The Languages of Product Management
Product managers need to be multi-lingual.
If you do not speak the language of the function you are interacting with, everything becomes more difficult. Conversations take longer. Alignment becomes tedious, if it ever happens. Stakeholders come back after a feature is launched with a list of complaints.
The best PMs prevent these messes by speaking in the language of their stakeholders. My friend Aatir Abdul Rauf calls these, “the languages of Product Management.” From my point of view, it is one of the most powerful concepts in product management today.
The worst product managers forever speak, “Producti.” They just speak in the language of PMs: terms like jobs to be done, user needs, empowered teams, putting the problem first, and product sense. While stakeholders and cross-functional partners have a sense of what these terms mean, they lack the deep neural net of context tied to each term product folks do.
The job of a Product Manager involves a lot of collaboration with these folks. Just like people from different countries and nationalities are most comfortable conversing in their native tongue, each department of a company prefers their own parlance. The most effective PMs pick up on this jargon quickly, to become more relatable and effective.
So, I am very excited to present a deep dive into the six most important languages for PMs to speak - Corporatish, Marketindi, Salesian, Designese, Techugu, and Analytian - with the creator of them himself, Aatir. The goal is to help you speak at least 10% better with your stakeholders. Let’s get into it.
The Languages to Speak
Corporatish
One of a PM’s most important relationships is with the company’s leadership. Leadership tends to speak a language known as, “Corporatish.” This is very different from Producti.
It’s not that leadership doesn't care about the state of the product. However, once the overarching goal is laid out in terms of a business metric like revenue, profitability, or market share, they need to know how product efforts translate into achieving them.
When talking with leadership, product managers need to communicate the health of the product and business metrics using terms that they care about and understand. It also helps, as a product manager, to be able to understand the lingo these folks use.
Key Terms
B2B: MRR, ARR, Logo/ Revenue Churn
B2C: Lifetime Value, Cost of Acquisition, Payback Period, Average Revenue per User
Both: Gross & Net Margin
Generally, the terms to know to speak Corporatish depend on whether your role is in B2B or B2C.
In either case, leadership is going to be interested in metrics around revenue.
MRR is monthly recurring revenue. This is the sum total of revenue the business is getting, stated on a monthly basis.
ARR is annual recurring revenue. It is the annualized version of MRR. It’s not just leadership who cares about ARR and MRR. Everyone from financial analysts to sales are always keeping a close eye on how ARR and MRR are tracking. As a result, the best PMs generally try to keep a close pulse on these rates, and, where they can, measure the impact of their features on them.
For subscription-based products especially, deciding which product features go in each package tier can have an impact on both MRR and ARR.
Thus, a conversation with leadership could look like:
“We’re beefing up our Pro tier with a workflow editor making it a more compelling proposition. We feel this will further motivate our Freemium users to upgrade, hence, bumping up our MRR.”
Logo Churn is the fraction of customers lost during the period over the number of customers at the start of the period. It is sometimes called customer churn. Leadership loves features that reduce customer churn.
The corollary to logo churn is revenue churn. Revenue churn is the fraction of revenue lost in the period, over the revenue at the start. Many think about a metric like ARR in the context of new revenue, existing revenue, and churned revenue.
Revenue churn biases to the biggest customers. As a result, many companies pay attention to both types of churn. But, all things equal, most companies care more about revenue churn than logo churn.
So, it’s very possible for a product to incur low logo churn in a month (say lost 1 customer out of 100) but suffer massive revenue churn if that “lost customer” was a majority revenue contributor.
Conversation Byte:
“We need to open a free trial for our product. This will help us capture more customers in the long run. Diversifying will help us reduce our logo churn. If we don’t work on this, then with just a couple of high-paying clients on board, we’ll always remain at risk of experiencing high revenue churn.”
Lifetime value is the total revenue a customer will generate for the business. Leaders often want to compare this to the cost of acquisition, which is the total cost it takes for the business to acquire the customer.
Leadership is usually playing a delicate balance between these two metrics. They may even measure the payback period, which is the amount of time it takes for the lifetime value to exceed the cost of acquisition.
Conversation Byte:
“Since competition is driving our cost of acquisition up, we need to drive up our lifetime value. To do that I propose, we focus on improving our onboarding experience & prioritize personalized customer service. On the side, we should consider increase our prices in the medium run. It will help shorten our payback period.”
