Intro

The thing is that the Product Manager position is quite trendy now in its many forms (product owner in a scrum, digital product manager, SaaS PM, digital business partner, product engineer. A ton of new roles!). 

As a product person, you definitely need to juggle between communication with different stakeholders, master your soft skills and build upon your hard skills for real action work! T-shaped would be too limited to describe the long list of skills and deep expertise that you should have. 

You may have a laundry list of experiences and skills, this is great, but if you are excited about building, creating stuff, then I see a clear rationale for the career transition that you want to make. So, yes, if you’ve worked in the ecommerce or marketing space, I bet that you can be a better ecommerce product manager. You may need some basics and I hope this article could help you.

Also, if you are a great product manager, you know what it takes to bring something of Value to the Market is relentless prioritization. It’s one of the most important characteristics of your job. You can be a product manager for a digital property or ecommerce if you acquire the hard skills in those domains. 

I’ve been often asked why I’ve made a move from one position to another. I don’t regret any decision that I’ve made until now, because it made the person who I want to be and made me grow. Don’t limit yourself if you want to make a change, transferable skills are important. 

I’ve got experience with ecommerce, SaaS,  hundreds of web projects and industries. 

I shall admit that I love websites and my contribution has expanded from the content audit, SEO structure to recommendations in regards to information architecture, content strategy, technical requirements for engineers and designing a good funnel optimization.

From outside it may look like that you’re quite specialized in one area, but the truth is that in order to be a good ecommerce consultant, you should be a real ecommerce product manager.

Don’t be afraid to make a leap from a non-product role and carry on reading.

If you’re considering a new partner for your ecommerce, then, yes, you’re also welcome to continue exploring this article.

Ecommerce Product Management – Why and What

Today I’m going to share with you my stance on ecommerce product management, what it is, why it’s important and give you some concrete examples.

I’ve decided to do that, because I’ve recently worked on an exciting ecommerce project and want to share my experience with you.

Some Truths + Myths :

• You need a developer and a designer.
• You need an ecommerce consultant.
• Your Analytics ninja will do a great job.
• Your content team will put all the pieces together.
• You need to put your architecture in place.
• Analyze your past performance
• And the list goes on..

All these hold TRUE when you have a new ecommerce website or embark on a new digital project. You need technology, design, business and administration in place along with a solid marketing strategy.

Do you need a product expert? NO, it’s a website, it’s just an ecommerce.

You’re WRONG, your ecommerce website is a digital product on its own and as long as it exists to solve a problem (someone needs to buy from you because of X reason) and has a business model behind it, yes, you need a product manager for key projects or ongoing activities in order to build something that delights users and serves your business purposes (drive $).

Note that there are great ecommerce specialists who are proficient in analytics, BUT they may not know how to translate their requests into technical requirements and that’s a problem, because you don’t know to spend money on engineering without a clear direction and be careful, don’t annoy your developers, they are too smart to waste time on building something just for the sake of it! 

Why do I need an Ecommerce Product Manager OR an Ecommerce Partner with Technical Expertise

This person is the glue between business, product development, engineering, design, marketing + content and the users. 

If you can afford it, it’s important to invest in growth of the product (you want to continue growing your business, don’t you?). If not, then it’s crucial to involve an expert especially in the case of a complex digital project which has an impact on the business and users. 

Do you ask yourself:

• What images do we need to tell our brand story? 
• What’s the mobile layout and mobile experience?
• What do we showcase from our product catalog?
• How do we do it?
• Where do I put the newsletter form to get leads:
• Where do I place my clients’ testimonials?
• Which provider do I use for reviews? 
• Which CMS do I use (Magento, Shopify, Woocommerce)?
• Which content tools will facilitate the work of my ecommerce team?

Very good, you definitely need someone who can orchestrate all this for you and help you bring more value!

