Context

As part of an interview challenge for a PM role

Challenge

I was assigned an Epic to deliver a rebranded version of the Design System. So that implied working on:

• Updating existing components with new design tokens (e.g., colors, fonts).
• Ensuring design guidelines reflect the rebrand.
• Accounting for work across all skill sets: designers, engineers, accessibility (a11y) specialists and others.
• Delivering the rebranded design system in 2-week sprints with a structured rollout plan.

Solution

Corporate has decided to announce our rebrand during this summer. They look for a fresh and up-to-date tone of voice in our brands to address younger generations. So the design system should be updated based on the new brand guidelines by June–July.

Approaching this as 5 initiatives:

1. Brand Book Assessment
2. Update Design
3. Update Code
4. Update Documentation
5. Restart Adoption Program

Running those, sometimes in parallel, through 6 stages:

1. Rebrand Kickoff
2. Design
3. Development
4. Integration and QA
5. Pilot and Feedback
6. Rollout and Support

Some examples of the tasks for the team:

Here's the proposal presentation:

Context

I worked for the Digital Transformation department in the Innovation Lab team as their first Product Manager for consultancy projects where I was assigned by percentages to different business units but also to internal initiatives aligned with the corporate's goals.

The real estate team in the retail business unit had their operations in paper and physical storage, using MS Office, MS Outlook and WhatsApp for control and communication. They receive requests from business units to value properties so they could evaluate buying or renting and build a store. 

They saw potential in all the data stored from years, plus the information going on during operational tasks so they could run an algorithm and predict square meter's value per zone. It could reduce at least half operational tasks and costs, besides maximizing assets value knowing where to buy, rent, or sublease.

Challenge

In a couple of weeks, I designed a proposal for the team so they could get buy in from higher management. This took longer than expected, they had never built or operate a digital platform nor product. Moreover, they expected a waterfall full product development. So, MVP, Agile, UX Design and User research were not as valued as "micro-managed code time".

We got 3 objectives from the business:

Besides the MVP Product management, I also managed the project budget: eventually up to US$350k. So I arranged a (non-full-time) Agile team of 1 Data scientist, 1 Data engineer, 2 Data Interns, 2 Product Designer, 2 UX Researchers, and 1 Visual Designer, from our Department. I also interview 6 agencies and hired a Low-Code agency to handle the development, but they worked in Waterfall, which complicated our timeframes.

Solution

I worked with the stakeholders and agreed on 4 releases. Those were planned according to the 3 business goals but as product milestones:

• Alpha: Appraisal system manager for new requests, current appraisals, and appraisers data.
• Beta: Digital archive from 5 years of appraisals
• Gamma: Platform open to appraisers to generate their docs
• Delta: Predictive analysis tool with archive and operational data

After the kick-off, to keep deadlines, we had to work on 4 simultaneous initiatives:

1. Create the web platform with the correct user experience. – Alpha/Gamma front-end features.
2. Digitalize 5 years of PDFs appraisals archive. – Beta data update.
3. Develop the ML predictive model. – Connected to Delta release.
4. Comply IT Security company regulations and get approval from Legal Department to handle users data.

We started in October and Alfa was release in December 2022 (3-months), Beta in February 2023, Gamma in July, and Delta by August.

Alpha – Appraisals management

This was a big research effort. After interviews, we mapped all appraisal's subprocesses to outline platform navigation flows, functionalities, and interactions.

In parallel, I evaluated our technical possibilities considering business needs, the type of information, and user context. So, I researched and tested various Low-code technologies to reduce technical effort and time to market. So I interviewed 6 agencies and hired a Glide Expert Agency: LowCode.

We created a prototype design to test the concept with users and then redesign the scope of features, interface, and interactions.

To match with the waterfall style of the Low-code agency, I used a design–develop by user flows, so progressively we enabled usability tests: Requesters, Appraisers, Real Estate Admin, and the System Admin.

