Huynh Product

What does a PO do?

Before you get to know anything about Scrum & Agile and stuffs, you should be clarify on the Product management job. This is for those who are new to this interesting career path.

Let’s take a simple example first so our newbies can resonate with the job. Let’s say you want to start a new business. There would be a lot of things going on before you can have the first customer, including:

Drawing the big picture
Doing some research on which industry to dive into. You may are in mind that you want to sell food or clothings. But are you sure that these industry are beneficial? Are they aligned with your values and advantages? ➔ So you will need to identify what to build first
You also want to know who is your customer, why they will buy your products, etc
Next, you has to find a place for the store/place so you can reach your customers
Now let’s pay more attention to the detail
How to design/decorate your shop
How to hire and manage the employees
What to do in the first month
What are the targets for this month?
And many more
After that, let’s get the customer feedback and improve the shop overtime
We need to make sure that the shop is heading to the right direction by getting feedback from the users, looking at the revenue, profit,…
From these data, we can have some initiatives to improve the shop over and over to gain more customer and increase benefit

Above is just a very short and simplified example. It is very similar to a product management job. A Product Owner (PO) is going to work on a software/application, where he also has to find out the big picture, the detail and customer of it. Of course, in a big company, there will be a lot of supporting teams for researching, tracking, designing, developing,… but the PO must have the general overview of everything. That’s why you might read or hear they say the PO is the mini CEO of that product.

Real examples

Let’s take a look at some real PO job descriptions. I believe this is the most interesting source of information. Please note that the PO job description and requirements vary significantly depending on product stage, industry, company size,…

Momo – A popular e-wallet in Vietnam

Job description

Identify user needs and market dynamics, and use these to inform the strategic direction.
Create simple, intuitive yet efficient user experiences (primarily mobile) that make customers smile by guiding designers
Gather relevant data and conduct product s develop and manage project trackers, timelines, and lead cross functional groups to deliver on project objectives.
Communicate with cross-functional teams (Business Unit, IT) and work with go-to market stakeholders to launch features.
Launch new products and features, test their performance, measure features and iterate quickly

Requirement

2-4 year experience on product executive position
Good documentation and presentation skills
Able to read and design in UML language, familiar with Use-cases diagram and Sequence Diagram
Able to understand and design a Relation Entity Diagram
Able to use data to make design decisions for revamping the experience of your product
Technical knowledge is a plus

VNG – The top Internet Company in Vietnam

Job description

Work with different team/ business unit such as Product, Dev, QC, Architect, Data.
Leading business improvement, transformation of one or more projects
Elicit requirements so when there are business changes, be able to know what is required business do differently and standardize the process
Communicate iteration priorities, feature sets, roadmaps, and stakeholder feedback to a variety of different stakeholders and executives.
Engage, propose and discuss with the product team for solution and the status of a project as well as constantly ensure product requirements are understood by the development team
Produce relevant documentation and keep them timely updated and transparent with the team
Assess existing processes or exploring market, competitors to identify redesign or enhancement opportunities to deliver improved productivity of efficiency to the business
Apply strong Business Analysis skills and methodologies to ensure that what is produced is aligned and value maximized for our users
Support and review the testing scenarios, test data and defects verification throughout the delivery
Provide reporting to executive leader

Requirements

At least 3 years of experience as a Technical Business Analyst or Product Owner with highly developed Technical Analysis skills
Bachelor’s degree in a CS, IS, IT field
Working knowledge of technical concepts (e.g user interfaces, API, databases) and dealing with technical stakeholders
Very good critical thinking, “dare to speak”, provide consulting to business
Strong problem solving and trouble shooting skills, with detail-oriented mindset
Advanced skills in using suitable tool for business modeling, drawing business and technical flows/ diagrams, creating mockups/ wireframe/ prototypes, etc.
Good skill in Elicitation and Requirement analysis & documentation with a high-level focus on details
Excellent document writing skill
Experience in the UI/UX and UX writing or understanding of user-centric mindset managing both web & mobile applications

Microsoft

Responsibilities

Subject Matter Expert: Gain deep understanding of Microsoft Defender for Cloud product features, capabilities, and priorities to be a trusted advisor to customers and product engineering. Use your cloud security skills to improve our Microsoft Defender security products/services, help customers get and stay secure by helping them with deploying our security solutions.
Advocate for our customers: Capture the voice of the customers and synthesize quantitative and qualitative feedback into actionable recommendations in a prioritized manner. Relentlessly champion customer voice to engineering teams and be a change agent to develop innovative ways to handle customer scenarios and resolve complex issues.
Practice Microsoft Culture: Growth mindset, One Microsoft, and Customer Obsessed, and Diverse and inclusive. Collaborate and work with a global high performing team to help customers learn and deploy our Defender for Cloud security product, to educate Microsoft field and third-party partners, and identify technical blockers and gather feature requests and share them with product teams.
Drive Objectives and Key Results. Own and drive key results to enable the services to achieve business objectives. Collaborate with stakeholders to define product specific business objectives and rationalize, prioritize, and execute tasks to successfully achieve goals.
Effectively communicate with quantitative and qualitative data to stakeholders across Microsoft in business reviews.
Partner Development: Collaborate across Security CxE, Microsoft Field cybersecurity and third-party Partners in supporting skills transfers across our Microsoft Partners ecosystem to empower our customers, and drive scalability. Quality documentation and effectively educate others about Cloud Security solutions both in internal and external events (Executive Briefing Center – EBC, Webinars, conferences).