Self Written notes for preparation

My Profile as Product Owner

My Profile as Sr. Engineering Manager

You are working in the product org of an e-commerce tech startup that sells pet food online. The Chief Product Officer wants you to scope out a customer sign-up process that drives customer acquisition and reduces onboarding time. You have limited resources and are under pressure to deliver the first results within two weeks. How do you scope out the project?

How do you scope out a project ?

I will go with a well structured approach.

1. Establish a process: It helps to gather and prioritize requirements

2. Collect requirements: We need to collect the requirement from multiple stakeholders to ensure we look at the bigger picture

3. Define Scope: We need to define scope and get it reviewed with stakeholders and leadership

4. Create a roadmap: Here we need to outline which features we are going to launch at what time

5. Get buy-in on roadmap to validate scope : We need to get buy-in on roadmap from stakeholders and avoid any misalignment

6. Manage scope: We need to manage the scope throughout the execution phase of program.

1. Establish a process:

We need to decide how we are going to prioritize initiatives from the project charter to convince stakeholders that we have a consistent process for prioritization.

2. Collect Requirement

- Conduct expert interviews with functional heads to learn more about the customer acquisition cost drivers. We need to know the perspective of the Head of Finance, what does the Chief Marketing Officer have to say ?

- Review documents(e.g Quarterly reports) to identify trends and potential bottlenecks in customer acquisition funnel and enrich the requirements with data points.

- Document the requirements in one matrix and prioritize them with clear criteria (e.g potential cost reduction, potential increse in revenue etc)

3. Define Scope :

We can utilize the Project Charter, Project management plan and project documents.

We can use Expert Judgement, data analysis, decision making, product analysis.

Finally we will come up with Project scope statement and after that we can update project documents also.

We need to leverage the requirement which we collected to write project scope statement. We should not forget to review this document with our manager and key stakeholders to get the feedback and reach alignment.

4. Create Roadmap

We need to create finally one overall roadmap that summarizes the in-scope elements that made it through prioritization process.

After that we need to quantify the impact of each features and allocate resources against it. For instance, we can justify higher investment in a new product features that helps customer to sign up within seconds if we can show a higher projected impact(e.g increase in onboarded customer by  MoM)

We also need to maintain a sub-roadmaps for smaller workstreams(e.g one roadmap for customer acquisition initiatives, one roadmap for onboarding time initiatives) to enusre the individual workstreams remain manageable.

5. Get buy-in on roadmap and manage the scope throughout execution phase

We need to conduct monthly roadmap reviews to ensure stakeholders understand if anything in your prioritization approach changes. and don't forget to actively manage your scope during execution phase.