In the second week of December, we invited a dozen appraisers and requesters to test the platform for their main tasks and evaluate the experience. We received ratings around 4/5 for Ease, Reliability, and Platform Understanding. We released these validated features:

• Appraisal requests manager
• Digital appraisals with 40/400 fields – Perfect for informal valuations
• Properties collection
• Appraisers directory
• Users management and visibility permissions
• Publish 100 appraisals from the progress on the digital archive
• Maps with coordinates and images

The Beta update – Loading a 5 years archive

We used Azure Cognitive Services to recoignize content in the 3 PDF formats we received, then Map those fields into tables to export to a Database. Later, those were standardized (cleaned) and passed by manual revision of the most important data (400+ fields).

This was a 4 month effort (February release) to nurture the initial database with 2000 appraisals from 5 states basically. Even these were not really used by the team, they were vital for giving structure to the database and to nurture the predictive model in the following months.

Gamma release – A more robust back-end

Alfa version was way more successful than expected. It even broke the database twice. So this released was replanned to robust our back-end features.

We moved from Secured Spreadsheets in our Sharepoint to native "Glide Big Table" to get better performance, operations robustness and simplifying "Actions" to less complex automations or custom code.

We introduced a new user type: Appraisals agencies. And, enabled 3 new sections: Taxes, Predictive analytics, and Archive. So, the Alfa release had the Beta update with all the 2000 appraisals from the archive, now at July 2023 we offered 7 sections for 5 type of users:

This fully changed users' dynamic. Now Agencies could manage their Appraisers and handle their workload, reducing work for the Real estate Administrators and justifying the charge for use (next year) for agencies to use the system for their own appraisals, properties and users.

And we changed from 1 System Admin to several more to control Taxes (Invoices and payments were ahead next year) and Predictive analytics (Selling access to this section was planned in the next 2 years).

At the end, Delta released the last section:

This was a 6-month development. After some changes from the initial infrastructure, it worked with: Azure Processing (Cognitive Services + Databricks), Storage account, Integration (Data factory) so it could connect to the native tables of our Low-code platform (Glide) as front-end, showing maps with Mapbox API and graphs from MS Power BI.

It offered different types of predictive analysis: By key indicators. Price per square meter and types of surroundings. Besides, Simulations for: Rent vs. Buy, Appreciation projection, and automatic valuation.

Outcome

Today, the process was reduced from 2–5 days to 1–3 days. And the Real state team won't need anymore to outsource communication between valuation requests. Appraisal agencies and independents now spend less than 16 min instead of a couple of hours to fill and create a PDF appraisal.

In August 2023, we registered that everyday 15 new requests were registered on average, since the release in December 2022. We reached 3.7k+ properties from 610+ appraisals by 1100 registered users.

The system will keep all the valued properties data, plus it has preloaded +2000 appraisals of all properties valued since 2017.

And, the ML predictive model transform all data into tables, graphs and interactive maps with zoom and heatmaps, to display 27 Relevant indicators by zone or environment, and a Rent vs Buy calculator with 15 values prediction.

Even these are not accurate, yet. It'll take around 1–2 years of operations to gather enough data to generate national predictions valid for commercial purposes. Or buying appraisals records from other companies –Which was under consideration.

And this platform opened doors to new income from appraisers and agencies to use the system to manage files, besides nurturing the real product to sell: properties value predictions and zone's value estimation.

Lessons learned

Context

I worked for the Digital Transformation department in the Innovation Lab team as their first Product Manager for consultancy projects where I was assigned by percentages to different business units but also to internal initiatives aligned with the corporate's goals.

The team of Procurement solutions, had an initiative to enable a digital platform to offer a catalog of products they dealt with big discounts from corporate's suppliers. After they ran a non-digital pilot with some employees, they got budget assigned from HR of the biggest business unit with two goals: grow to be self-sustaining and produce as much savings as possible for employees. This was not profit-driven.

They planned to release this e-commerce platform to offer those products as a Price club marketplace, under the drop-shipping model while being able to scale to more vendors and users from other business units so they could charge them for the access to this employee benefit.

Challenge

This was the first digital product they had built. They were not technical nor experienced with e-commerce. So, they thought on investing in a robust platform to support future growth, fully customize the front-end and ensure they'll meet any security future concern from corporate.

The initiative had 4 teams, 17 people: Operations, Commercial, Marketing and Customer experience. Besides, an agency as (2) 3rd party developers. And, the cost of operation was estimated above US$200K.

