Minnie Ingersoll: Three Phases of Product Management

I would sort of talk about product management in three main chunks of product management, where the first part of product management is defining the vision, defining how do we fit in to the market, what is our addressable market, how are we going to be differentiated? So sort of traditional strategy exercises and then figuring out, okay, so that's where we're going. And then phase two is, and this is how I think about it, phase two for me was, okay, so what product are we going to build to reach that vision? Sort of what is the MVP? What is the minimal viable product? What is V1, what is V2? What is sort of our roadmap there? And this is where when I was doing product management, we all wrote prds. And a PRD was our product requirements document. We wrote that and that was kind of our three to six month plan for what product we were going to build. And then phase three was execution. And so phase three, we've agreed what we're going to build in phase one. Let's make sure that we hit our milestones, deliver on time, on budget, that piece of things. And I found that different people often played very well in different parts of the phases of product. I particularly like the last phase when things are kind of well defined and we can go just execute on things. But I think a lot of product managers actually maybe think that the sexier part is the upfront piece where you're defining what's going to be built. And almost the UI work that I think is now often done by designers. Design wasn't a big discipline. When I was starting my product management work, the product managers often did a lot of the design.