Hands on a small internal product as a PM

21 Sep 2014 . category: product-management . Comments
#entrepreneurship #startups

Today, I feel so happy as I have successfully executed version 1.0 of an internal product developed to help our support engineers. It is my first product as a PM that is released and being used by my colleagues. 🎉

It is an amazing learning experience and feels so good when we can see there is 70% slash in the time spent by them to identify and fix the problem reported by our customers.

Well, I would like to share why we felt to address this issue internally, why was I given this as my first assignment, how did we plan the features, what is it like wearing the hat of a tester and all. But before that, I would like to address a major learning of mine through this post - levels of product management.

Product Management association with a product varies depending on the product and its stakeholders.

Internal Product Management:

If the product is for the internal purpose of the company where stakeholders are your colleagues, then it falls into this category.

My cofounder felt it is a good one to start with for me as there is no much harm I would bring if I execute it poorly as a beginner and at the same time to assess me on the job.

Interestingly, the biggest advantage I perceived is understanding the underlying structure of our product (Shopify and QuickBooks integration). This support tool tightly associates with our current beta product, so in the process of its design, I went through the APIs of their respective apps and now can connect easily with our engineering team’s discussions.

B2B Product Management:

Very soon this would be my next phase.

Most of the SaaS companies are excellent examples of B2B products. Our company ZapStitch is a cloud data integration platform. Say, there is an e-commerce company hosted on Shopify while managing accounting data on QuickBooks then we help them connect these two cloud applications, so data is across all platforms in sync. So any company using those two products and has the problem of data fragmentation then they are our potential customer, and we do business with them and help them.

B2B product management involves a lot of interaction with the point of contact (users) from those companies to understand their needs, pain points, and underlying problems. So my work timings are about to change in few weeks since our target audience is in North America and am in India.

Either way, it is getting more exciting now that I am getting into the real game. 🏂