Not only that, but the communication and translating the information between teams is extremely important, everyone needs to be on the same page. Use whatever you want, calls, user stories, notes, card or tasks to involve all stakeholders (e.g. business, marketing, designer, development), but you’d like to make sure that everyone understands what they need to do (avoid being too prescriptive), why they do it and when it’s required to deliver it.

Ecommerce PM tasks

List of Ecommerce Product tasks (which can be performed by a person who is NOT necessarily a PM, but has the skills to do the job!):

• The PM would spend their time on finding how to better present your product assortment and categories
• Would think of your UX
• Devise the proper user flow through the website
• Drive experimentation to drive business results
• Focus on Growth and focus on acquisition
• Perform content audits to beef your content strategy
• Review and recommend CMS
• Revise and recommend an ecommerce provider for reviews (Yotpo, Bazaarvoice, Trustpilot)
• Plan how to lay out that content 
• Review the wireframes of your new landing pages, write user stories for developers to make those pages live!
• Decide on plugins and ecommerce technology
• Conduct competitive research (e.g. acquisition channels, customer experience, checkout experience and CRO hooks on the competitor’s website)
• Define KPIs, track and analyze them over time to make sure that it’s all on track, the business is going in the right direction and the users have a delightful experience through all touch points with the brand as a part of their customer experience.
• Run QA testing when necessary, ensure that you know, a page is accessible and a product can be bought 🙂 
• Use A/B testing to validate the changes made to the site, and know whether a change would hurt or improve the shop’s revenue.
• Prioritize the tests to run first, focus on the areas with the biggest impact. 
• What content should we enhance with numbers to showcase better that trusworthy online shop, how to design and place trust seals on the website, how to capitalize on testimonials, where and how to place them.
• Own the roadmap to drive growth of the ecommerce product continuously by using data as your best friend and applying user-centered design with converting user flows in mind. 

What Tools Do You Need

Passion for prioritization and making trade-offs 🙂 Attention to detail and desire to communicate clearly. Be humble and decisive, learn how to say ‘NO’ in a clear and friendly way 🙂 

You are the person who should drive the whole team in regards to what to do or migrate first given your limited resources and expected delivery time 🙂 

Apart from the skills above and driving everything with a positive attitude, the following tools may help you (* This is not an exhaustive list. It’s just what I’ve used for this project and some other recommendations from my experience.):

• Google Analytics
• Tableau
• Google Adwords and Search Console
• Access to current CMS
• New CMS and access to staging (well, do your homework to better understand the technicalities and implications of the new ecommerce platform! This goes without saying!
• Hotjar
• Optimizely
• Atlassian JIRA for tasks (for bigger projects, SMBs don’t usually have it) and Confluence for documentation
• Balsamiq or Figma
• Screenshots for examples 🙂
• Google drive (at least my personal favorite to outline the user stories)
• SQL to query ecommerce data
• Asana, Trello, Monday.com, Basecamp or any other project management tool of your choice.

Ecommerce Product Case Study

Let’s review my most recent contribution and show you a things or two.

Project

• Ecommerce shop online, SMB, fireplaces 
• Country: USA

Challenges

Client comes to me and wants to:

• Change CMS from Magento to Woocommerce
• Complete redesign (layout, new wireframes, new theme, new top navigation)
• Highlight top product categories
• Content audit to showcase top products and eliminate obsolete pages and taxonomy
• Change information architecture
• Boost SEO and improve the conversion funnel
• Define a new URL structure
• Increase conversion rates (who doesn’t :))
• Highly functional mobile website
• Get rid of what doesn’t work?

How does it sound to you? Is this a simple project (website is not new, has years of history).

Needless to say that all these moving pieces should nicely play together in 3 months for the core components. Fun, isn’t it 😉

Opportunities

I’ve identified threats in terms of traffic acquisition and business decline right after the switch. From my experience, it takes 3 to 6 months (depending on the size of the website, the quality of work done and scope) to fully revive the traffic acquisition and see a lift in revenue. The truth is that there are too many moving pieces together, engineering, design, content, ecommerce flow that can help or break your website in the course of the project.