I was assigned to help them refine their CX strategy and reorganize their product development stage so they could meet the intended value proposition while people in operations learned how to product manage a digital solution.

Moreover, after the product release, we faced some problems with the business plan and the platform (Adobe Magento) which was very robust but expensive to customize. For example:

• Having different shopping carts for every vendor's store, in the checkout.
• Handling manually all the weekly purchases to the vendors, customers feedback and notifications.
• Big delivery times, weeks–months for certain products.
• The most attractive discounts (35%) only for bulk purchases or premium items.

Solution

We needed a clear strategy and roadmap. We needed product rituals and artifacts. Product culture was key to put vision down to earth and deliver on time the value proposition: A center for benefits and savings in products, then grow for self-sustaining but not for profit.

After trying different tools, I created a master–PowerPoint–deck. This was updated every month. The vision and year's goals, the last month sales results, a high level strategic roadmap, and one slide per team with their timeline.

Once the roadmap and all team's timelines were clear and aligned, priority stood out and we could release the most essential features for the basic user journey. We leaved the rest for a next version which had to be–user–validated.

In December 2021, we release the version 1 (aka. MVP) with 7 (epic) features:

• Home page with slider of current campaign
• Category pages (i.e. Office supplies, Kitchen accessories, Tools, etc.)
• Catalog dynamic page with Filters and Search
• Product page with details
• Shopping cart and checkout
• Analytics of use and sales
• Backend reports for products, users, orders, and vendors.

After the release pressure, we defined our product metrics to monitor, then Operations team started a weekly results review every Monday – Sales, savings, registered users, logins, average ticket, conversion, etc.

We re-mapped the user journey starting from the log in/sign in process to the payment, we did usability tests with 12 users. And, we found +48 friction points to improve.

Then we reviewed existing alternatives for the layouts, interactions and user flows, benchmarking 11 e-commerce our users liked: Walmart, Elektra, Coppel, Cooking Depot, Mercado Libre, Amazon, Shein, Office Max, HEB, Soriana, Grainger.

During 2022, we achieved released several features based on our findings:

• Home page with banners, stores top products carousels
• Store pages with categories and situations carousels
• Emails with dynamic links to filtered product lists
• Product card with savings displayed
• Product page with savings and store comparison and personalization controls
• Shopping cart with savings displayed
• Checkout process with more payment options
• Backend for automate invoices, delivery tracking, and orders with vendors.

We pushed to ran continuos research as part of every sprint so we could monitor our funnel of 5 stages.

Besides, we inserted quick-surveys pop-ups at strategic moments inside the app to capture customer's feedback at:

• Sign in & Log in
• Home, Search & Product selection
• Payment process
• Confirmation & Waiting for order
• Receiving order
• Use & Feedback

These are some actionable insights:

• We learned some banners with the discount in % instead of $ were more effective, or images of top products instead of brand's logos were more clicked.
• In the pages, we detected users clicks trace and search was situational after seeing a product. So we redesigned the information architecture to show products for situations (Wash the car) inside a category (Cleaning products). This doubled conversion of those items. –We didn't have bundles at that point. We developed those later.
• We detected people valued physical information from the item like a review with pictures, or product images with dimensions in real environments. So we promoted these new features in the roadmap.
• Displaying products by store pages, solved the technical constrain of the shopping carts separated by vendor in the checkout. People were aware from the beginning that they buying in different places, like at the mall.

Outcome

By July 2023, we reached 30 vendors, 2.5k products, 16k registered users, 190k monthly visits, 0.4–3% monthly conversion rate, US$160k+ sales, average ticket of US$200 and average savings of 30%. Besides a catalog with 400+ discount benefits in physical stores.

About customers satisfaction, 3 out of 4 customers (75%) considered this e-commerce helped them saving money when they need to buy something special. This was reflected as 41 pts in NPS, which is above the average NPS of e-commerce brands in 2021 was 37 points, according to Survicate. 

Since this was considered a success, the team got budget for 2 spin-off products to release in 2023 Q4: an internal B2B platform with office supplies items, and a rebranded platform with a niche-curated offer. But, I was only involved as consultant of the team's budget and MVP roadmap strategy, not in the release plan or operations.

