
L)
Mktg
effort
(M) (1-
5)
CS
effort
(1-5)
(CS)
Total
effort
(E+M
+CS)
Score
(R*I*C)/
E
Prod
A
Feature/
feature
set 1
Lead 6 8 100% 3 2 2 7 16
Feature/
feature
set 2
Lead 5 6 50% 2 2 2 6 8
Feature/
feature
set 3
Parity 8 5 100% 2 2 2 6 20
● Captures customer value, likelihood, and effort.
● More quantitative/data-driven.
● Great to expand across roadmap & more functions.
● Can incorporate t-shirt sizing or points sizing.
● Must ensure everyone understands cutoffs
for scores.

26. My Example - MoSCoW
M ust have
S hould have
C ould have
W on’t have
● Works well for agile teams.
● Works for well with t-shirt sizing or points sizing
used by engineering teams.
● Can be used for easy grouping into MVP (minimum
viable product), MLP (minimum lovable product),
MMP (minimum marketable product), etc.
● Possibility of not being data driven enough -
PMs must make conscious effort to define
and communicate criteria for each category.
● Can be confusing about duration of time
period during which a requirement stays in a
specific category.

27. What I did: Simplify, simplify, simplify
● ~20 potential features > 8 features categorized into 3 distinct feature sets
● Each feature set defined with separate:
○ Releases
○ Personas
○ Detailed use case(s)
○ Target customer outcomes
○ Target success metrics

28. Part 2: Execution: The evolution
from Vision > Build > Adoption

29. Step 6: Translate customer pain, product vision to whole team
● Communication
○ Clear, simple, concise
○ Consistent with defined user problem and product vision: user-centric
● Data-driven decision-making
○ Quantitative (ROI, value calculations, metrics)
○ User’s language & feedback (pain points, stories)
● Bias to action
○ Proactive
○ Iterative
○ Remove blockers quickly and test hypotheses/assumptions quickly
● End-to-end development lifecycle
○ Define & design > Build & test > Enable & train > Market > Sell > Measure customer adoption
○ Roles & responsibility within organization

30. What I did: Follow through, stay detail-oriented & consistent
● Cross-functional project management
○ Kick-off
○ Bottoms up estimation
○ Weekly syncs with release leads from each function
● Detailed requirements & sprint planning
○ At least one pager/mini-Product Requirements Document (PRD)
○ Thorough user stories with clear acceptance criteria and prioritization
○ User stories defined at least 2 sprints, estimated at least 1 sprint in advance
○ Epics for release/feature set defined at least 1 release in advance
● Quality & testing
○ Internal
○ External beta
● GTM enablement
○ Target use cases and outcomes
○ Target user and buyer personas
● Definition & measurement of success metrics
○ Relate to target outcomes, value drivers, and business goals
○ Define primary workflows and target usage metrics
○ Measure baseline

32. 40% of existing customer
base
Adopted within first 3 months
“Kudos to whoever
dreamt this up!”
“Great, a big
step forward.”

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