First of all, don’t freak out. Take it easy and start thinking about the challenges, the prioritization which you need to give to each, how you can help and find opportunities.

Identify Opportunities without being stressed about time (emoji)

• Analysis to identify opportunities to boost customer retention and ecommerce conversion
• Identify key metrics to test 📈
• What advantages does the new CMS provide (Woocomerce vs Magento)? Can we change URLs? How to do that with the least risk involved?
• What is the job to be done? Use the (JTBD) framework to identify what the users want to do (they can buy a product, review it or consume content, how to, step-by-step, product specifications). Believe it or not, users are NOT only buying a product. If you are familiar with the purchase journey, you’ll know that consumers don’t buy a fireplace instantaneously, they want to check whether it’s easy to mount it, browse FAQ, look at ‘How-to’ videos, review testimonials and before & after photos. You see, many jobs to be done and be optimized from an ecommerce product perspective.

Preliminary steps

Analyze all the information you’ve been given or you’ve collected to define your high level conclusive recommendations and mark the start! 

Arrange a meeting with the business stakeholder(s) and meet with the development and design team! You should make sure that you provide your recommendations, guidance and requests in the best form possible. As I’ve always said, I think that the ability to adapt to different working styles is very important and critical for the success of every product!

First steps 

• Analyze the business requirements with the client
• Coordinate the development with engineering, BUT don’t just hand over the business requirements. I’ll talk about this in a bit. 
• Prioritization and grooming of the product backlog (we need the epic for the Homepage first, shopping cart, next product categories, then products and only then informational content) 
• Make sure that you have your well defined Epics (if you’re not familiar with the term Epic, think about themes, development buckets). Epics are bigger themes which group together key elements. You may have one epic per login page, shopping cart, homepage, product categories, product pages, info content, conversion rate optimization, testimonials, reviews
• Set yourself to support the quality assurance testing to detect and reproduce bugs on time.

Are we clear? Your work as a product management before you hand over anything involves:

• Providing in-depth analysis  
• Doing a quantitative analysis of existing ecommerce metrics
• Conducting a competitor analysis
• Getting that Market Research done
• Breaking down the high-level goal of the new website launch  to specific measures that can easily be tracked to ensure we are achieving that high level goal after we launch.
• Reviewing the wireframes to prepare recommendations (specific recommendations with examples, this is what works best from my experience)
• Writing up your technical requirements for the development team

Are you getting nervous? Calm down, stay with me and apply the tips below! 

Tips 👍:

• Break down the required work into Epics (high level themes)
• Prioritize Epics
• Keep high level description of the Epic
• Identify the status of the Epic 

Is it dev-ready? 

Well, if your designer is not ready with the design or you’d like to change something, obviously no developer can help you flesh it out to a functional page. 

Tasks = smaller increments of work in the Epic

Think about the individual increments of work, smaller tasks in each Epic (e.g. CTA buttons on the homepage, top hero image and messaging), it’s important to work with smaller units of work.

Next

• Prep your best communication skills 🙂 
• Polish your user stories or technical requirements, make sure that all items are small, feasible at a very high level, testable and add value to the high level goal.
• Do you have any UX product recommendation (e.g. In my case, the carousel slider on the homepage was burning my eyes and actually is distracting for users!)? 

Now is the time to highlight that your ecommerce product needs UX. For example, a homepage carousel can definitely cause more harm than good, because it has serious usability pitfalls.

Then do you really want to bury your customer testimonials? Don’t you need attractive photos which represent how the customer has transformed their fireplace with the good brick paint kit? Highlight the product benefits with powerful copywriting which underscores the benefits in a transparent and clear way (easy, how much time did it take, what tools are needed etc).

I shall admit that I’ve had quite a good list, some items including a new block for customers’ testimonials, before & after photos to showcase the product and tell the story about how the product solves a problem.