Lessons learned

Context

I worked for the Digital Transformation department in the Innovation Lab team as their first Product Manager for consultancy projects where I was assigned by percentages to different business units but also to internal initiatives aligned with the corporate's goals.

In September 2021, my manager's manager proposed an initiative to create an online school, for the different businesses in the corporation, that we could run with courses from the experienced members of our Innovation team.

Challenge

A small team of a Visual designer, the Education leader, and me as the Product Manager had the goal to release a platform and a new product design course by December –3 months.

This product had to compete with online top education like IDEO, IxDF or Kurios because teams normally spend their education budgets on those. It had to offer high-quality learning materials and an education program to keep growing the courses in 3 areas: Customer Experience, Agile Methodologies, and Data Analytics, besides hosting an online community to keep people interested and updated with courses.

Solution

I did some desktop research on the ed-tech industry and our main competitors before I ran a series of workshops with our department's managers to get the vision, and goals we wanted to pursue.

Later, I interviewed 8 potential users to uncover their context and needs. So, I co-created with the team the value proposition we expected to build and worked on a Product proposal brief to get the managers' approval and budget assigned to this initiative.

• This had to serve 2 profiles:
  • The student (user) and The boss (customer)
• Their pain points were:
  • They lose time with low quality or outdated internal training
  • They spend outrageous money to access content from foreign experts
  • They don't have much time or continuos motivation to study
  • They don't have a route or guide to follow what they need to learn
• So, we offered:
  • Courses updated, curtated and produced with the top experts available in our teams.
  • A learning formula: Learn self-paced, share with the community, and practice with expert feedback.
  • Different academies with routes of courses according to skills business units were looking for or needed to improve.
• A community as a multimedia space to discuss and enrich from other people experiences.
• A sistem of point and levels, as gamification first stage.
• Recurrent events to get noticed for more teams and business units

Based on the Product proposal brief, I created a Product roadmap so I could start benchmarking providers and agencies to compare options to build our product. Agencies were so expensive for our MVP needs (>US$50K) so I interviewed 5 Learning Management Systems (LMS) providers to find the best fit for our strategy.

I selected LearnWorlds so we could spend an affordable (US$249) monthly price, while we worked on the content and bureaucracy.

The features that matched our priority were:

• School, academy, and course landing pages
• Student home page with their open courses and progress
• Teacher home page with recent messages or interactions
• Multimedia player for course materials
• Quizzes, exams, and projects to evaluate students
• Analytics of use
• Custom domain and site white label

And some from our next version:

• A community site with groups and messages
• Interactive player for custom video interactions
• Certificate generator (To avoid operational work)
• Capacity for multiple languages (In case English or Portuguese were needed)
• SSO for login (In case business units expressed access concerns)

In the following weeks, the team worked on the new brand for the school, the platform customization, the first course production, strategy meetings about the education style, and dealing with IT Security and Legal teams that were not familiar with MVPs or experiments.

Based on the learning process I researched: Learn self-paced, share with the community, and practice with expert feedback; I directed the first course of someone whose work in the UX Community I deeply admire: Adrian Solca.

I discussed with him the goal and topics of the course. So he could prepare the course materials and record himself for the video classes. Later, the visual designer created the final polished materials for the students and I uploaded everything to the platform and prepared the quizzes or exams for each unit.

The course had 6 units, one every week. We had to produce the materials 2 weeks in advance until we finished all the content. Every week we hosted a 1-2 hour call with Adrian so they could discuss the materials or have a review.

By the end of the 6 weeks, the 17 students had a project in teams where they pitched the products they had designed. I created a scorecard and invited some judges from real positions in the company so the students could receive real feedback from people who evaluate MVPs, initiatives, and budgets every day.

Outcome

We launched the MVP and hosted the first cohort of a Product Design Bootcamp (6 weeks program) which certified 17 people from operations roles who were facing new digital projects at their jobs.

So December 2021 closed with 2 bootcamps, 53 active students with 146 hours of study (tracked in the platform), 43 video classes (6 hours), 168+ community posts, and 17 people got a certification of completion.

The education leader was promoted to manager and could hire 2 members on her team to get an independent budget and freedom to expand this model to more courses, academies, and custom events.

In 2022, it got 5 academies with 1–4 courses each, 2007 students mostly from 2 business units, and 850 participants in events. It received an NPS of 85% and sold 10,000 spots for the upcoming 2023 in a customized product version.

