The «product manager» is a new profession, and many companies don't even know about this. However, in terms of importance, such a specialist can be compared with the CEO and is necessary for any large business that is interested in serious profits. Farid Gazizov is a successful product manager (product head) with twenty years of experience in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia, and the United States markets. He knows the specifics of working both with his own products and with others - in third-party companies.
Farid was first engaged in product development for his startups - he made a semi-automatic trading platform, a mobile application, and a coupon service website, and also a price aggregator. At the same time, he worked as a product manager in the companies «Rive Gauche», «Wild Orchid», «Ulmart», for which he created mobile applications. Among Farid's recent successful cases is working on the virality of the application (introducing count-down (instant gratification) before receiving a bonus) in the Real-Time Group, which increased engagement by three times. As well as creating tools (monitoring specific competitors, the total number of offers on the market, the average price on the market, the best price on the market) to analyze the competitive environment, which allowed to increase the profitability of objects by 2.5 times for DoubleYourRentalProfit.
And for «Ulmart», Farid solved the problem of «abandoned carts»: about 85% of users did not complete the order. We had to analyze the reasons and divide them into groups. The biggest problem was a distraction (73%). To overcome this, we implemented sending a reminder letter that the purchase is not finished. This reduced the figure to 61% - a significant increase for a large retailer. We also added reminder emails with relevant products to people who were looking for something on the site. And to increase the efficiency of the idea, we created an algorithm for selecting relevant products and offered a discount on them.
In addition, as a product manager, Farid currently leads two major projects in Russia and the United States. The first is «Home Delivery Service»: a price aggregator that allows the user to collect a food basket and see how much it will cost in different networks. The second project is «Double Your Rental Profit»: a platform that increases the return on investment in short-term rentals. Farid gives several recommendations to product managers on working effectively and overcoming the difficulties that inevitably arise.
If a product manager wants to quickly move up the career ladder and do his job really well, they need technical knowledge - for example, the basics of programming languages. They are very helpful in the work. It is not necessary to complete a technical specialty at a university, but it is necessary to get a basic set of information on the topic. Farid says that he did not receive a technical education, but if he were starting over now, this would be the first step on his way to mastering the specialty of a product manager.
Also, a good product manager must have business development skills and understand the product's business model and unit economics. Often he has to make a so-called «pivot» - a turn of the product in the other direction after the product manager has already tried everything he could, but the unit economics of the product does not converge. So, for example, there is a reversal from B2C to B2B.
«I had a lot of such pivots», - says Farid. - «I developed a mobile loyalty program based on an application instead of plastic discount cards. Difficulties regularly appeared, sometimes with users, then with entrepreneurs, but I added the functionality of adding my checks to the application, and it greatly interested users. I developed my own OCR for recognizing checks and our algorithm became the first in the Russian market for the stream recognition of BTL-promo checks in large volumes. The biggest promo that we conducted was the Alpen Gold brand campaign, we received up to 10 thousand checks per day and almost 1 million as part of the promotion (the average for the Russian Federation is up to 1000 checks for the entire campaign period). There were many mentions in the media about the campaign, we became the largest check processors in the Russian Federation and partners of the largest BTL agencies».
But in addition to education, two key skills are important. The first is an open mind, a willingness and desire to ask a lot of questions, to show curiosity. «I have asked myself many times how new ideas are born», - says Farid. - «And I realized that when a few old ideas collided. And the more you know, the faster this" "clas"" will happen, which will be decisive». The second skill, related to the first, is the ability to go beyond, not limit yourself to what you already have, and look at the situation as if there is no horizon and the possibilities are endless.
Another important rule regarding working in a company is that the product manager must actively interact with all specialists and departments. He can't just sit in his seat and deal with a conditional application because it's the same as driving a car and not paying attention to road signs and markings. «The deeper you interact with other departments, the better the product you can create», - Farid says. - «If you create a product without interaction with marketing, then buying traffic can be expensive, the unit economics and business model will fall apart».
Therefore, the more closely you work with the departments, the better the product turns out. We had an interesting example of interaction between marketing and product development when developing a price aggregator with cashback functionality for a purchase receipt. The marketing team--after conducting tests on the purchase of traffic--reported that to buy traffic and enter the market positioning itself as a price comparison service, it will cost us from 50 rubles per installation, and we can buy traffic for cashback at a price of 6-10 rubles per installation. Marketing expenses are the biggest expenses when promoting any B2C product. If we can buy traffic five times cheaper, even going into the market, on the other hand, this is a great achievement».
It is impossible to avoid problems in working on the product, no matter how you debug the processes. To maintain high team efficiency, it is convenient to use the Eisenhower Matrix, where tasks are divided into four types and placed in four squares: important and urgent, important and non-urgent, unimportant and urgent, unimportant and non-urgent. «But we also introduced a feature describing the resources required», - Farid adds. - Let's say it may be an important and urgent task, but it will take the entire team three days to solve. Or the task is not important and urgent, but it takes 15 minutes of work for two people. Then, we can skip the second one forward».
But the main thing that Farid advises you always to remember: a product manager is an experimenter who constantly tests, invents, and checks something. He always works with hypotheses - he has tested one, moves on to the next as no one can know what the audience wants until this «something» is tested. «A good product manager builds hypotheses, prioritizes hypotheses, says: «Most likely, this hypothesis may or may not work. And to come up with hypotheses, you should be open-minded, come up with crazy ideas. And remember that there is no failed experiment - there is the knowledge gained. And they always have value».
