Product management- Porter’s way

Porter is an online marketplace for mini trucks in India. We are operational in 10 cities and will be present in 10 more cities by end of March 2022. Porter has 1 million+ monthly active users on Porter customer application and 50k+ monthly active users on Porter partner application. We clocked more than a million rides in month of March and growing strongly at 10% m-o-m.

People at Porter.in live by these core values

1. Impact
2. Curiosity
3. Ownership
4. Empathy
5. Integrity

These values are being followed by Porter’s employees for more than 3 years. As the team grows, it is important to reiterate these values again. Values also need to be internalised so that they become a norm in conducting the daily operations at work.

As a product team member, each PM will be involved in multiple phases for product building i.e requirements gathering, prioritisation, design, delivery and evaluation. The following is a jab at internalising these values while doing PM activities

Impact (Like Tony Stark in “The Avengers”)

1. While gathering requirements, I consider each person’s opinion to build hypotheses. But the weight of the opinion will be arrived at by analysing the impact of the hypotheses and not by the position of the person giving the opinion
2. While versioning releases, I prioritise features which deliver higher impact to my product/business goals
3. I measure my product’s success based on business outcome delivered and not on number of releases done
4. When unsure about a feature, I don’t sit back but experiment. I conduct A/B tests to determine optimal features
5. I break my features into smaller releases to gain confidence in the product instead of building all features at one go

Curiosity (Like Arya Stark in “Game of Thrones”)

1. I keep myself apprised of latest tools and product practices to provide best user experience
2. I understand the technical design of my product so as to be aware of the flexibility and limitations of the system for future releases
3. I share my product ideas and designs with internal team members and users to seek validation and feedback
4. I understand the limitations of my product so as to build viable solutions

Ownership (Like Jon Snow in “Game of Thrones”)

1. I align the vision for my products with all stakeholders
2. I ensure products delivered as per my expectations without compromising on quality
3. In case of product outages or failures, I will introspect on what went wrong and improve the implementation rather than citing external conditions
4. I ensure the both internal and external users are using the product features as designed so as to the make the product a success. I conduct training sessions if required
5. I will not hesitate to rollback a feature which is no longer adding value to user or organisation

Empathy (Like Sean in “Good Will Hunting”)

1. I will dig deep to understand motivations behind a feature request by an internal/external user
2. I will observe how users interact with product features to gain first hand inputs
3. While building a solution, I will consider how it impacts users and be wary of unintended consequences to arrive at an optimal solution rather than taking an easy solution
4. I will consider the state of user when using the feature so as to fit my UX designs to the state
5. While building MVPs, I am completely aware of the features not supported and appraise frontline teams with the alternatives when faced with such situation

Integrity (Like Captain America in ‘The Avengers)

1. I will be clear and upfront about the success indicators of each feature before release and not be carried away by bias to validate feature success
2. I will maintain easily accessible dashboards to provide transparency of product performance
3. I will not let anyone misconstrue product goals so that my features get higher priority
4. I will not falsify information in marketing communications sent to users to gain traction
5. I will not embellish the success indicators so at to prove feature successful but find ways to improve

Want to be a part of Porter? Check out the openings here