Average revenue per user (ARPU) represents the blended rate of revenue you receive for an active customer. It is similar to lifetime value, however, it is usually calculated on a specific timeframe for financial statements, like the average revenue per user over a year. Some consider ARPU an overall business health metric, while LTV a user profitability metric.
Conversation Byte:
“By launching grocery delivery service alongside ride hailing, we’ll be able to cross-sell to our existing customers. This will kickstart adoption and also lift our ARPU.”
The final concept in Corporatish to understand as a PM is margins. There are two important one’s to understand. First, gross margin. Gross margin reflects the profit ratio leftover after accounting for cost of goods sold. It does not account for things like the sales team, or the product team. These usually fall in Sales/General/ Administrative Expenses, and Research & Development expenses, respectively.
As a result, while many high-burn companies will focus on gross margin, many profitable companies and financial analysts will focus on net margin. This is the lower of the two rates, which takes into account the company’s other expenses:
Conversation Byte:
“Our current SMS vendor is proving to be very costly as we’re scaling. Thus, we’re considering other upcoming players in the market who might be more economical. This will help dial up our net margins too. ”
Good vs Great Corporatish
Name dropping these metrics does not impress company leadership. Just like being an MBA doesn’t make you a magical PM, neither does knowing these terms. Instead, as a PM, the key is thinking through these metrics, and the impact your product will have on them.
Great Corporatish builds trust from the audience that the PM knows what moves these metrics, and has built a roadmap and features to move them.
Company leadership is often looking to harden the product roadmap. So, the conversation for good Corporatish will establish consensus on how the products are prioritized and built to achieve these metrics.
Resources to Learn More
This article could be 100,000 words. To avoid that boring fate, here are some resources if you want to go a layer deeper on these terms:
Visualizing the Interactions Between CAC, Churn and LTV by Gordon Daugherty
A guide to SaaS metrics for product managers by Tarif Rahman
Finance for Product Managers by Stephen Cornelius
As you can see, many of the terms in Corporatish are strategy or financial concepts. So, you can always go deeper by studying those fields.
Marketindi
Product managers collaborate with marketing to ensure the product is presented in the best light. To understand their tactical and strategic performance, PMs need to be wary of the common vocabulary they use.
Marketers tend to have a specific way of thinking about things, which influences the vocabulary they tend to use.
Key Terms
B2B: Marketing/ Sales qualified leads
B2C: Landing pages
Both: Site copy, SEO, Cost per click, Impressions, Open/ click rates
Marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads are the lingua franca of marketers in a B2B context. Often abbreviated MQLs and SQLs, MQLs refer to leads that have come to the website and marketing is passing over to sales. Most often, these are people who have filled out a form on the website with their contact information.
SQLs are then the leads that the sales department accepts as leads to further pursue. Most companies only convert MQLs to SQLs once the sales team has spoken with the potential customer and confirmed they are in a potential position to purchase the product.
For a variety of reasons, including being the wrong person, the wrong product, or the wrong time, many MQLs do not become SQLs. As a result, marketers are keen to measure and optimize the gap.
Conversation Byte:
“This quarter we saw a rise in inbound interest for our AI-powered CRM product for real estate agents. This can be measured by the rise of MQLs we experienced over last month (over 40%). However, the most common objection prospects are putting forward is lack of a mobile app and that’s the primary reason our MQLs are not converting into SQLs. We may not to consider prioritizing that on our roadmap.”
They often do so by optimizing landing pages, especially the messaging to convey the right value proposition and speak to the right audiences. The singular landing page (LP) is the first site a user first sees when entering a website. Since many users bounce after this first impression, marketers spend a great deal of time asking PMs to optimize LPs.
Sometimes, this means working with a writer or content designer to rewrite parts of the page. Site copy is the term of art used to describe those words. It seems like a small thing, but changing site copy for prominent areas and buttons can have a huge impact.
The ultimate goal of the landing page, its layout and site copy is to create a compelling narrative that drives conversions. A conversion for a marketer is when a user takes the desired follow-up action after consuming the page. This is mostly done through signing up for a free trial, filling up a form for a demo (usually counted as a MQL) or even sharing contact details to download a whitepaper or e-book.
But before the visitors even arrive on the web page, the marketer has to get them there. With Google still the #1 site on the web, many marketers have to think about Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Conversation Byte:
“Surveys show that 1 out of 3 people don’t realize that our fintech product also offers micro-loans. How about we set up a nice landing page for this? We can optimize the site copy for loan-related keywords to help with SEO. Perhaps, add in a clear GIF on the top to show how easy and quick the process is. I’m sure it will drive up our conversions. ”
It’s a mixture of art and science. The technical elements of the site have to be constructed well for Google, but, more importantly, the content has to be stellar, authoritative, and with many links to it from authoritative places around the web.
