If you wish to pursue a career in Product Management then it’s very important that you speak the product language. The knowledge of these commonly used PM terms may be beneficial.
Bugs, defects
An unintended or unexpected result or behavior in software.
The product manager is responsible for prioritizing the severity of the bug. Sometimes bugs are “production issues” and need to be fixed immediately while others can be shelved to be fixed at a later time.
Usually discovered by the Quality Assurance engineer, automated tests, the product manager or users of the product.
Key Performance Indicator (KPI)
The most important metric used to gauge the success of a product
Example KPIs: Revenue, User Signups, Churn Rate, Profit, Cost Savings
Stories
Also known as User Stories
A requirement document in Agile Methodology.
Different than the typical “requirements document” – rather than talking about specific technical requirements, user stories are conversational sentences around the desired functionality.
Story Points
Story Points are assigned to User Stories by the developers working on the project.
They convey the level of effort they think is required to complete the particular user story.
User Experience (UX)
The overall experience that a user has with a product.
UX includes UI.
User Interface (UI)
The way the user interacts with the product.
The simplest cases are the buttons and forms on a website.
User Interface is a combination of the ‘look and feel’ of the product and ‘how it works’.
The User Interface is heavily informed and guided by the User Experience research.
User Persona
A type of person that will use the product.
It’s an imaginary user that has a specific behavior, attitude and goal.
User stories should be created with user personas in mind.
Agile Methodology
A software development philosophy that emphasizes the development of solutions through collaboration between self-organizing and cross-functional teams.
Customer Interviews
Also known as Customer Discovery Interviews
The goal is to gather the voice of the customer or user of the product.
This is also an opportunity to test assumptions you have about the end user and your proposed solutions for their problems.
Issue Tracking / Issue Tracker
A tool used by product managers, project managers, developers and quality assurance engineers to track the work they are making on a particular feature or bug
Mockups
Very early drafts to show the general look and some functionality of a product.
Product managers put together mockups either themselves or work with a designer.
The mockups are living documents that change as the product requirements change.
Once the product is more fleshed out and there are much less changes to the mockups, the designer will invest time to create a high-fidelity mockup (for example, using Adobe Photoshop) which the developers use when building the product.
Product Roadmap
A plan put together by the product manager that prioritize and estimates release dates for the product’s features
Scrum
The most popular implementation of the Agile Methodology.
Usability Testing
Usually performed by a User Experience Researcher or a combination of the Product Manager and Designer.
Evaluate a product by putting it in the hands of real users and observing the way they interact with the product.
Often times usability tests will give a user a specific task and then observe how the user completes the task, where they get confused and need help.
The output of a usability test is to uncover missing features, unused features, and points of confusion.
Designers
Product Managers work with designers to create everything from the overall feel of the product to the minute details about the look and placement of buttons.
Developers
Product Managers work with developers to turn the product and designs into actual products that are usable by customers.
PMs also help answer developer questions about the priority of certain features or bugs and for clarity on certain product requirements as they arise throughout the development stage.