Lessons learnt from Product Management, applied to Data Science

SatRdays, April 2024

Andrie de Vries, Director of Product Strategy, Posit

Agenda

  • What is product management?

  • Why should you care as a data scientist?

  • Resources

My product management journey

Products that I worked on

  • Psion Revo PDA

  • Revolution R Open

  • Microsoft R Open

  • MRAN

More recently, at Posit

  • Posit Workbench

  • Posit Technical Acccount Management

  • Licensing

  • Packaging and pricing

What is product management?

Product life cycle

The adoption cycle



Geoffrey Moore, Crossing the Chasm

But how do you do that?

Define your value proposition

Create gain and reduce pain.


Strategyzer, Value Proposition Design

Jobs to be done

Jobs Theory goes beyond superficial categories to expose the functional, social, and emotional dimensions that explain why customers make the choices they do.


A framework by Clayton Christensen and Bob Moesta

Jobs to be done

Use JTBD as the first step in the value proposition:

  • What activity must be completed?

  • What is the current way to do that?

  • What are the pain points with the current way?

  • What can be gained by doing it differently?

Product strategy

Define a sequence of outcomes (the plan) based on analysis of:

  • target customer,
  • market environment and
  • strategic objectives and needs of <your company>

Product strategy meets value proposition

The product triad


Marty Cagan, Inspired

The data scientist as Product Manager

Think of your app as a product

  • Your app is a product

  • Your internal audience is your customer

  • You must convince users to change their habit to use your product

  • This switching cost is the “price”

Inertia

The biggest obstacle to adoption is inertia

Paraphrased from April Dunford

https://www.aprildunford.com/

How to convince your users?

For example:

  • How do you persuade business users to stop using Excel / PowerPoint and adopt your shiny / quarto dashboard?


  • Talk to users before you build it

  • Don’t build it for you!!!

The 10-x better exercise

What does 10x better mean for your product?

  • Easier?

  • More reliable / up-to-date?

  • Faster?

  • Sharable?

  • Commenting?

  • …

Additional things as you grow your product

Understand the customer

  • Qualitative research

    • Interviews, focus groups, observation

  • Quant research

    • Survey, questionnaire

  • Compare

    • with substitutes / alternatives

Make sure they can get help and updates

  • Forums, mailing lists, slack, discord, reddit, youtube, ….

Examples of projects that turned into products


Resources

Book recommendations

Marty cagan Teresa Torres Strategyzer April Dunford LeMay

  • Marty cagan, Inspired
  • Teresa Torres, Continuous discovery habits
  • April Dunford, Sales pitch

Lenny’s Podcast

https://www.lennyspodcast.com/

Gitlab product handbook

https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/product/

Summary

  • What is product management?

  • Why should you care as a data scientist?

  • Resources

Q&A


https://andrie.quarto.pub/pmds-saturdays/