SEO is contrasted from the ads on Google, referred to as Search Engine Marketing (SEM). SEO is free. SEM is paid. Marketers bid a potential cost per click (CPC) in Google’s auction, which is running globally and in real-time. Google does not just show the highest cost per click. It considers the bidder’s quality as well, and takes a balance of what’s best for the searcher and Google’s revenue.
The cost per click is a function of two things: impressions (views) and click rates (fraction of users who view that click). Google is calculating on the backend what the estimated click rate of an ad is given a particular slot, and how many people it needs to show it to.
Conversation Byte:
“The edtech market is getting competitive and naturally our cost-per-click will start rising as other players place high bids for keywords we care about. Our upcoming hyperlocal tutoring program, however, might help as we can adjust our targeting & use city names in our ads. Our impressions may remain stable but click rates will go up because students prefer localized solutions. ”
Good vs Great Marketindi
To speak great Marketindi, you should have a good basic understanding of how to help your marketing colleagues. A great PM marketing partner will understand the marketer’s current challenges, and help guide them on how to use technology and engineering resources to overcome them.
One challenge many marketers recently have faced is rising CPCs. With each click now costing more, they can drive less visitors to their landing pages. This makes it harder for marketers to achieve their MQL goals. Great PMs will help marketers cope with these rising CPCs by helping increase their landing page conversion rates. They can give marketers tips on better positioning based on competitive insights and suggest new landing page ideas as they expand the product.
Resources to Learn More
Marketing is much more than just buzzwords. It’s a way of thinking and set of tactics that are not only necessary for product growth, but also necessary for product feature success. As a PM, your relationship with marketing is critical.
All of the following resources should help:
How to Build an Amazing Relationship Between Product Management and Marketing by Product Plan
Go To Market Strategies: A Guide for Product Managers + Template by Product School
How Product Management Can Work Effectively With Marketing by User Voice
Salesian
Product managers need to inspire sales to convince the world how great the product is. Apart from sharing new features, user stories, and case studies, PMs need to know a bit about the internal mechanics of a sales process to better facilitate them.
Key Terms
B2B: ICP, Discovery Call, Close Rates, Win Ratio, Productivity, Lead Scoring
B2C: Channel strategy
Both: BATNA, Quota
Just like building for everyone is a fool’s errand, so is selling to everyone. As a result, most teams focus on an Ideal Customer Profile, or ICP. The ICP describes the type of business and user within the business who would get the most out of the product.
Many sales teams will start the sales process with a discovery call. This is not the same discovery we PMs who follow Teresa Torres are used to doing. The sales team is usually doing a discovery call to discover if the MQL is to be converted into a SQL (jump to Marketindi if you skipped it and don’t know those terms), by understanding if they are the ICP.
In discovery calls, sales teams use qualifying questions to determine good-fit. A commonly used framework is BANT:
Budget: does the prospect have the budget for the product?
Authority: is the prospect the decision maker or just a proxy?
Need: is the prospect’s problem solved by the product?
Time: how urgently is the prospect looking to purchase?
If the potential customer is an SQL and negotiations progress, eventually the sales team will issue a formal quote. The conversion rate from that first formal quote to a final, signed deal is the close rate. But it varies widely, so be sure to check the denominator where you work.
Win ratio is another tricky rate, though typically calculated based on opportunities. It represents how efficient a sales rep is from beginning, the opportunity, to end, the signed deal. But it varies widely between companies. Some differences are just based on Salesforce, so be wary.
Conversation Byte:
“Sales has been going on a number of discovery calls where prospects cite the need for extensive customizations. I’m seeing most of these prospects are from large conglomerates trying to find a single tool to fulfill all the needs of their subsidiaries. It’s important to remember that our ICP is focused on SMBs looking for a simple social media scheduling tool. We’re not for enterprise customers yet. This means we need to tweak our marketing messages. No wonder our win ratio is down this month.”
Regardless of the exact definition, win ratio is one of the primary inputs into measuring sales productivity. Broadly, sales productivity is the measure of how productive a sales person is. Win rate can help determine their performance productivity.
How do organizations help sales representatives be more effective? One methodology is lead scoring. Lead scoring is a system that provides a score for each lead (MQL or SQL), estimating how likely they are to convert, and how much effort the sales team should put into them.
