With the growth of no-code, launching products becomes easier and faster it doesn’t make product management simpler. I’ve been leading product development for our no-code marketplace WeLoveNoCode for the last 8 months and learned a lot about orchestrating different PM deliverables. Today I will share my learning with real-life examples from WeLoveNoCode.
Let's start by listing down the top deliverables according to Sachin Rekhi (read his awesome article here):
- Vision: Vision Narrative
- Strategy: Product/Market Fit Hypotheses
- Design: Customer Discovery Insights
- Design: Product Roadmap
- Design: Product Requirements
- Execution: Metrics Dashboards
- Execution: Team OKRs
- Execution: Decision Rationales
- Execution: Product Wins
Now let’s talk about how those PM deliverables look in real life. This is the practical how-to guide for all founders and makers who want to build MVPs fast with the power of no-code but struggle to master the product management part.
Vision: Vision Narrative
When you are a product manager or a startup founder, you must have a vision for your product. It is not enough to just create a product map, and it is definitely not enough to keep everything in your head. Here at WeLoveNoCode, we are trying to develop a narrative. WeLoveNoCode is the biggest marketplace to hire no-code developers and our narrative is to help everyone to build products faster and more probable with no-code.
However, it is not an easy process to find your vision or narrative. We changed our narrative several times along the way. We started with something like "Fast no-code development for a flat monthly fee" and currently have "Get matched with verified no-code experts to build your software fast & affordably." Moreover, we are actively trying to base our narrative not on just telling people that we are the biggest marketplace of no-coders but focus on our clients' actual problems instead. So as you can see, this is only the beginning.
"How do I start thinking like my client" you may ask. My suggestion for you is to answer a few simple questions:
- What part do you start with?
- What's the punchline?
- How to get from the current state and the future state?
- What is your product that best inspires the audience?
Strategy: Product/Market Fit Hypotheses
Another MUST for product managers is a set of product/market fit hypotheses that you need to iterate from time to time on and refine. It is said that every business requires at least these 8 product/market fit hypotheses that make up their product strategy, but your specific business may have more:
- Target audience
- The problem you're solving
- Value propositions
- Strategic differentiation
- Competition
- Acquisition strategy
- Monetization strategy
- Key performance indicators (KPIs)
In short, at WeLoveNoCode the mantra goes like this: our clients are entrepreneurs or product managers who want to verify their MVPs or ideas fast and cheaply. Our monetization strategy is a monthly subscription.
If you have answers for these hypotheses, you can safely transfer this knowledge to the product or marketing team, as well as the sales team. With a clear vision of what value the product has, you can increase conversions and grow your KPIs. And that's what refining your strategy is all about.
Design: Customer Discovery Insights
If you are a startup founder and need to build a successful product faster, your first step would be User Experience Research. You need to use common UXR methodologies and user experience research methods. Thanks to our Design Lead – DK we try to use most of these methods. If you want to dive deeper just check this article here.
Design: Product Roadmap
As a founder who builds with no-code, you should keep strategy in mind. We all remember that a product roadmap is a shared source of truth that outlines the vision, direction, priorities, and progress of a product over time. It's a plan of action that aligns the organization around short and long-term goals for the product or project and how they will be achieved.
We use a roadmap to understand the direction of our product development. Our work is primarily based in Airtable; it's one of the no-code tools that has more advantages than other databases. There you can make a Gant diagram of your project and share it with your team. Also, we have our product docs in Notion and product roadmap drafts in Miro.
Design: Product Requirements
First of all, when you are a startup or a product manager, you want to move fast. However, sometimes this leads to forgetting about product requirements, which is bad. Trust me, you don't want to do that.
We ended up with a readily-made design that had no product requirements and no user research to back it up on numerous occasions. Of course, we were forced to rebuild these parts of the product later on, as they did not tie in well with the user expectations. We also tried writing product requirements after implementing the design. Please don't do that.
We've changed our workflow since then. Now I write requirements that first get approved by stakeholders. Then designers work on the task using that document. Then developers use the design and that document to implement the feature.
Execution: Metrics Dashboards
Our company is metric-driven and you should do the same. We have several dashboards, with the main one in Airtable, in which I can see how my team is performing. Another dashboard is in ChartMogul, where our stakeholders can see MRR, ARR, CHURN, and other metrics in real time.
The last dashboard is just a Google Spreadsheet which the Marketing team and I are looking at twice a week. I think it's enough since we work in sprints, and it is just more suitable for us. Moreover, after implementing a feature, we must wait at least a week for numbers to make a meaningful appearance in the dashboards. It may sound too slow for some companies; however, not for us — we don't yet have 10k+ active users per day, so we just have to wait to analyze the results.
Execution: Team OKRs
If you think about company goals you must use OKRs (objectives and key results). They are a goal-setting methodology to help teams set measurable goals. OKRs are frequently set, tracked, and re-evaluated – usually quarterly. The goal is to ensure everyone is going in the same direction, with clear priorities, in a constant rhythm.
My development team doesn't have OKRs. In the marketing team, we have several OKRs for this quarter. When you see both the goal and the progress you're making, you can make better and more optimal choices and accelerate your work.
Execution: Decision Rationales
It is totally accurate that product managers are responsible for determining when decisions need to be made and making the decision-making process as efficient as possible.
Some team members may not understand why we, as product managers, sometimes choose this over that. So that's why our Marketing Lead Lisa Dziuba, is asking us to have rationales available for every hypothesis, with questions like:
- What are we testing?
- Why?
- What do we want to achieve?
- How to measure it?
- Who will lead this?
This way, anyone in the company can read that and understand why we are choosing this decision over everything else.
Execution: Product Wins
Of course, any achievement is a win. But as a founder or product you probably want to build your product faster. When you pick no-code you can save yourself some precious time – that's totally a win. When you are a leader, you also need to support, encourage and do everything you can so your team can earn more knowledge and confidence. And the most important of all, for every achievement, you need to be grateful to your team members because they really matter.
As I told you before, being a product manager or a founder is not an easy job because you always have to keep your finger on the pulse. But there's no need to panic or think that you can’t do it. If you are reading this you definitely can and you will succeed. Just start using these deliverables step by step and you will see the improvements, no need to rush and do everything in one week, start with basics like narrative, product hypotheses, requirements, and then you can add metrics and research. Moreover, I’m glad that we use no-code tools in our day-to-day work.