We received US$350–700 per student/course access and at least US$100K in passive income for giving access to the community.

By 2023, our school had reached 13 courses (+5 in a Portuguese version) with 14,497 paid courses access (15% of students completed at least a course) from 6 business units, 2400 students as part of the online community, and 1200 participated in that year's events.

Lessons learned

“I operate a shipment forwarding business in Hong Kong. Today, our business is completely manual and operates on paper and WhatsApp. I want a mobile application for my team and our customers to use.

Our customers get multiple packages, like let’s say 5 packages they purchase in Hong Kong. They’ll ship those all to our warehouse. We’ll package those into a single box or bag and then ship those to the customer wherever they live, like Canada or Australia.

It’s really time consuming to get the details of all of the customers packages like the shipping/tracking information and then make sure we have all of their packages before we consolidate and ship it out.

After we ship it out, they’re always asking us for status updates and it’s really time consuming to constantly be providing their shipping information and updates.”

🕵️‍♂️ Clarifying questions

I replied the email with some questions to get the business context and need.

I received a Loom link to a 5-min video answer. Here's the script:

After working on the initial assumptions, I sent to the management team an email with my overview of the customer and product, so I could ensure people and resources. Besides, I included a Draft PRD for more details to the Technical lead and work on the details later:

🤷‍♂️ Initial assumptions

In order to create a first proposal to discuss later in a call with the customer, some assumptions were made from the email and the video answer.

I tried to figure out the key interactions among users and after some desktop research I drafted the user personas and their master flow.

📑 The solution proposal

Here's the proposal presentation for a non-technical audience were I explain the thinking behind the solution to their business and customers needs. These slides include:

• The problem
  • How to make sure we have all customer’s packages into the consolidated package?
  • How to show customers the updated information about package status and shipment progress?
• The audience
  • Buyers, Customer service agents, and Operations specialists.
• The solution to build
  • Information architecture
  • Wireframe
• Next steps
  • What's included, Price tiers, and Timeline.

Every year, I take online courses, listen to podcast, read and highlight books. Besides, I take notes to use later in my job and personal projects. But it's hard to study and memorize every insightful quote, game-changer tip, master-mind artifact or ultimate infographic I'd found.

Information overload has become a daily issue due to mature mobile devices and well-trained social media. We as technical and knowledge workers need a customizable personal system to save, curate and retrieve information when we need it the most according to our daily day.

In 2021 I met the tools to build a "Second brain", this concept from Thiago Forte in his legendary course "Building a second brain (BASB)" was a big upgrade to my life. So, every year I update this post with my findings and tools about implement this "Second brain" philosophy in my job and personal life.

2021 / 2022 / 2023 / 2024 / 2025

2025

It's February 2025, and here's my update. Last year was a big change on how I deal with information and digital places. I adopted a more robust and complex app for notes and thinking: Obsidian. This has been a step forward from an Architect mind-shaped to adopt a "Gardener mind-shape". So, these are my new tools so far:

• Web browsing: Arc
• Reading and highlighting books: Kindle
• Reading and highlighting websites: Reader, by Readwise
• Visual notes: Excalidraw
• Taking notes and project management: Obsidian
• Calendar: Google Calendar
• Files storage: iCloud
• Backup: Google Drive

2024

In 2024's early days, my Second Brain is now refined by actionability or reference using a couple of questions:

About this thought or urgency I feel... is it something I need to do soon or not?

• a) Do I know when is the best moment to do it?
  – Action: Task or Event
• b) Do I want to keep it as-is or I just need an specific piece of it?
  – Reference: Storage or Notes

So far this year, these are my tools:

• Web browsing: Arc
• Reading and highlighting books: Kindle
• Reading and highlighting websites: Reader, by Readwise
• Podcasts with AI: Snipd
• Extract, convert and sync highlights to notes: Readwise
• Taking notes and voice-notes: Bear 2
• Managing projects and tasks: Things 3
• Visual projects workspace: Miro
• Calendar: Notion Calendar (prev. Cron)
• Files storage: iCloud (Projects, Areas) / Google Drive (Resources, Archive)
• Backup: 1TB Portable SSD

