Role: Product Management Intern

Responsibility: Launched a brand new SuperWorld website and video to help our users better understand what SuperWorld is about.

Duration: August ~ December 2020, 5 months

Team Members: Shikhar Sharma (PM), Hanh Dang (Design), Sejin Park (Design), Rui Duan (Design), Elina Shelest (Development), Vinay Chaudhari (Development), Vraj Patel (Development), Chau Nguyen (Development)

Subject Matter Experts: Hrish Lotlikar (Co-Founder & CEO), Tyler Smith (Content Director), Deeksha Dasari (Project Manager), Lucie Bole (Design Lead)

Catalog

• The Challenge

• Goal

• Outcome

• Process

• Reflection

• To launch a brand new SuperWorld domain website from scratch.

• To publish an introduction video about SuperWorld.

• To gain users/tractions.

• To help the users understand what SuperWorld is about.

• To make sure the users stay on the website.

• To convert the users into buying the virtual real estate and become part of the SuperWorld.
  

SuperWorld Website

• Gather Information

• Write User Stories

• Prioritize Tasks

• Write Tickets

• Sprint Planning Meeting

• Daily Stand Up Meeting

• Design Session

• Weekly Check-in

Before I started any task and assigned the task to my team, I would gather the information to help the team. I accomplished this by discussing with the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to understand their needs and particular feature requirements. Doing this helped me know more about the feature and SMEs' needs for this specific feature. Most importantly, it gave me pathways to prepare the materials for my team. I gathered the information that I needed for my team by talking to the SMEs, or they would lead me to other people that can help me further.

Once I understand the feature and its specific details, I would document all the specific requirements into a user story. A user story consisted of its description, objective, feature, user flow, assumptions/constraints, acceptance criteria, test criteria, and technical specification if applicable. All the user stories were stored and managed in our product backlog.

Since there are many features that the SMEs wanted, I have to prioritize the tasks that I assigned to the team. I prioritized tasks by two criteria. The first one is the importance of the feature. I determined the feature's importance by estimating how this particular feature will impact our product and how long it will take to implement this feature. The second one is the team’s ability to finish the tasks on time. Since we are running a one week sprint, I have to give the team tasks to finish in one week and not overwhelming them. I determined this by trial and error. I started giving the team small tasks to estimate their ability to complete tasks, then gradually added more tasks for them to finish. Doing this helped me understand their ability to finish tasks on time to optimize our team's efficiency.

Once I finished prioritizing the team's tasks to work for that particular sprint, I would write the tickets for those tasks and attach detailed user stories to the Trello board. Using the Trello board and the tickets helped me understand how our team is doing and our current progress.

During the sprint planning meeting, I would first go over the tasks that I want the team to work on this sprint by going over the tickets and the user stories. Then, I would make sure the team understands what we are doing by allowing them to ask questions. Finally, I would ask for anyone on the team to take on the tasks. I would make sure everyone on the team has tasks to do to optimize our team’s efficiency. Before the meeting ended, I would recap the team’s assignments and make sure everyone knows what they are doing.

Our team has created a daily stand-up Slack channel for everyone to check-in. Team members would write what they were doing yesterday, what they are doing today, and any blockers in their ways. Daily stand up channel helped the team understand what everyone is doing and any problems or blockers that need to be solved.

Every Monday and Friday, our team would have a design session for everyone to join. The purpose of the design session is to let everyone on the team provide feedback on the design, and designers can make changes on the spot. Our lead designer, Lucie, hosted the design session. She would provide most of the feedback, and everyone on the team can give input as well. Design sessions helped the team understand our current design and provided everyone with a space to give feedback.

Every Thursday, we will have a weekly check-in meeting with other teams. The weekly check-in aimed to help the other product teams understand what our team is currently doing and vice versa. It is an excellent opportunity for us to understand the direction of our company is heading.

Over these five months as a product manager at SuperWorld has taught me how to launch a product from scratch. The most valuable lesson that I learned from this experience is how to work and communicate with people in the work environment. Especially when working with people that disagree with me. I learned to understand their perspective by having conversations to discuss our views, reach a mutual agreement, and adopt their feedback. As a product manager, I have to gather information and input from the team and the SMEs. I learned how to prioritize feedback to maintain our product timeline. When working as a product manager, I think of myself as a distributor who gathers all the necessary information and delivers them to the team to successfully produce the product. I understand that I haven’t work with the users and data analysis as I wanted to. These are something that I wish and look forward to working on in my next position.