It is usually done based on things like company size, who the team is contact with, the number of people the team is in contact with, and how much time the company has devoted to the deal. But instead of calculate all this themselves, most companies will use a pre-built tool like Marketo, ZoomInfo, or Salesforce.
Conversation Byte:
“Our fitness coach app is seeing great traction from gyms with multiple outlets. Let’s bake that parameter into our lead scoring so that we prioritize those accounts.”
The sales terms up until know are primarily used in B2B contexts. In B2C, this role might exist and use similar terms but be called partnerships or strategic partnerships. These teams often mention channel strategy.
For instance, in a video game context, a developer can sell online-only, they can try to partner with major retailers, they can partner with gaming websites, and more. Each of these options is considered a channel, and the channel strategy is which channels the partnership team has prioritized and why.
Both B2B and B2C sales teams make have use of terms like BATNA, which stands for Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement. A bit of a borrowed term from corporate finance and procurement, it helps the sales team understand, “if not us, then what?” By understanding what the other side’s options are, it makes negotiation easier.
Finally, when speaking sales it’s always good to know about quota. Sales quotas are goals or target minimums sales people need to achieve. Unlike PMs, their salaries are heavily weighted towards variable compensation tied to the quota. As a result, a sales person falling behind quota can be considerably more stressed than one above.
Conversation Byte:
“Our doctor appointment marketplace is stagnating in conversions. We need to explore channel strategies where we can partner with hospitals & clinics to increase brand awareness. At the same time, we need to sign up more doctors. To help sales hit their quota, we’re going to add a dedicated customer service rep in the sales pitch to motivate doctors to try us out.”
Good vs Great Salesian
Speaking with sales is an especially important skill for B2B PMs. It is not uncommon to see senior product leaders in B2B contexts not only regularly meeting with sales, but also regularly doing sales. Big clients like to meet with important product leaders to ensure their requests are reflected in the upcoming roadmap.
As a result, it is imperative that B2B PMs regularly communicate and proactively manage their relationship with sales. A good B2B PM might share the upcoming roadmap. A great B2B PM makes sales feel like they helped co-create the roadmap.
B2C PMs, and PMs generally, also need to have a great relationship with sales and strategic partnerships. These people are the one’s who drive deals that significantly move your stock price or enterprise valuation. As a result, helping enable them can directly increase your compensation.
Resources to Learn More
Relationships with sales as a PM are multi-faceted. You want things from sales. They need things from you. Managing it well is a lifelong journey. These resources can help you speak better Salesian along the way:
Ten Things Product Managers Should Know About Sales by Daniel Shefer
The Product Manager — Sales Team Disconnect: Areas of Friction and How to Mend These by Antonia Bozhkova
Negotiating with Sales: A Guide for Product Managers by Pradip Khakhar
Designese
To get that pixel-perfect design, PMs should use design jargon that most UX/UI professionals are fluent in. Feedback given this way leads to accurate revisions, quicker time-to-market, and less back and forth.
Key Terms
UX, UI, Typography, Margin, Padding, Layout, Hero Image, Isometric, icons, Above the Fold, CTA, Line spacing, Hierarchy, Alignment, Whitespace
The language here is, perhaps thankfully, common across B2B and B2C.
UX and UI are different. UX refers to user experience, which is focused on the user’s journey to solve a problem. UI refers to user interface, and describes how a product’s surfaces look and function. Put another way, UX is about the experience, while UI focuses on visual interface elements.
Conversation Byte:
“Recent surveys for our train ticket booking system show that users love the new minimalist UI we’ve launched and the clean design of our route guides. However, they feel the UX is confusing as they’re unable to figure out how to go past the seat selection interface.”
UI designers tend to care about things like typography. Typography refers to the presentation of the letters and text. It’s a deep field one, one famously loved by Steve Jobs, who introduced fonts to the digital world in the 1980s after auditing a class in college. Your choice of it helps convey your brand image and feel, so designers tend to care quite a bit that it matches the design style guidelines.
UI designers also tend to care about margin and padding. They are both words used to describe white space, but refer to different elements. Padding refers to space within an element. Margin refers to space between elements. Both of them describe the ever important negative space, and it guides both UI and UX design.
Each of these negative spaces are elements of the overall layout. The layout is the overall structure that supports the varying visual components in the interface. It is a fundamental of UI design, so most designers will pay attention to it.