Very good, create some prototypes, work together with your UX partners, get started with testing them and start some validation with real feedback from users (you can run the prototypes through internal teams, customer service or reach out to top clients. Also, make use of any tools like usabilityhub to get quick feedback on prototypes or get a survey form up and running on Hotjar).

Only once you are done from a UX perspective, you can carry on developing the UI. 

Don’t forget that you are not a solo magician, keep the conversation going, ask your developers if the prototype feels right to them and identify any impediments. Would it take more time? If so, make sure that you regroup with your UX, your developers and make a decision on what to develop first. It’s your ruthless prioritization to choose what feels right to the business and develop with resources and time in mind. 

• Engage with the engineering team or the solo developer to determine the best technical implementation methods, change the scope based on their feedback and then agree on the implementation schedule
• If you work in an agile environment, yes, your audit may imply new items! No worries, just actively maintain the backlog of items to provide clear direction to the designer and the developer, make sure that you’re clear and avoid mess at any cost!

Get the party 🎉 started! 

Final

It’s trivial I know that you cannot improve what you don’t measure. Measure, measure, experiment and incorporate feedback as quickly as you can!

Learn from visitors, use all analytics at your disposal, check your ecommerce metrics vs your benchmark and find out what needs to be tweaked! 

One of the key pieces in  the ongoing work is to report your findings and business results effectively in order to get more buy-in, resources and keep your ecommerce website running and developed as a product! 

Example of an Ecommerce User Story

Even if you don’t want to provide user stories to the development team for some reason (e.g. they prefer a list of requirements as in the case of this ecommerce case study), I’d recommend that you define your user stories for yourself and use them as the basis of requirements.

As I’ve mentioned before, you don’t need to be a super expert at the definition of requirements or be a veteran product owner to write these. What you need is your desire to improve and learn 🙂

I’ll give you a quick intro that you can use. Epics are broken down into user stories.

You can think of epics = themes and user stories = tasks.

The user story format which is quite popular in scrum actually represents the customer / user focus and the value that goes behind the requirement and the feature. 

User Story format: 

Apart from the standard user story format, I recommend you to include a title for each requirement, a short description, your user story, a list of business requirements and the acceptance criteria which the development team needs to meet in order to consider the task done. 

The title is important as it helps us glance over the requirement. The description gives us more detail, the set of business requirements speak about the value from a business and functional perspective while the acceptance criteria is important for the automated testing, it explains the expected behavior, helps technical teams better understand what is required to consider the task done and also gives guidelines to non-technical team members to perform testing.

Remember that:

• Each user story is independent from the rest. E.g. I will have a user story for the main CTA on the homepage, then another one for the add to cart, then yet another for the shopping cart checkout. 
•  Each user story can be easily tested with a short set of acceptance criteria.
• Bring value. The user story represents WHY someone needs WHAT thing that we are building. 

Acceptance criteria, yes, here we go with Gherkin. I discovered Gherkin in a past project for the re-launch of dynamic landing pages back when I was leading the Product owner domain for search and ecommerce at Vistaprint.  I really loved it due to its simplicity. 

Here is the Gherkin format:

Given XYZ condition

And condition

And condition 

When X

Let’s put all this into practice!

Example of Ecommerce User Story

Title: Fixed header 

Description: The website has a fixed header so that the visitor will see our signs of trustworthiness, our phone number and address at any time.

User story:

As a visitor 

I want to see the company’s phone number and email address throughout the site

So that I can send an inquiry.

Requirements

• The header is fixed as the user scrolls down the page.
• The header shows the company address, phone number, the free deliver, money back guarantee and quality seals. 

Non-functional requirements

• Header is small enough not to occupy too much space on the page.
• Header is not obtrusive on mobile devices.
• The page loads fast.

Acceptance criteria:

Given I scroll down the page 

When I look at the upper part of my screen

Then I can see a header with the company name, phone number and address. 

Conclusion

That’s it,  I hope that you’ve learnt something regardless of your background and you’re ready for your next challenge.