Slides from the 'Essentials of Product Management' workshop at General Assembly in London, June 2013 ABOUT THIS WORKSHOP The first step in making an idea reality is to understand product management. There is a huge amount of work between the idea stage and the coding stage, and this Saturday workshop will help you understand what needs to be accomplished. We will start the day off by learning what the product management role encompasses and what the managing process is like. We'll also cover a product's feasibility and the various stages of—and ways to approach—the product development process. Through group work and hands-on practice, we'll look at the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) philosophy to test and validate your plans, and move on to identify the other more technical tools needed to start and evaluate the building process. TAKEAWAYS Part 1: The Product Manager role & the Product Management Process Part 2: The Customer and MVP - Learn to break an idea into its primary parts to assess product feasibility - Explain the purpose and process of building an MVP - Identify various ways to build and learn from an MVP - Evolve an MVP to reach product/market fit - Determine if product/market fit has been achieved for a product Some slide content courtesy of Simon Cast, John Eikenberry, and General Assembly

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6. the role of a product
manager is to discover a
product that is valuable,
usable and feasible
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Marty Cagan, Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love

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12. Our job is to be stubborn
on vision, but flexible on
details.
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Marty Cagan, Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love

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49. Acquire Visit and Arrive
Engage Interact and Enjoy
Retain Come Back
Grow Spread the Word
Revenue Generate $$

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72. MVP
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80. Fact : In the real world, most
companies do too much
development and spend too
much money too early
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Fred Destin, Atlas Ventures

81. Most start ups fail because
they didn’t develop their
market - not because they
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Steve Blank, Author of Four Steps to the Epiphany

82. Products today – it’s not
some product manager that
has an epiphany. That’s not
how it works. Product,
design, engineering, [work]
side by side.
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Marty Cagan, Silicon Valley Product Group

83. We own the process.
The process doesn't own us.
We call it Agile Jazz.
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Tom Loosemore, Gov.uk

84. Don’t fail fast.
learn
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Tom Chi, Google X