Category Archives: Product Management

Product Market Sizing Using TAM, SAM, and SOM

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At the end of this post, you will learn how investing an hour to properly calculate the market size could have spared top tier VCs such as Kleiner and Google investing $120 million in Juicero that had a market size of just $33,000!!

While Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is the best way to test your market fit and go-to-market strategy, you still need to do some calculations before the MVP phase to learn about your market size and what demand you would expect provided your business and market constraints.

Let’s Roll Up Our Sleeves and Get to Work!

Terminology

  • Total Addressable Market (TAM): The revenue from selling your product or service assuming your company has unlimited resources and has no competitors.
  • Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM): The revenue from selling your product or service limited by the actual amount of resources your company has.
  • Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM): The revenue from selling your product or service limited by the actual amount of resources your company has and all potential competitors and substitutes.

Calculate Market Size

Juicero planned to launch their $700 juice making machine in California, Arizona, and Nevada. So we will calculate TAM, SAM, and SOM for those markets.

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Product Strategy at Medium & Large Companies

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There is abundant literature out there that has discussed various iterative models and techniques used for product development to help product strategists and managers build the products their customer wants and achieve business success. They are great and no one can deny the importance of experimental approaches to the success of any product strategy execution and pivot or refreshing it over time.
However, when it comes to medium and large companies, it is easier said than done. Each one has its challenges that can derail the best product strategy and its execution.

In this post, I would like to shed some light on common themes I have encountered throughout my career as a product leader and strategist.

Company Culture

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” – Peter Drucker.

Whether it is an established product company or setting off on their product’s journey, your organization’s culture is the first thing you need to spend time analyzing before you start thinking about building any strategy. I found the Cultural Web, a model developed by Johnson and Scholes, is a great start to see and understand the different influences and dynamics that affect organisational culture.

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Monolithic vs Microserivces Architecture from a Product Manager Perspective

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Monolithic vs Microservices systems is now a hot topic that a product manager will probably encounter when they tune their interface with the development team.

What is a monolithic system?

In a nutshell, your system is called a monolith when you have all components like authentication, authorization, product catalogue.. etc in the same codebase.

What is a microservices system?

Instead of having a single codebase that has all your components, you have a web of individual codebases and individual services that work together to deliver the application.

Usually, when you move to microservices, the importance of testing goes up dramatically Continue reading →

Integrating OKRs With the 0, 30 and 90-day Rule to Measure Product Success

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What is OKR?

OKR (Objectives and Key Results) is a goal setting system used by Google and other companies. It is a simple approach to create alignment and engagement around measurable goals.

I will (Objective) as measured by (this set of Key Results).

OKRs originated at Intel in the late 90s and was introduced to Google in 1999 by the famous venture capitalist John Doerr, and continued to spread to other companies in the Silicon Valley. It has supported Google growth from 40 employees until now!

I will not explain OKRs in details as there are many online resources for this purpose. I will, however, show you how I integrated this framework with the 0, 30 and 90-day rule to achieve product success and to ensure everyone is going in the same direction, with clear priorities, in a constant agile rhythm.

What is the 0, 30 and 90-day Rule?

It is a test criteria used in Agile development to test different stages of product adoption by target users (personas): Continue reading →

Qualitative vs Quantitative Research in Product Management

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It is a lot of work to get started and to figure out what you should do and when. Here I would like to talk about the distinctions I make between triggers that tell you, right now you need qualitative research vs right now you need quantitative research.

Let me break it down:

  • Quantitative research, quantitative metrics, numbers, analytics tell you what is going on with your product.
  • Qualitative research, talking to people, observing their behavior tell you why those things are happening

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Thoughts on Traditional vs Agile Project Management

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Traditional project management has been practiced and enriched over decades in different domains such as construction, defense, technology… etc. Most of the literature like PMI and PRINCE try to formalize this discipline and focus on giving it clear steps that you follow from start to the end of the project.

Scope is in the heart of traditional project management

time-cost-quality-model

Being PMP certified and an early adopter of Agile and Lean principles, I felt like flipped on my head Continue reading →

User Stories that Don’t Kill Creativity and Collaboration

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What is fascinating about the User Story is that it’s an open-ended framework that can be used well or it can be used poorly. The most important thing is keeping the User Story in problem space and to link it back to your value proposition and problem scenarios. Two reasons for that:

  • It helps to debug when something goes wrong by tracking back to the origins of the story and what problem it meant to address
  • It facilitates the important discussion with the team so they can reach a shared understanding of what the problem is and together conclude what is the best way to solve it

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Stories or Tasks on Kanban Sprint Board?

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I often get asked by Agile teams what should go on a Kanban board during sprint planning. The short answer is: It depends on what works well for you as long as you are maintaining the spirit of the methodology by keeping everything visible on the board and “Just-in-time”.

Some companies focus on recruiting highly qualified full stack developers that can work on different areas such as database design, business logic, front end, testing, integration.. etc. In this case, I believe the best option is to use only user stories on the Sprint board. Each developer will be able to handle a full user story and move it across the Kanban board as a one coherent unit which reduces the overhead of handoffs and coordination with other developers. Also it makes easier for the product owner to verify a full user story rather than trying to combine multiple tasks together to create a testable narrative. Continue reading →

Why the Product Death Cycle Happens. How to Turn it Into a Virtuous One!

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You probably heard about the Product Death Cycle and the famous tweet by David Bland where he graphically depicted a serious problem that plenty of product managers are facing.

This is what I’m calling the Product Death Cycle
@davidjbland

Death Cycle

Since David made his tweet in 2014, it has resonated with many product management folks but unfortunately this cycle is still there and will keep happening in the future specially when we look at the overwhelming statistic that 90% of software products fail!

I would like to break down this cycle in the light of my previous posts about following a systematic approach to build a product that addresses existing customer needs. Continue reading →