Product Management Guide: Problem Identification, Solution, Delivery, Success Metrics

This is about how you think and approach some of the challenges you face in a Product Manager role. Let us assume you are hired as a PM at a product development organization that wants to reenvision its product budgeting feature.

Your tasks include suggesting alternative approaches, identifying missing features and shortcomings in the user experience based on problems and opportunities you have identified.

As a PM, you should first try to understand what is budgeting feature and its purpose.

Budgeting Feature: This feature helps people to plan and manage their spending.

As you understand the core feature now; you need to frame your goal what you want to achieve. If I was the PM for this organization, I would have framed it as below-

1. Figure out the problems with the current design
2. Improvements that could solve those problems
3. Solution
4. Success Metrics

Now as I have a plan in place, let us start -

Step 1- Problem Identification

To identify the problem, I need to know the users of this product who use these features. Let us define the User Persona. You can do User Research, User Interviews to define your persona.

From my research, I assume below-

a. Working professionals

b. Travelers

c. Housewife / non-working adults

Now let us identify the user needs-

Assuming the above persona’s — common goal with given feature could be: they would like to set a budget and optimize the spend to adhere to the budget.

Pain Points with currently designed feature-

1. No option to categorize essentials, non-essentials spend
2. No option to differentiate every day, weekly, monthly, one-time spends

Step 2- Improvements

As we have identified the flaws with the current design, we can now focus on improvements to the current feature.

1. Option to be added for categorization
2. Option for differentiating spends

Step 3- Solutioning

As a PM, you need to visualize how you want to solve the problems which your users are facing with the current design.

I will draw Wireframe which will clearly guide my development team with the new design. This step requires a lot of further analysis like competitor analysis, user interviews, data analysis of your customers which will guide you to conclude your Hypothesis on design.

Step 4- Success Metrics

a. Feature Success Metrics-

Count of monthly active users successfully creating budgets: This metric would have to be analysed in two dimensions; as a single success metric and a funnel.

b. User Success Metrics

Count of users achieving their monthly budget goals: This would indicate proportion of users displaying intended behaviour.