Product Management Terms
What you need to survive a product discussion or interview.
If you have read any of my previous articles on product management you would know that I have just started my transition into the space and while it has been a fun 5 months of learning about Product Management and connecting with the amazing Product Management community, I am still looking for my first paid PM role.
In light of this, I had my very first PM interview a couple of days ago. Before this, I had listened in on a couple of mock interview sessions and done some personal research (YouTube). Before the interview, I was feeling pretty confident. But as fate would have it, one part of the interview managed to catch me by surprise.
Perhaps, because it was an interview for a junior role, one part of the interview involved defining a number of Product Management related terms. In all my research I had been so focused on solving work scenarios and developing product vision and strategy that I had neglected this aspect
As a result, I have made a little glossary of essential terms to know ahead of your next PM interview.
Product Strategy: A high-level plan that lays out the goals of a product throughout its life cycle, its relationship to the goals of the organization, the target customer and its value proposition.
Agile: as defined by the agile manifesto is a collection of beliefs that favour rapid development that teams can use to make decisions about the software development process
Scrum: A framework that encourages teams self-organize during the process of problem-solving and to reflect on their successes and failures to continuously improve through self-experience.
Scrum Master: The scrum master is the leader of a scrum team and they are responsible for ensuring that the team follows scrum practices and rituals.
Theme: A high-level goal for the product. A series of epics that, grouped together share a broader business objective.
Epic: A series of user stories that when grouped together share a broad strategic objective
User Story: A short and simple explanation of a product feature written from the point of view of a user.
Acceptance Criteria: These are the conditions the product must meet to satisfy a user story. Acceptance criteria are different for each user story and help to build product features that are centred around solving the user’s problems.
Feature: A functionality in a product that creates value for users or helps them complete a task.
Roadmap: A high-level visual summary of the “why” and “what” of a product to be built. Roadmaps communicate the vision of a product over time.
Prioritization: This is the process of creating a hierarchical list of product initiatives in order of their importance to. Different prioritization frameworks exist for use in this process such as; the KANO model and the MoSCoW framework.
Persona: A stand-in biographical profile of the typical user or customer of a product. Personas usually include; Age, location, user goals, frustrations, and the value proposition of the product to the user.
Mockup: A detailed visual representation of the product for use (often exclusively) with internal stakeholders. They can also be used to communicate product goals to customers but do not usually allow for customer interaction.
Minimum Viable Product: an artefact of the agile system, an MVP is an initial product build with just enough functionality to allow the team collect the maximum amount of validated user information with the least amount of effort.
Kanban: A visual tool used to track a team's progress and workflow on a project.
Go-to-Market Plan: A plan outlining how a company intends to release a product, promote it, and sell it to its users.
Customer Journey Map: The step by step process a user will need to go through to accomplish a specific goal. This could be the process to buy a product or completing a task inside the product.
Value Proposition: The measurable benefits that a user will derive from using your product or service.The value proposition can also serve to differentiate your offering from that of your competitors.
Product Backlog: This is a list of the development work to be done on a product to satisfy the product roadmap. Backlog tasks should be regularly reviewed for efficient task prioritization.
This is most definitely not an exhaustive list but if you are a beginner looking to get started in product management, you should be able to find your way around a few industry discussions with this knowledge.