2023

So, in 2023, as soon as I could, I signed for the premium "Building a Second Brain Cohort (18th) Course", and it blowed my mind. I finally was able to apply the CODE method: Capture, Organize, Distill and Express. Since college I didn't take so many personal and technical notes. And my stack of apps grew in complexity and ROI:

• Web browsing: Arc
• Reading and highlighting books: Kindle
• Reading and highlighting websites: Reader, by Readwise
• Listening websites: Speechify
• Extract, convert and sync highlights to notes: Readwise
• Taking notes and voice-notes: Bear 2
• Managing projects and tasks: Things 3
• Calendar: Google calendar (with Appointments page)
• Files storage: iCloud (Projects, Areas) / Google Drive (Resources, Archive)
• Backup: 1TB Portable SSD

2022

In 2022, I pre-ordered and read the BASB book and It changed completely my digital life. I started using the PARA formula: Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archive. PARA was my organization criteria for my computer's folders and files, later in my Google Drive, and my Notion pages, even my email inbox, and browser bookmarks were now categorized by "actionability".

2021

In 2021 I met the tools to build a "Second brain", this concept from Thiago Forte in his legendary course "Building a second brain (BASB)" was a big upgrade in my life. So I wrote about it and built the first version with these apps:

• Reading and highlighting books: Kindle
• Reading and highlighting websites: Pocket
• Extract, convert and sync highlights to notes: Readwise
• Writing notes: Notion
• Managing projects and tasks: Notion
• Database of notes: Notion
• Files storage: Google Drive

This combo was great to keep consuming content and make it findable in one-stop-shop: Notion. I thought that was the corner stone to revisit my notes, write more insightful posts in blog and share more clever stuff in social media.

In August 2023, I took the Building a Second Brain (18th) cohort, created by Thiago Forte. It has been a game-changer on how I approach any piece of information. In a lesson we learned about Richard Feynman and his simple but original method to discover solutions to physics and humankind problems: The 12-favorite problems list.

Basically, you just have to list all those problems that come and go on your mind during the day, week, or even years. He suggested always carrying that list with you so that anytime you find something useful you take note and eventually you come to find unseen connections among those problems and particular solutions thanks to the holistic approach and constant recall of the list.

2025

In February 2025, I refined my list and changed from a numbered to a bullet list to avoid the notion of hierarchy and did not force me to have 12 exactly, less is ok too.

• How to apply personalized artificial intelligence tools to my daily day work to achieve more impact in less time?
• How to build product strategies for the main business models?
• How to achieve mastery in systems thinking and first principles thinking?
• How to manufacture and share a mindset so people use it?
• How to manage personal energy instead of just tasks and time management?
• How to identify and track a vision, goals and metrics so a team make them real in healthy terms?
• How to stay physically, mentally and spiritually healthy with the less friction at any day?
• How to interact with data, information and knowledge to frequently get my most innovative and quality work?
• How to identify and balance the wu wei (non-doing / no-hacer)?

2023 - 2024

In my case, I made this list back in August 2023, and I pretend to keep it updated here as much as privacy allows me.

1. (very personal)
2. (very personal)
3. What’s the best way for someone to learning how to learn?
4. How to learn to unlearn so you can relearn a topic, skill or relationship?
5. How to find the wu wei (non-doing / no-hacer) on each scenario and balance that with the acurate action?
6. How to make someone learn a Mindset?
7. How to manage energy instead of time?
8. How to make people frame a vision and goals effectively?
9. How to manage personal knowledge to push the creative process and create more often?
10. How to plan, track and manage my career?
11. What to do to dissolve mental fog and apathy?
12. How to keep every space clean with less effort?

...

How to identify more of your favorite questions

You can try different "prompts", just as in journaling techniques. Start with these:

–What were you obsessed with as a child or teenager? (Ask your parents or caregivers)
–What are the longest-running hobbies you’ve had in your life?
–What common themes or patterns do you notice emerging in your life repeatedly?
–What kinds of stories, art, or music give you goosebumps, make your hair stand up, or move you to tears?
–What pursuits that others consider challenging do you find fun and engaging?
–What do you find your mind wandering to in the in-between moments of your day?
–If you could wave a magic wand and have the ultimate answer to any question, what question would it be?
–If you could travel to the future and ask your future self anything, what would it be?
What would you ask your past self?
–If you read all the books and took all the courses you wanted to, what question would you like to have answered after all that?
–What are your most pressing problems currently?

