How to Develop a Great Product by King Product Manager

In this talk, Ishai Smadja illustrates the different stages of Product Management, how one should always remain creative and open-minded when it comes to product ideas and solutions, and how important learning is in the whole product management lifecycle.

Ishai Smadja

Ishai Smadja is a Product Manager with King’s experimentation group, the team that is in charge of innovation and finding new opportunities. Before joining King, Ishai worked for four years in military intelligence, before which he worked in the field of management consulting for three years for several companies.

How to Develop a Great Product

Different Stages of Product Management:

1. Opportunity
2. Solution
3. Validation
4. Implementation

1. Opportunity

Opportunity is a match between a need and a solution. A winning opportunity is a new value-creating match between solution and a need delivered to a customer.

One creates opportunities through systematic creativity:

1. Use opportunity as a bridge between need and solution.
2. Think of a problem faced by the masses and how you can use technology to solve it.
3. Think about what is happening in different demographics, microeconomics, macroeconomics, and import innovation from different places.

2.  Solution

Example:

Looking at value propositions

• Eliminate
  • Example: In a mobile game, the price point is eliminated as it can be downloaded and played for free.
• Reduce
  • Example: The graphic quality of the game can be reduced as the mobile game users don’t expect it as a priority.
• Create
  • Example: Create new mobile games.
• Raise
  • Example: Expand the portfolio by adding more games.

3. Validation

Hypothesis-driven approach:

• Prioritise by certainty and importance
• Testing – Minimum Viable Product

Learning:

• AB tests
• Qualitative feedback
• User testing
• A hypothesis can never be proven

Learning is a continuous process, and would never be a specific step in the whole process of product management.

Ishai concludes by giving the example of Youtube to put his point across. Long before Tinder made swiping a thing for matchmaking apps, there was a little-known video site trying to play cupid to the Internet generation: YouTube. The founders noticed that people were not only interested to upload their videos to find matches, but they were also uploading random funny videos. Hence, apart from improving the features, they also updated their learning to provide the best value possible of their product. A product manager should always keep their eyes open, devise creative solutions and not limit their product’s value.