Author archives: Toni Schmidt

Product discovery and product definition are among a product manager's most important responsibilities. Depending on how well the execution is, discovering the right product and defining it in a way that allows for both speedy and robust execution can be essential to business success.

Product discovery is a process in which many different ideas are generated and then tested with as little effort as possible. “Testing” in this context means validation of whether or not an idea would result in a measurable improvement on a (or more) concrete KPI(s). Ideas that were tested successfully then move forward towards the development cycle.

After discovering product, a product manager needs to define the product. Essentially that means exploring and describing the “What is it?”, “Why do it?”, “Who is it for?” and “How is it done?”. This is of course not only the product managers work, UX/UI design, Engineering, Management, Marketing etc. teams will inform the product definition. The product manager’s job is to provide one concise, reasonable and convincing story (in the literal sense, not as in “user story”) about what the product is going to be.

Analyzing existing solutions and exploring improvements is a key skill for anybody working in product. However, it's easy to set a wrong emphasis in a design critique, or be too brief or too verbose. This article is an end-to-end case study of how I structure and explore the analysis of an an iOS app.

This article lines out (potential) shortcomings in Red Planet’s iPhone app and my suggestions on how to improve them. I focus this critique on where the app could do better providing user- and business value, UX pitfalls and best practices for travel apps. I used Red Planet's publicly available iOS app, downloaded from the Apple AppStore, for this critique. Red Planet is a South-East Asian hotel chain whose focus seems to be Gen Z and Millennial leisure travelers who are budget-conscious but have high expectations towards cleanliness, convenience and tech-savviness. For Red Planet’s website, see redplanet.com.

Prioritizing product backlogs is a key responsibility of product managers. It's essential that the most important backlog items are done first, so customers, users and the business have the highest benefit. There are a number of methods on how to prioritize a product backlog, which fit different situations. In this article, I aim to introduce a couple of approaches I find useful and how to best apply them.

Writing Product Requirements Documents (PRDs) is part of my everyday job at Trip.com. Writing them in a comprehensive way while not being overly verbose is key to ensuring my peers will actually read through and understand them. Over time, I've found myself re-using the same components again and again. Read on to find out what those are.