Many folks will be particularly interested and interating on, and optimize the hero image. The hero image is the big, eye-catching image that is towards the top of the website. In many cases, like the one below, it takes up most of the space at the top of many websites. It usually plays a huge role in achieving the objective of the page.
Conversation Byte:
“Ling, I saw the mockups you shared for our webinar tool - totally loved the new layout. Thank you for the effort you put in. Some notes:
The cursive typography used in our testimonials section can be a bit hard to read, especially on smaller screens. Perhaps we could use an alternative there like Open sans?
The hero image is so on-point. I love the idea of this being a GIF where people from different backgrounds are chatting and collaborating.
The margin between the cards under the Benefits section look a bit tight to me with respect to the rest of the page. Can we double-check that?”
One of the most interesting things that designers can do is depict 3D objects in 2D planes. This is called isometric style. This is contrasted to flat style, which does not attempt to depict the 3D nature of the image, but instead shows a cross-section.
Designers also tend to care quite a bit about icons. Generally, design teams will develop a set of shared icons that the app or web page regularly uses. Because icons often indicate to users what tapping on something means, getting them right matters.
Another element of design that is critical is the content that exists above the fold. This refers to all the content that renders before a user scrolls. The fold is the end of what’s visible before scrolling, at which point the content is referred to as below the fold.
Any design discussion is also bound to have talk about the call to action, or CTA. There are very few informative pages in products. Most have an explicit next action, and the CTA is the button and text for that next action. It might even be closing the page. But designing it intuitively for the user is still critical.
Conversation Byte:
“Sandeep, thanks for pushing out the design in time. Phew - you’re a life-saver. I had some feedback on the live page and wanted your thoughts. The icon sets we have used on the navigation bar differ from those in our action dropdowns - perhaps those can be more consistent? I’m also a bit nervous about the fact that the delicious red CTA you crafted isn’t showing up above the fold on my screen - I feel that might hurt usage. I can share my specs with you. See if you can take a look.”
Designers also frequently discuss line spacing. Line spacing refers to the vertical distance between text. Different apps and web pages will have different overall guidelines. What’s generally most important is consistency.
Designers also tend to focus a great deal on hierarchy. The visual hierarchy helps users rank what to look at. Careful arrangement of visual elements can lead visitors down the exact path a product team intends.
A final term of art to know when speaking Designese is alignment. Alignment refers to placing text or other elements in the page so they are aligned with something. Generally, if things are not aligned, it can look unprofessional. However, an intentional misalignment can also create emphasis.
Conversation Byte:
“Matt - the blog is now looking stellar! I think your line spacing adjustments were the secret sauce. It’s so much more readable now on smaller devices. And now that the heading font sizes and bullets have proper visual hierarchy, it’s going to make the page more skimmable. I did want to highlight the alignment of the quote blocks with the rest of the article text though. They see to be a bit off. ”
Good vs Great Designese
Designers, of all people, tend to be the least concerned with understanding their lingo. However, designers also tend to respect PMs who understand that lingo more. In fact, because designers regularly work with PMs, they often have strong opinions on how good a PM is when working with design.
One of the biggest mistakes a PM can make when trying to work well with design is doing their job for them. Designers don’t want you to define the margin and padding. Instead, they want you to help provide the business context of what is relevant to that decision.
As a result, the best way to speak designese is to facilitate and notice the work a designer is doing. Notice that they were thoughtful about the above the fold content. Share your thoughts on the CTA during a design review. These tactics will be much better recieved than trying to pre-define them in the spec.
Resources to Learn More
Fundamentals of layout in user interface design (UI) by Leonardo Moreno
UX and Product Management are a perfect match by User Zoom
UX for Product Managers by Daniel Elizalde
Techugu
Product managers talk a lot with engineering teams consisting of tech leads, developers, & QAs. Tech units prefer talking with someone who understands their challenges, comes up with feasible requirements, and writes clear specs they can build against.
Key Terms
Databases, servers, backend, frontend, version control, staging, production, estimates, technical debt, bugs/ defects, sprints
The first concept to understand is databases. These are the sets of data stored in some logical, organized manner. They are typically structured in terms of tables and fields. Fields are stored in a table structure. Different types of databases have pros and cons. Relational databases support relationship mapping between different points in tables, non-relational do not. A PM will rely on engineering to decide on database design but may need to understand the implications of choices on the product.
