Practical Product Management Verification

• Product Execution

  Demonstrated

  She has practical experience taking product ideas through implementation and working with customer requirements. Her ownership, enthusiasm, and ability to move initiatives forward are clear strengths. She is comfortable translating identified needs into concrete product work.

• Product Management

  Partial

  Hasmik has hands-on experience working on multiple small-to-medium products and demonstrates good ownership and enthusiasm. However, her current approach is more focused on execution and responding to customer needs than on independently making product decisions based on validated problems, market opportunities, and evidence. She shows good potential but would benefit from structured mentorship to develop broader product-management judgment.

• Product Strategy

  Partial

  She can identify opportunities based on existing product performance and consider extending a successful solution to a new market. However, her reasoning does not yet go far enough into market needs, customer segments, competitive differentiation, or why customers would choose the product over alternatives. She would benefit from a more structured approach to evaluating opportunities and defining product value.

• Product Discovery

  Partial

  She understands customer needs, but does not yet consistently turn them into clearly defined product problems and explore how the product could address them. Her approach tends to focus on helping clients solve issues directly rather than identifying scalable product solutions to the underlying problem. She needs to understand what is the problem to solve, what is the best solution for that particular scenario, how the solution can be done through the product created.

• Product Roadmap

  Partial

  She has experience working across multiple product initiatives, but there was limited evidence of structured prioritization based on business impact, customer value, or measurable outcomes. Her experience appears stronger in delivering initiatives than in determining what should be prioritized next and why.

• Product-Market Fit

  Partial

  She has not yet demonstrated a strong approach to understanding where the product works, where it doesn't, and why. She tends to assess product success more at a general level rather than analysing differences across customer segments, markets, and use cases to identify where the product creates the most value.

Hasmik's goal for the session was to understand where she stands now, including her strong and weak points, and to discuss product management. On the practical side, the session covered a quiz-based recommendation product that performed well in its first channel and was then replicated for a new market. Strategy: The decision to take the product to a new market was based on its strong results in the first one: it worked there, so repeating it seemed the natural next step. When the discussion moved to why partners would choose the product, the main answer was the quality of customer support. Where to develop: Good results in one market are a strong reason to look at another, but they don't yet show the new market needs the same thing. Before deciding, it helps to ask: - Who exactly are the customers in the new market, and do they have the same problem? - What do they use today, and why would they switch? - What does the product do better than the alternatives? Also, before implementation, set strong achievable metrics for the measurable result, for example "with this product partners will increase quiz completion by X%." === Discovery and data: When asked how the quiz creation process could be improved, her first ideas were about support helping partners set up their quizzes, and the difference in results was explained mainly by partner-configured content. Usage data and a comparison between the two groups did not come up. With further discussion, she arrived at the idea of tips and guidance for partners. Where to develop: When asked how to improve quiz creation, start from the problem rather than from support: "many partners get low quiz completion." Check the data for why, then look for a change inside the creation flow that helps every partner at once, since helping them one at a time doesn't scale. Tips are a good start. Templates, recommended question sets, or a built-in warning when a quiz is likely to underperform would take it further. === Execution: Hasmik described her products with a lot of concrete detail, from the first idea through to delivery. Her ownership and energy were obvious throughout the conversation. === Roadmap: Most of her examples were about delivering work the team had already decided on. We didn't spend much time on how she chooses what to build next or how she weighs one option against another, so I can't say much about that side yet. === Product-Market Fit: When the quiz worked for 100 of 300 partners and poorly for the other 200, the gap was explained mainly by partner-configured content. Which partners the product fits best, and what the strong group has in common, was not explored. The move to a new market was similarly based on success in the first, without checking thoroughly whether the new market has the same needs. Where to develop: Treat product-market fit as a question of where the product works, not whether it works. Start with the 100 vs. 200 split: profile each group by segment, market, company size, quiz setup, and usage. What the 100 have in common is your ideal customer profile (ICP). Some of the 200 may simply be a poor fit, and finding that out is useful, because it tells you where not to spend effort. Before entering a new market, check whether its customers look like the 100 or the 200, and set a target metric, such as quiz completion rate, that a pilot must reach before you scale. === Overall: She was open and engaged, and she wanted to understand where to improve. We also talked about how project and product management differ, and which direction she prefers. She delivers well today, and the main growth is in deciding what to deliver: understanding problems, validating them, and choosing the solution that scales.

1. 1

   Practise problem framing across three industries: Over the next 3 months, identify 1 problem in each of three industries: restaurants and food, travel and airports, and clinics and healthcare. Treat each as a mini product (1 product a month) and write a two-page brief: - Problem statement: what is going wrong, and why it matters - Affected and target group: who has the problem, and which segment you would serve first - Problem validation: the evidence that it is real, such as articles, reviews, or short conversations with people in the field - Product solution and development: the core idea and the first version you would build - KPIs and monitoring: 5-6 metrics that would show the product works, and how you would track them - Monetization: how would you do monetization Get feedback from someone in the field before you finalise each one.

2. 2

   Pick 2 applications you like most and list 5 features per application you enjoy as a customer (ex. youtube, spotify, instagram etc.). For each, write a few lines on : - The feature: what it does and how it works for the user - The problem it solves: for the user, and for the business - Why it is built this way: the design choices and the alternatives the team could have picked - The metric it likely moves: for example time spent, retention, or conversion Example: Instagram's endless scroll removes the effort of loading more, which increases time spent and ad revenue. Finish with the patterns you noticed and one feature you would improve.

3. 3

   Choose two well-known products: Netflix (B2C) and Slack (B2B). For each one, list at least 10 metrics the product team would track. For every metric, write: - What it measures and how it is calculated - Why it matters for the product or the business - What a drop would be critical to make actions

4. 4

   Read Hooked by Nir Eyal. Then pick an app you use daily and map it to the four steps of the Hook Model: trigger, action, variable reward, and investment. Identify the weakest step and propose one change to test, with the metric you'd track.

5. 5

   Product-Market Fit Exercise: Pick Airbnb. - Collect the data. Read about 40 reviews on Google Play, the App Store - 20 with 5 stars and 20 with 1 or 2 stars. Read guest reviews and host reviews separately. Tag each review with 4 attributes: - Guests: type of traveller (solo, couple, family, group, business), trip length, destination type (big city, small town, rural), and the reason given for the rating. - Hosts: type of host (single-property or professional manager), property type, market, and the reason given for the rating. Compare the two groups. Look for patterns. Which traveller and host types are mostly happy? What do the unhappy ones share? For each complaint, ask whether it points to a poor fit (for example, a traveller who wants hotel-level consistency) or to a problem the product could fix (for example, unclear fees or slow support). Write the one-page summary: - Who Airbnb works best for, on the guest side and the host side. - Who it doesn't fit yet, and whether the cause is a poor fit or something fixable. - Your decisions: one product action per finding, such as clearer total pricing for price-sensitive guests, or better tools for first-time hosts.