I recently sat through a product management (PM) talk from a Senior PM at a Toronto tech startup. The talk was aimed at giving MBA students who don’t have a technology background an overview of PM. During the talk, many terms were thrown around that might not have made sense for newcomers.
This post covers design, UI and UX terms and Part 2 covers engineering related terms like backlogs, sprints, APIs and user stories.
Design, User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX)
User Personas
As a PM, having a user-first mindset to building product is non-negotiable. A critical part of a product manger’s job is to be the empathetic voice of the user and/or customer. It is through the PM that their pain points, likes and dislikes about the product are communicated. It’s important to get an intimate understanding of who your users are so that you can build a product that solves their pain and delivers value. A persona is a profile of a product’s typical user(s). A single product can have multiple personas, one for each type of user using the product. The persona can help the PM, designers and other stakeholders understand pain points, goals, responsibilities and activities of the user.
Hifi Mockups and Low-fi mockups
Another critical skill of a PM is to be a great storyteller because a core part of the job is to be able to sell their vision to stakeholders and get buy in. The PM has to be able to convey their ideas clearly. One medium of communication is through product mockups. Mockups are a great way for the PM and design/UX team to think about the design and layout of a feature and convey them to others.
Low Fidelity Mockups
A low fidelity mockup serves to layout the high-level information architcture of a design without going into the specifics. At my previous startup Tract, we acquired our first customer using just low-fidelity mockups of the entire mobile application! With minimal investment, a low-fidelity mockup can sell your product vision really well and go a long way to building trust and consensus with stakeholders . My favourite tool for creating a low fidelity mockup is Balsamiq.
Hi-Fidelity Mockups
A hi-fidelity mockup, serves to give a much more realistic view of the what the actual feature or screen looks like. It usually contains design specific elements like the dimensions of an image, real copy, and conforms to design stylebook specifications.
Usability Testing
Designing and building something beautiful without validating it’s usability risk is useless. It is imperative to put your product through usability testing to validate how users are using this new feature and also if users can figure out how to use it. This ensures that your product does what it was designed it to do, every time. Fixing a bug once it’s been released can be very expensive (and stressful!) Worse, you risk frustrating your users and hurting your adoption and retention metrics if you ship something that users cannot figure out how to use.
Usability testing can be done using mockups, prototypes or functional software. The type of testing done depends on what kind of information you are trying to get from your users. Some common types of usability testing include:
In-person observations — Observing a user as they use a specific part of your application
Eye-tracking tests — Using specialized hardware and software to see which parts of the screen users focus their attention on. A visual heat map is then generated for review
Learnability tests — Observing a user while they try to find and learn how to use a new feature
Benchmarking tests — Comparing users as one group uses the old design and another uses the new design to see if the redesign actually enhances usability
Choosing a test group can also vary depending on your goal — you can deploy a test to a select few customers, an internal group of employees or outsource it to external testing agencies. As with QA, usability testing is not a one-and-done thing. It has to be a a continuous process to ensure that you have happy, un-frustrated users.
In the next part, I’ll touch on lingo you need to be able to communicate with the engineering team.
Who am I?
I’m a product leader with almost a decade of experience across startups, scale-ups and large enterprises. I’ve led the go-to-market for successful digital products in multiple verticals (manufacturing, B2B SaaS, fintech, ecommerce) and have consulted for some of the largest brands.
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