Here's the list I'm using to write and keep working on more questions:

• How can I…?
• How might we…?
• How can my organization…?
• How can I help others to…?
• How does X relate to Y?
• How do I…?
• What does it look like to…?
• What would be possible if…?
• What do I want with…?
• What would I do if…?
• What would happen if…?
• What would have to be true to…?

All these suggestions come from Thiago's work so if you're interested in learning more, go visit Thiago's post where he explain in detail how to get started on your own 12 favorite problems.

After testing different options as Squarespace–review soon, webflow, Substack, Medium and my self-made website using JAMstack. Today I started using this so called “platform for writers”.

I realized most of my content is in written format. And I don’t need anymore to have so much flexibility in the frontend. Actually, that has become a creative excuse.

Now as PM, I can left behind the days of so much –unnecessary – effort to communicate the value of UX design as my “personal portfolio, and focused more on content about products, as those complex living entities that shape our daily days.

So, I’m updating my website updates log’ post later. And let’s see how this website/blog evolves as my new thinking garden or second Brain.

Contexto

Los usuarios no bancarizados buscan una forma confiable de almacenar su dinero fuera del contexto de un "banco". Necesitan una forma segura de enviar dinero a sus amigos bancarizados y no bancarizados por igual.

México tiene una gran comunidad no bancarizada que lucha por enviarse dinero entre ellos con regularidad. Este nuevo producto (nombre en clave: PagAhora) presenta una nueva billetera móvil que facilita los pagos p2p de una institución que tiene licencia.

Esta tiene la propuesta de conectar a la población bancarizada y no bancarizada, almacenar dinero en un lugar de confianza, recibir pagos de los clientes, y evitar incomodidades.

Se lanzó un piloto en Enero 2021 en Queretaro.

Propuesta presentada

PagAhora – Challenge

Propuesta de solución, incluye:
– Estrategia
– Investigación y análisis
– Diseño de solución
– Riesgos

Ir a la propuesta

Recibí por mail un párrafo explicando el reto para Product Manager:

Somos una PropTech que centraliza la gestión de vivienda vertical para los administradores y digitaliza los cobros a inquilinos. Ahora queremos ofrecer un mercado de servicios y productos a domicilio, este marketplace ofrecería a los vecinos servicios especializados para el hogar (reparaciones, asesorías, etc.) y artículos que la administración compre al mayoreo y así aprovechen un precio por volumen usando nuestra plataforma.

Solución

Un par de días después, presente una propuesta en un sitio hecho en Notion con los detalles de la estrategia de producto y roadmap.

Mercadito – Propuesta

Propuesta de solución, incluye:
– Estrategia
– Investigación y análisis
– Roadmap de la solución
– Riesgos

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TL;DR: Save time and discussions by creating a creative strategy brief. Share it and present it on every meeting so teams can align on goals, users, scenarios and constraints. Framework based on Jared Spool’s UIE post. Free and editable template in My resources page.

Meetings are a pain. They usually waste time on the lack of an agenda and unexpected outcomes. And that’s because teams are not aligned. But you can lead the product development, design reviews or stakeholders presentations by using a creative strategy brief document.

Follow the next step-by-step guide in a shared document with your teams, or duplicate my free template.

Goals

List the business goals or product goals as shared by management. Or at least call the team and answer:

• Why are we building this product?
• What metrics do we expect to accomplish?
• What’s the challenge to overcome?

Give format to those answers by using SMART goals. Here’s a notion template by @pdct.tips

Users

Describe the target audience for your product. If you don’t have a research team, try interviewing stakeholders to answer:

• Who are the people that normally use the product?
• Are they field experts? Or newbies? Recurrent or rare visitors?
• Why do they buy the product or service?
• Which other ways do they find to satisfy their needs?

Maybe stakeholders won’t have all the answers, but they can refer you to the Support or Analytics teams. They will find creative ways to get you those answers.

Of course you can build Personas for this step, but that’s an entire project. In case you want, here’s a case study about how I introduced Personas in a big corporation’s environment.