The next term to now is servers. They are a crucial component of how the internet works. They are how information is served to our phones and laptops. Using protocols like HTTPS, users interact with servers, where the backend happens. Databases are typically on servers. In many modern mobile applications, the majority of content and computation occurs on the server. This is known as the client-server model.
The user’s phone primarily focuses on frontend components, like how the interface is designed. So when engineers say things like, “we’re a frontend team,” that usually means they focus on areas like the presentation layer and how it interacts with the data from the backend.
But, it is a complex topic. Take the example of filtering. For filtering large data like Yelp, that should happen on the backend. But filtering quick data like a Google Doc would happen on the frontend. PMs should be ready to spark discussion about the pros and cons of what’s better with their engineering teams.
Conversation Byte:
“Now that we’re launching our own custom reports for our social media scheduling tool, we may need to add a few more fields (like reactions) to the database. We’ll also need to think about adding more servers as fetching complex reports will be a heavy operation that’ll take a toll on them. The backend team will need to think about architecture and how we can best structure the database for deriving such reports. I’m advising the designers to take a look at the UI of tools like Google Data Studio and Tableau to conceive the design but keep the frontend team in the loop to assess the feasibility of actually implementing them. ”
The next concept for PMs to know is version control. It is the practice of tracking changes to code. For most teams with many engineers working on the codebase, it’s necessary to have a version control system that enables them all to work on the project. Many modern teams use Git (and a company Github) for this, which enables distributed version control. Tools like Git help teams roll back to an older version without a bug or remove a feature.
In version control, engineers put their code up to a staging branch to check for conflicts. They test in the staging environment before going live. In the staging environment, PMs and other folks can ensure the product behaves as intended. They often work with internal folks like QA.
Once the feature has cleared testing, it is passed to the master branch. Then the code is deployed to the production server. This contains the production code that goes live to users. Although external users can try the feature, companies often start with a small percentage or group of users.
Conversation Byte:
“Sure, the search filters look fine on staging and I’m seeing all the right values. However, on production, I’m seeing duplicates and the facet counts are off. This looks like a data issue. Can we get tech to look into this asap? If all else fails, let’s roll back to the old version we have on Git.”
When speaking with developers, PMs are bound to chat about timeline and work estimates. These are the common language between PMs and EMs in many daily conversations. PMs work with EMs to get estimates of the time required to make decisions on which work to prioritize based on impact over work ratio.
Often, conversations about priorities also center around technical debt. Tech debt can be deliberate, accidental, or the result of rot. Regardless, it’s often something the team needs to invest in so it can work faster and more efficiently.
Sometimes, the team also needs to prioritize bugs or defects. Even the best teams miss edge cases, or edge cases are created with future features. These create bugs the team needs to go back to address to maintain the proper success of a pre-existing feature.
Finally, to speak great Techugu, PMs should know about sprints. These are units that engineering teams go through, anywhere from two to four weeks. Many teams try not to disrupt the work assigned in between. Planning is instead conducted towards the end of the current sprint for the next, and so on. The term grew out of Scrum and Agile practices but has long since sprouted its own tree, used by teams who don’t practice strict Scrum or Agile.
Conversation Byte:
“I’m seeing that most of our prior sprints fail to deliver a couple of user stories that were agreed on. I guess the estimates we’re getting from devs might be too optimistic? Paul had a good point that many of our issues stem from some technical debt we’ve accrued in our database and it’s becoming unwieldy. Perhaps, we should dedicate a sprint to that to clean up the cobwebs and enable better velocity moving forward. ”
Good vs Great Techugu
Speaking with engineering is a daily task for product managers. So, speaking great Techugu is essential. To do so, make sure to not overuse the terms. Instead, stick to your areas of expertise. Be rigorous about the data, use research to back up your recommendations.
Then, translate those WHAT and WHY concepts of the strategy into tactical execution. The worst product managers are those who just have their head in the clouds, and cannot help with the HOW. When speaking Techugu with engineers, help them clarify and frame pros/cons. Do not try to be the expert, but help relay the business and user context for engineering decisions, facilitate conversation, and remove blockers.
Resources to Learn More
Developer-Speak: What a product manager needs to know by Product Plan
The top 5 things PMs should know about engineering by Justin Gage
5 Things Every Product Manager Should Know About Software Development by Jesse Streb
Analytian
PMs often have to venture into the land of analytics to gauge the growth, retention, and engagement of their product. This requires comfort with a lingo that product ops & data analysts fluently converse in.
