Diego Perdana – Product Manager Portofolio

Become a product manager is my biggest dream ever, especially in a Tech company. I’m really grateful that my path is in that way. I ever became a Product Analyst (we can say it an Associate Product Manager) at the biggest E-Commerce in Indonesia and Product Manager at the biggest Bank in Singapore. It’s not that big but I’m grateful to be part of it.

Admiringly one of the e-commerce is Tokopedia! I was really proud that i ever joined this company because i can learn about product management and practically doing it. Tokopedia gave me more than just a job, it’s about working and learning environment that can give you unlimited knowledge and impact at the same time as a product manager.

One of the knowledge and skill that i learn as a new joiner and doing product management is to “get things done “. As a Product Manager, one important step you need to do is get to know and understand your product, company, and software development as Fast as Possible.

Truly when i joined Tokopedia in January 2018, i managed some features of Tokopedia that have a purpose to the given buyer browsing experience. But i need to struggle to learn the products. I need 3 months to understand the products. I think this is normal, but unfortunately, i was wrong.

It should be a month to understand the modules (by the way for the browsing experience we have 3 product features in there).

Why i can say that? because i saw my coworker doing that.  My coworker previous background is from Big Consultant firm and he joined Tokopedia as a Business Lead for my Tribe (Tribe = team that focuses on some modules). As a new joiner, in 2 weeks, he can make a significant impact on other products in my Tribe and increase the metrics number. How can he do that? so i ask and observe what he’s doing.  Okay, now let me tell you about that into tips:

1. Get to Know People (2 Days)

In the very first week, you need to know about the people that will work with you. On the first day, you can ask your Team Lead to introduce you to some important people. The people could be:

1. Engineer Team: they can explain your module from the technical side and of course they will become your team member.
2. Data People: they monitoring your modules’ performances and gave the analysis. You can ask them about the previous data and metrics related to your feature.
3. UX & UI: User experience and User interface designers are part of your team too. You will work with them closely when you want to start some initiative and idea.
4. Business: some requirements and alignment from the business side that impacted your products have come from them. So they will be your teammate too.
5. Product Manager: other product managers or product lead in the same squad will give you an explanation about the feature and software development flow that exists in the squad now.  I think your product member is the person that you need to catch first because they can introduce you to other stakeholders.

2. Understand the Product Fast (10 Days)

This is the hard one from my perspective. You need to understand the products that already delegate to you deeper down from customers, tech, and business perspective. From that, we can actually break down how we can know the module fast. this is my tips: 

1. The flow of your product: you can ask the previous Product Manager about this and ask them to explain to you in detail (end to end process). If there is some manual process like uploading content that displays in some pages, you need to know the flow.
2. Vision and Roadmap: you need to know about the vision of the products to be dealt with it so you can align with company and product vision to make an improvement roadmap. The roadmap is a list of ideas and improvements for the product that can bring your product into the product vision. Other things about Roadmap, you need to know is about backlog or improvement that on the process now. Vision is really important because this will become your fundamental guide to developing every feature in your product. A roadmap is important to keep you on track.
3. Try the products again and again: you can try to use frequently your product so it will make you familiar with your products. You can compare it with another competitor to know which better the UX flow or get insight.

3. Get Access for Any Tools (2 Days)

As a first joiner after you know about the people, you can learn about some company tools or your squad tools. Let say designer using Zeplin.io to put the design, you can ask them to get the access so you can check the previous design. Other things were like documents about the flow of products that put it online like Onedrive or GDrive. Other cases, for knowing about the backlog and what your tech team doing is from the management tools for the features roadmap like Trello or Phabricator.

By having any access to tools that you needed, you can surely communicate or learn about the products independently (for some cases). I think the first access for catching up is communication tools (email or chat apps), data dashboards, and documents about the products (flow and requirement).

4. Data First (2 Days)

When you want to make improvements or ideas for your products, one of the tools that help to support your ideas and argument is Data. Improvement products without data it so fragile. By knowing the data you can check if there is a broken funnel regarding your features so you can make a priority to find the problem of that and solve them first. I give you my tips to this data:

1. Metrics: you need to know about important metrics for your product (eg. CTR or Complaint Tickets).
2. Hypothesis: have a hypothesis about what problem or idea to improvement. Let’s says you have a hypothesis argument about broken funnel in some features. You can say: “I think there is a big drop rate in this x flow because the users can’t do one-click …..”
3. A question to ask: by defining the hypthoesis you can break down it into questions that you need to ask Data Guy. From the above hypothesis, a possible question could be “I want to know about this data drop funnel. could you give me data that impact our metrics about this? and the time frame is from xx months to yy months.”
4. Gather the Data: after you get the data, you can analyze or dip down the data. You can discuss it with other PM or Data guy if have some question or hesitation about the data.  By then, you can propose some ideas from the data to solve your hypothesis problem or statement.

5. Idea to Changes (6 Days)

After you got the data, product knowledge, peoples and access, i think it’s time for you to start the idea (you can start it actually without follow or doing other tips first). I usually start the idea by defining this simple question:

1. Problem: problem statement can come from the data you got and the hypothesis you make. You can start with a small problem that you can find. For example, “i think users cannot see the differences between the buttons so people usually did not click the cart button”. After this, you can see what are a big problem that can make an big impact for your product. Now let the Data be your teammate for finding the more fundamental problem.
2. Possible solution: after you got a variety of problems, now try to answer it. I usually listing any possible solutions to the problems. Why? because somehow you just need to do that (just kidding). The main reason is to open your mind about ideas and creativity regardless of the possibility. So it might allow you to have a crazy idea which can turn something and significantly create big impact.
3. Validation: after you have all solutions, its time to validate it. I usually see the data, research or previous working if my solution already implemented. Remember, to validate the ideas, you don’t need to spend much energy and time. You can use wireframe and do usability testing, or just simply do research.
4. Priority: some validate solutions now serve on the table. But what should we do? its to prioritize what should we eat first. It’s about effort and impact. For effort you can validate or ask your Tech or Designer team. For Impact, you can discuss it with the Data or Business team. One tip from me if you have low effort and high impact ideas, its a quick win and do it now.

I think that’s all from my experiences. I write this article its actually for my reminder so i can always learn from my mistakes. This article builds with a couple of iteration because I’m not good at grammar, so yeah will fix it and make some changes. If you have any feedback, don’t hesitate to contact me.

Thank you and have a nice day!