As product managers, we often contribute to a new product or a feature from scratch. One of the commonly used practices in product management in the research phase is defining user personas of the target users or the ‘building for whom?’ exercise. The user is someone who is directly or indirectly benefitted by the product. The product is expected to solve a problem for the user.

Majorly, all theories around product management focus on the direct users of the product which is the customer, and in the case of marketplaces, the seller. The next step is to then deep dive to find customer types using multiple parameters like age, income group, work profile, region, preferences, etc as per the needs of the product. For most of us, our user persona detailing ends with these two types of users.

While reflecting on the failure points I have had over multiple product executions, this came out as a peculiar reason. There are many more users who are impacted by the product we help build. However, we end up addressing their problems almost as an afterthought post the product launch. As a product manager, it is imperative to consider a holistic view of all the users impacted while conceptualizing the product.

Some of those other users and their respective problems connected to the product are -

Internal CMS operations user

• The internal CMS user will use the CMS you design for the operational purposes like uploading creatives, meta-content, catalogs, etc. Their KRAs are measured on the configuration TAT but they don’t control the UX of the CMS they use.
• It’s the product manager’s responsibility to ensure optimized UX for the operations user for her to be able to achieve minimum TAT. Help her help you!

Finance reconciliation manager

• This user needs the realtime sales data mapping against the sellers with product IDs and categories with 100% accuracy along with the ability to query past sales data.
• To be able to run payment logics as per commercial arrangements and process payouts in an automated way as per agreed cycles.
• In addition, the data should flow to taxation systems for audit purposes like ERP.
• He needs tax calculations to be handled accurately without anything amiss. He is the one guy who can’t afford to hate auditors.

Business owner/Category owner

• Needs the ability to fetch the sales numbers by product, category, region, price range, etc. This will help her plan the future inventory sourcing better.
• Needs the ability to review customer feedback trends on new products.

Warehouse Manager/Logistics Manager

• Needs the real-time order flow interfaces along with delivery planning as per area codes.
• Needs the understanding of the inflow of products to optimize space.
• Needs the interfaces to work in rough network conditions with minimal typing needs.

Marketing managers

• This user needs access to realtime sales data mapped against different product categories.
• Needs the user level sales data mapped to content IDs in the BI system along with an overview of user segment-wise performance.
• Needs the ability to review the top of the funnel and take optimization actions accordingly.
• Needs the ability to evaluate how digital marketing, PN, user cohorts, and SEO campaigns are performing with appropriate attribution inputs in place.
• Needs server-side triggers for new product launches and if a product is available again for sale to run retargeting campaigns.
• Depending on the scale of the organization, you may have one or more users here.

BI/Analytics Manager/Product Manager

• The sales and user behavioral data needs to flow through the analytics platforms which can be further used for effective reporting and deriving cohorts. This data is also critical for organization-level dashboards.
• As a product manager, you need analytics instrumentation in place for measuring your product success metrics. The user’s behavioral data should also feed to your personalization engine.

Engineering Manager/DevOps Manager/Support Manager

• Needs the ability to track the performance of the system in terms of response time, concurrent users, errors being logged, bugs, and production issues being registered.
• These are the users in the marketplace context but the use case is applicable to any business. While it may sound trivial to take care of the needs of these internal stakeholders, it is extremely critical and often overlooked.

You have not shipped a complete product unless the problems of these users are addressed and it will backfire post product launch. It almost always does.