Key Terms
DAUs/ MAUs, Bounce Rate, Pageviews, Sessions, Time on Site, Conversion Rates, Returning Users, Source/ Channel
Nearly all products care about usage. To quantify this usage, analysts and PMs often talk about daily active users (DAUs) and monthly active users (MAUs). DAUs represents the total unique users who used the product at least once in a 24 hour period. MAUs is the same for the last month.
Those two definitions are relatively straightforward. But analysts will also often talk about the ratio of these two metrics: DAUs/ MAUS. It is critical for PMs to have an intuitive understanding that this is an engagement metric. It shows how many of the users who used the product in the last month did in a day. If it’s 100%, then it’s a daily-use product. If it’s 3%, then it’s a monthly-use product.
Conversation Byte:
“Ever since we put a payment wall on the auto classifieds section, we’ve seen a massive drop in DAUs & MAUs. The good thing is that we were aware of the tradeoff we were making: monetizing serious sellers vs. serving everyone.”
Another metric PMs are bound to hear when speaking Analytian is bounce rate. This is the percentage of people who land on a page and do nothing. They “bounce.” Identifying pages with higher than expected bounce rates is a great exercise for PMs to do with product analytics. They can often be quickly reworked with design to change content, CTAs, and the like to decrease bounce rate.
The denominator for bounce rate can vary. Sometimes it is pageviews, while other times it is sessions. A page view is any view of a page. A user can have multiple views of the same page. A session is usually a unit of time by a user. So it might be 30 minutes. It is important to understand which metric is being divided.
Product teams also pay close attention to the time on site. This is another alternative to page views or sessions. Each metric has its pros and cons, so it is good to try to choose the right metric for your specific situation in conversation with analytics.
Many features that teams release will be looking to impact conversion rates. This is the rate of visitors to a page that did some conversion goal: often email signup or item purchase. Many growth teams, especially, try to release experiments to improve these rates.
Conversation Byte:
“Although we’re getting a lot of pageviews on our reseller page, the bounce rates are exceptionally high. This is because the page is too text-heavy and the CTA isn’t clearly highlighted. To improve time-on-site and eventually conversions, we need to redesign the page. A well-placed video might help too.”
Often, the team will split the result by new vs returning users. It is critical to understand what qualifies as returning. Sometimes this is just, not being the first visit. Other times, this is being a paying customer.
A final term to know to speak great Analytian is source/ channel. Often, analytics will split traffic or data by the source the traffic came from. For instance, traffic from paid ads may behave differently than organic traffic. Usually source, or channel, refers to a marketing channel like paid search, Facebook, or Display ads.
Conversation Byte:
“Ever since we launched our loyalty program & flash deals, our e-commerce site is seeing a rise in returning users by 15%. The main driver of this returning traffic is Facebook where existing users are being roped in through ads for time-bound deals.”
Good vs Great Analytian
Speaking with analysts is nearly a daily activity for most PMs. So, ask questions. Analysts want PMs to be fluent in the terms. Leverage analysts to help determine the right metrics and measure metrics.
By focusing on describing what you want to measure, and then hypothesizing the metric, PMs can help work with analysts. The great PMs do not merely understand the concepts, they work with analysts to make the analytics even better.
Resources to Learn More
DAU/MAU is an important metric to measure engagement, but here’s where it fails by Andrew Chen
Everything a product manager needs to know about analytics by Simon Cast
A Guide To Product Analytics: Benefits, Metrics & Why It Matters by Vinci Lam
The Other Languages
Product managers do not interact with just 6-7 functions. They interact with 10-20, depending on the size of the company. As a result, PMs also have to be able to speak:
Legalese - the language of legal
Customese - the language of customers
Managerian - the language of managers
Projecti - the language of projects
Writerish - the language of writers
Supportindi - the language of customer support
Qualuruba - the language of quality assurance
Recruito - the language of recruiting
Opsalog - the language of operations
While a deep treatment of those language is outside the scope of this article, one final language is worth double clicking on.
The False Idol
Producti
As PMs, we are first and foremost worried about being great product builders. We deeply analyze the products we use. We think deeply about the product strategies we propose our teams to pursue.
As a result, the language of product management, product design, and product engineering takes up most of our mental space. Indeed, meetings with these three groups also tend to dominate the actual time on our calendars.
Especially when speaking with product leadership in an attempt to prove our worth to be promoted, we are incentivized to speak great Producti. Indeed, every PM should become amazing Producti. But the idol becomes a false one when PMs forget to speak non-Producti to everyone else.
