What Could Be in a Product Management Portfolio (Pt. 1)— Building a Product
“You want to be a product manager? Okay, just read these books, watch these videos, take these courses and apply for 100 internships (which are hard to find, by the way) hoping you’d get one. Oh, and while at it, try building a product to show your skills.”
I know these requirements can be tough, but I want to show you how to build a portfolio as a newbie product manager. This portfolio will contain a product you will build and a case study or case studies, but for this article, we will deal with building a product.
Before moving on, you might want to check out this article on the PM Starter Kit. It contains helpful resources.
To add to the list, check these out:
- Book: Cracking the PM Interview
- YouTube channels: Colors of Chloe, Alisa Works
- Twitter Lists of Product Leaders: Cracking the PM Career, Product Management
BUILDING A PRODUCT
A software development life cycle (SDLC) consists of the following: Requirement Gathering > Research > Design > Development > Testing > Launch > Maintenance.
As a product manager, you should focus on the first two aspects of this lifecycle for your project, and document every process. If you are not working with a designer or developer, you would then need to focus on every part. These are steps you could take on building a product:
STEP 1 — Requirement Gathering:
So, you have an idea of what you want to build. How do you go about bringing it to life? Answering this is similar to answering product design questions in interviews:
- Identify a problem you would like to solve, e.g, designing a watch for a 15-year-old, making banking accessible to everyone, etc.
- List possible solutions to the problem
- Prioritise these solutions according to ease of development and the value they would add to your potential customers. There are different frameworks for this but assigning scores and working with the estimates help. For example,
If I want to add a voice assistant to a wristwatch, I would score the value 3 out of 3, with 3 being the highest value. And 2 out of 3 for ease of development, 2 being medium effort/ease of development. You could also make use of other prioritisation frameworks like MoSCoW as most PMs prefer frameworks that don’t measure effort.
- After prioritizing, focus on what features you want to implement in your project/MVP. Also, estimate how long it would take to build these features.
STEP 2 — Research:
This is done to validate your solutions. You want to make sure you’re building the right thing for people. You can carry out research by having one-on-one conversations with people, surveys using Google Forms, Survey Monkey, Typeform, etc., or phone calls. Make sure not to ask leading questions.
For example, if you want to know what someone does in their free time, you could ask, “so, what’s your day like after work hours?”, rather than asking if they like to watch Netflix after work.
With your findings, you can validate your solutions and re-prioritise.
STEP 3 — Documentation:
Document your findings in a Product Requirement Document (PRD). Here’s a template I created for that.
You should also write user stories. You should try Requstory, it makes this easier.
Draw user flows and wireframes to visualise the flow process of your project. Wireframing is a skill that I think every product manager should have, I would be writing an article on that soon.
User flows can be done on Whimsical or Lucid Chart. Wireframes can be done on Whimsical, Figma, Adobe XD, Balsamiq.
STEP 4 — Design
According to the SDLC, the design comes next. If you’re working with a designer, you might want to team up to write a case study or draw the wireframes. Your team should decide on that.
If you would be working alone, you can work with Figma or Adobe XD. Here’s a list of websites to get inspirations from:
(PS: Please, do not copy people’s designs)
STEP 5 — Development & Testing
After designing, you can decide to prototype your design and use that as your MVP or develop it. There are no-code/low-code tools you could use, like:
For mobile apps, you can try out glideapps.com.
Or, you can work with a developer(s). Make sure to conduct tests on your product to ensure it works as specified.
STEP 6— Team Management (Optional):
If you’re working with a team, leverage the free versions of apps like Trello, ClickUp, Jira to manage the team. These apps can be used to assign tasks, manage the status of tasks, etc. If you want to practice scrum, this courseware on YouTube is short and very easy to grasp.
Congratulations! Following these steps will guide you to completing a project, and that’s the first part. The next step is presenting your work on your portfolio. For this, consider the STAR framework — Situation, Tasks, Actions, and Results.
Situation:
- Explain the problem you solved and the goal of the project
Tasks & Actions:
- List out the solutions you identified and how you arrived at those solutions
- Show how you prioritized your features
- Write a brief report on the survey you carried out and what you finally concluded on
- You can also add links or pictures of your PRD, user stories, user flows, and wireframes that you created
Results:
- A link to your finished project
- If the product is live and people have tried it out, you may also want to add reviews from people who have used your application
There you have it! You have been able to demonstrate some product management skills and you stand a higher chance of being the best candidate for that internship or entry-level role. Read up the second part on how to write case studies.
If you follow these steps and build a project, or if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter or send me an email: gabriellaigebu@gmail.com
Ciao!