Scenarios

Describe where will the product or service be used by the user. And elaborate more on the How they use it. It helps to end up discussions on meaningless features or unproductive perfectionism.

If you want to create more formal User Scenarios, you can read the Usability.gov method’s guide.

Constraints

Detail the project’s technical limitations on:

• The technology
• Design principles
• Time schedule
• Project’s budget and
• Member’s ownership.

Those are consideration to deliver the desired experience within the terms of the teams’ processes.

Shorter version, no time? Ok, then identify the Jobs To Be Done

JTBD are short sentences about the problems your product solves.

“The process of reaching an objective under given circumstances”. – The JTBD Playbook by Jim Kalbach

Remember, people don’t buy subscriptions or objects. They buy a solution for a problem or desire. So clarify what are the Jobs-to-be-done and shrink all the previous points to make teams focus on the most important outcomes.

You can find a more detailed guide for writing those in Jim’s Blog.

All these points may sound a very complex task that could take weeks to complete. And it normally is. But the crucial point here is producing alignment. So download the gDocs template from my free resources page, fill as possible the fields, and set a meeting with teams involved to complete the document.

Even if simple, it may be a time-saver because it produces a shared document where every team is listened and committed to a specific outcome, instead of scheduling sync meetings to discuss personal beliefs and tastes.

• Every opinion is valid
• It’s not personal. Focus on facts, not blaming someone.
• Open-minded listening to detect opportunities

2. Choose the questions template for a better perspective

• Quick retrospectives define the team’s key focuses of attention
• Mad, Sad, Glad format to understand your team’s emotional health and consider changes
• Start, Stop, Continue template to focus the team on new habits by defining what to do or don’t
• Sailboat framework helps to define the vision for the team and anticipate problems ahead
• The 4 L’s look at the current situation from a factual perspective

3. Schedule action items with owners and follow-up dates

They will help as calendar remainders and keep track on people and tasks progress.

More at:

7 retrospective templates we love and use at Miro — MiroBlog

Side-projects are never a priority. Do you remember those internal tools, book clubs, podcasts, blogs or health routines that were never done?

After those energetic starts, use these 4 steps to prepare a shared-place and ensure progress:

1. Create a single-source-of-truth for knowledge and activities. Use a Wiki and Kanban apps.
2. Set recurrent reviews and block execution times. Use a shared calendar and a task focus app.
3. Prepare agendas with expected outcome and track tasks with a person and deadline assigned.
4. Publish public meeting minutes so everyone sync on agreements and action items. They could be an email, wiki post or card in the Kanban board.
5. Build relationships instead of transactions and ensure points of contact per topic. Use a simple personal CRM and schedule 1:1s with every person in your team.

Notion has a wide community with tips and free templates for every step:

Discover new and productive templates — NotionPages.com

Collaboration and communication issues are present at every company. What makes different your team from Intel, Google or Tesla teams is having a continual improvement process.

After contrasting Lean vs Agile vs Design Thinking, here’s how Jeff Gothelf’s book explains it:

You must identify and choose the specific elements of each methodology that work well for your teams, so you can focus on effective collaboration and continuous improvements to satisfy your user needs.

He recommends to balance the product research and delivery. So teams can learn while testing and releasing features. But keep in mind:

• Working in short cycles
• Hold regular retrospectives
• Put the customer at the center of everything
• Less research work but more often
• Putting the research work in the backlog
• Radical transparency in the process an metrics

Here’s the book:

Lean vs Agile vs Design Thinking — Amazon.com

Even if you are an active reader, you forget those mind-blowing insights from the book you read 2 weeks ago. And that’s ok.

The best way to learn is teaching. So share while you learn. You must stop collecting and start connecting knowledge. That will feed your creativity, produce original content, and help more beginners.

You can create your own system, instead of worrying about physical or digital notes, flashcards and spaced repetition.

Readwise imports your notes from Kindle, notebooks and many mobile apps. It schedules email reviews of your highlights and notes. Besides, it exports them to Notion and other formats.

Once a week in Notion, you can search and play with your exported notes. But duplicate this Ali Abdaal’s template and you will auto-generate articles while reflecting on the teachings of every book or article you’ve read.