Speaker 1: Do you want to become a pro at navigating the complex world of product management? Well, in this video, I'm going to cover 15 key terms and concepts used by product management. By the end of this video, you will be a pro at the language of product management. So grab your notepads and let's get started. Hey, my name is Akash. I have a decade of product experience. I'm a Harvard MBA grad and angel invest in startups. On this channel, we talk about ways to level up your product management skills and career. Let's go. So I've broken down the terms into the three parts of a product manager's role, which are choosing the right problems to solve, defining what success looks like, and working and executing with the team for the product success. Okay, first we have PRD or product requirements document. This is a document that defines the requirements and specifications for how a product should be built. It's written by the product manager in collaboration with the engineers, designers, and other folks on their cross-functional team. It's an important tool for communicating with the development teams, stakeholders, and other folks who will be working on the product. A great PRD addresses the why behind the product as well as user and market research. So next we have acceptance criteria. The acceptance criteria is usually written in the PRD itself and is a way for the product manager to define what are the minimum requirements that need to be met by the product in order for it to be launched. This is very important for the developers and QA testers who will be working on the product because it tells them what criteria they need to be looking at to make sure are built into the product and those are must-haves and minimum requirements that are needed for the launch of the product. Okay, next let's look at A-B testing. So A-B testing is a way of launching two versions of the product in order to see which performs better. All of you and all of us unknowingly every day are subjects of A-B testing on sites like Netflix, Amazon, Google, and others. What this means is that a small subset of users is always seeing small variations in the checkout button placement or an ad placement or the watch next screen or the algorithm that's used in the Netflix ranking and ratings algorithm. Then the website sees if that small change made a positive impact on your user experience or not. Only the tests and experiments that had a outsized positive impact on your user experience are actually rolled out to all customers and all users and built into the final product. Okay, so backlog. Backlog is really the laundry list or complete list of products and features that a product team plans to work on. It's a great way to keep track of all of the ideas that are coming through from the sales team, the customer experience team, customers, designers, anyone who is involved and a stakeholder of the product itself. It's great to make sure that everything that needs to be done is kept in one place and nothing falls through the cracks. Anytime a product manager is thinking of what feature to work on next, the backlog is usually the place that they will go to first to see what is the ideas and concepts that are on the backlog that need to be worked on. Okay, disruptive innovation. So this is actually the most popular framework that is used in the world of business and around product management. This was first written by Professor Clay Christensen in the book Innovator's Dilemma. I actually had the good fortune of taking Professor Christensen's class at Harvard during his last year of teaching this course. So this term actually describes how new products and entrants to the market are able to disrupt existing markets and existing players who are dominant in the market. It all starts by introducing a new product or service that addresses a customer segment whose needs are being overmet or not met at all by the existing products and services. These new products are typically things that are simpler, cheaper and just easier to use. They have lower performance when they are actually introduced but quickly improve their performance to disrupt the existing products in the space and slowly all the customer segments move to this new product. I have a video that I'll link to here about how Airbnb has disrupted the hotel industry so give that a watch. Okay, so feature flags. Feature flags are a great way for product managers and development teams to keep parts of the code actually hidden and secret while in public. So products that are already shipped and out there in production environments have multiple feature flags and each feature flag determines which product should be seen by which customer. So for example a customer when they buy a new product or a buy a new plan for a existing product that they already have what happens is in the back end they don't ship new code to the product for that customer they just turn on the feature flag for that customer. It's a great way to test new features or have skew-based mapping of features and parts of a product for a complete code base. Okay, JTBT or jobs to be done. This is again a framework by Professor Christensen that talks about what the needs of a customer are when they buy a product. So according to this framework people don't actually buy products they hire them to solve real needs and problems in their lives. For example people don't really buy headphones they hire headphones in order to listen to music that they love. It might sound simple but it's a profound mindset shift that has deep implications. Okay let's go here. MVP or minimum viable product. This is a version of the product that has the minimum features required to address the customer's pain point. It then gives the product managers and product team a signal in terms of what to continue building and invest more development time and effort on. The goal of an MVP is to get a product idea out to customers as quickly as possible and then gather that feedback. Building MVPs is essential for any startup or any company because without MVPs you'll be building full-fledged products and then realizing that it doesn't even solve a actual product or customer need. Okay PMF or product market fit. This is the point at which a product has been built to address its target audience's needs and requirements at a complete level. This is when the product is ready for scale growth. Finding product market fit is really essential for any product and it's an ongoing process of iteration and testing. Many VCs won't even invest a series A round of funding in a startup until they have achieved product market fit. Okay roadmap. So a roadmap is the prioritized backlog that a product team and product manager plans to work on. It's basically a high-level plan of what is coming in the pipeline and what everyone should be targeting for each quarter and each year. It covers all the key products and initiatives that are going to be addressed each quarter and each year that the product manager, engineering team, designers and everyone should be aligned on. This helps everyone to know what direction the product is going in and helps the sales team to sell the product better, helps the engineering team to plan better and just helps everyone know what direction they should be aiming towards. Okay let's go here. So tech debt. So this is the cost of maintaining and supporting a product over time. It arises as a result of taking shortcuts during the development of a product to get it out the door and ship to customers as quickly as possible. So like any debt, tech debt is a way of borrowing development effort from the future to the present. But what that means is if this tech debt is gone unaddressed for long periods of time, it can spell disaster and big problems for the product because many things will stop working and a lot of bugs will come up because a lot of the underlying infrastructure is shaky. So another common term you might see is user stories and this is actually something that forms a part of the PRD itself. User stories are a way of seeing the product's features from the eyes of the customer. So the user stories are written from the perspective of the customer such as as a user I would like to see x because y. This helps everyone to understand why they are building every part and every feature in a product and what the actual goal of that feature or user story is. The UX or user experience. This is actually just the overall experience that a user feels when they are using a product. This includes how easy it is to use, how visually appealing it is and how intuitive the entire flow is when it's all mapped together. This is typically built by product designers in collaboration with the product managers to make sure that is actually addressing the key customer problem or job to be done. Figma is nowadays the most popular tool for user UX design and it includes flowcharts, screens and other UI elements. So y-frame is actually just a simplified representation of what the actual UX and visual design of the product will look like. It's a low fidelity design which means it's a very quick sketch, might even have been done on pen and paper in the past or might be done using a tool like balsamic nowadays. This can even be done by the product manager themselves just to give stakeholders a sense of what the product will look and feel like when it's actually built. This becomes a key tool for storytelling that can be used by the product managers and designers to pitch the product and gain the experience and gain the insights from stakeholders. Okay and finally pivot. So a pivot is essentially a change in direction for a product based on new information or new customer trends in the marketplace. In product management, a pivot can involve shifting focus from a particular set of products and features to new ones because there is new information from customers or there is new activity from competitors. Pivots are an important tool for product managers and startups because it enables them to keep changing direction based on what is the most up-to-date and precise current requirements that they see in the market. Pivots allow them to adapt and respond to changing behaviors in the market and these help them to make sure that they are continuing to focus on the real customer demand and customer problem or job that needs to be solved. Many companies like Spotify, Airbnb, Uber, Amazon and more started and succeeded because they pivoted early and to address the actual customer problems. Okay so that's all 15 terms but the problem now is that knowing all of these terms isn't just enough. Knowing the jargon definitely makes communication easier but it doesn't help you actually building all of these skills and building the mindset and skill sets that are needed to be a successful product manager. So for that I've made this playlist that covers all the essential skills that a product manager needs to know. You should definitely watch that next. This will get you up to speed on all the skills as quickly as possible.