Regardless, given how important Producti is to our careers as PMs, let’s quickly go over it.
Key Terms
Common PM Jargon: Jobs to be done, user needs, empowered teams, putting the problem first, product sense, roadmap, backlog, persona, mock-up
Jobs to be done is one of the most powerful PM phrases in today’s modern PM jargon. It attempts to describe a rigorous understanding of what a user or customer has hired the product to do. Based on concepts from the late Harvard Business School (HBS) professor Clayton Christensen, it’s continual usefulness has made it a favorite of PMs.
This video by the late Clayton Christensen can be watched infinite times, it’s so valuable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGuSM3yUxik
User needs is another PM term of art that means more to product people than their stakeholders and collaborators. It’s another term that’s arisen from the mix of user research and design thinking. It describes the overall sum of what a PM has learned through discovery and user research about what the user needs from a feature.
It is a great way to quickly summarize to product teammembers and leadership the type of motivation the group is talking about. For instance, “let’s talk about user needs now, instead of business motivation or usability.”
Many product folks also layer on additional theory to the user needs concept, like what the hierarchy of needs are. Most stakeholders will not know these.
Empowered teams refer to product squads who set out to achieve outcomes by solving problems as product teams, instead of executing on handed to them features. These have become a term of their own since the publication of the two landmark books by Marty Cagan.
Putting the problem first describes another key tenet of product management philosophy in 2021, that most people won’t have as much neural circuitry tied to. For modern product leaders, this is everything. They want to help the team identify problems to solve. The worst product leaders come solution-first, pushing the team to build something before going through the product research and design process of validating the solution.
As a result, a casual mention of the phrase means a lot in product circles. But most other functions won’t understand the importance of this process. It’s not their fault they are coming to you with product solutions. That’s what they think PMs do.
Product sense is the intuition and judgment that leads to good product decision-making. For product practitioners, we understand this typically means understanding user needs, formulating the job to be done, and prioritizing solutions. Many outside product feel that product sense is a bit of a “dark art,” because it’s hard to pin down and define.
But great PMs exude great product sense. In brainstorms, their ideas pack a punch. The features they choose represent deep product thinking. A high percentage of their experiments hit. This is what product sense is, and many product interviews try to test for it. As a result, it is commonplace in today’s PM vocab.
The roadmap is a shared document that shows the direction and priorities of the product team over time. Some teams list features and dates, many have a long list of philosophical reasons that’s heresy. It’s the ultimate “PM” topic that most other functions care far less about.
A backlog is a list of work for the development team. Sometimes, this list is everything the team is not going to do, as in, “that’s in the backlog.” Other times, it’s the prioritized list of work the team is going to do, or has in the queue to do next. It depends on the context, but PMs love to throw this term around.
Conversation Byte:
“Our chat tool needs to consider a strategy for integrating bots in the future. Our competitors are leaning in on this and our enterprise customers have been on our case. I’m trying to clear the existing backlog riddled with defects as quickly as possible, so let’s put something on the roadmap for Q3 around bots.”
A persona in product is a profile of one of the type’s of users of the product. It often includes a description of the key characteristics, usage, and needs of that user type. Some product people quickly make these on the fly conceptually. Others deeply research them with their user research team.
A mock-up is usually a visual representation of the product. They are often less high fidelity than a prototype, perhaps completed by a product manager in PowerPoint.
Good vs Great Producti
Mashing up or misusing product terms is the fastest path to your boss losing confidence in you. The worst thing a PM can do is misuse product jargon. Make sure that you know the basics of the above terms, so that can use them correctly.
Good PMs will use these terms intuitively when speaking with product leadership and fellow PMs. Great PMs will help imbue these terms with new meaning by being a thought leader on product topics in their company.
Resources to Learn More
Three books have become an essential part of the PM canon, that will help any PM deal with PM jargon and use it like a great master:
Inspired by Marty Cagan
Empowered by Marty Cagan
Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres
Takeaways
https://twitter.com/aakashg0/status/1505138921809850371
Politics does not need to have a negative connotation, at all. Have you ever seen Bill Clinton engage a person? He can engage anyone from any walk of life.
As a PM, it pays to study the professions of your colleagues. By being better able to speak their language, you stand more ready to influence them as well.
great article aakash! It would be interesting to see a part two for this post, that explains how to level up some of these languages from good to best in class :) , as you have mentioned many a times, what makes a product thought leader unique? how do you get there, besides gaining more experience?