If you’re a product manager looking to gain a competitive skill or someone wanting to have an edge when seeking a product management position, this article could help give you an advantage. This advantage will come when you use Bubble as a contemporary, cutting edge tool to create and then demonstrate high fidelity, interactive product ideas and concepts with Executives, Customers and Product Development.
The job of a product manager is quite diverse and challenging. Your responsibilities can vary quite a bit not only across industries but also across companies within the same industry. Regardless, being a product manager will require you to use a lot of different skills. For the purposes of this blog, I’ll focus on product managers in technology-centric companies (i.e. tech companies in San Francisco / Silicon Valley, New York, Boston, Austin and Seattle).
Some of the skills a product manager needs are non-technical, i.e. communication, collaboration, influence, negotiations and others. Other skills are more technical, i.e. data collection & analysis, competitive analysis, product development, experimentation and others. The breadth and depth of skills is quite extensive which is one of the reasons this critical role is so challenging. If you are a technical founder in a startup or a tech solo-preneur, you use all the skills of a product manager (and many other skills too). This is perhaps why some people say a product manager is the “CEO of a product“.
The effective product manager will need to share concepts with not only Executives but also Customers because Customer feedback is critical for collaborating with the development team to ensure the product being developed addresses a Customer’s (or market’s) pain point.
Historically, wireframes and mockups have been used to achieve those objectives. And eventually you’d deliver a minimal viable product (“MVP”) to your Customers for their initial testing and use; vital input to your development team as you iterate on the product.
When you use Bubble, you can quickly create prototypes of concepts. And not just visual-only concepts; you can create a prototype in which users can interact with it. Below is a short list of capabilities you can deliver with Bubble.
- Control the UX (down to the pixel)
- Create login accounts
- Create messaging/chat functionality
- Integrate 3rd party services via API’s and plugins (Slack, Box, Stripe, Sendgrid, etc)
- And many other examples
Additionally, because you’re developing functional prototypes, you’ll also be creating your product’s data structure. And arguably, you’re starting to think about that ever critical data structure even earlier than you would with just wireframes or mockups. Having Customers interact with your prototype and showing the development team the data structure (and logic) will help you as a product manager minimize design gaps earlier in the development process. You can even design in the ability to track how your Customers are interacting with your product, i.e. which “pages” they’re going to. You can do A/B setting simply by setting up different workflows and UX depending on certain login (or other) criteria .
While there is a learning curve with Bubble, it’s not incredibly difficult to become proficient within a short period of time. Chances are you have a software background which is an advantage (but not required). This is particularly useful because you’re thinking “holistically” on how your Customers will interact (UX) with the product, what the data structure needs to be and the logic to tie the UX and data together. And since Bubble is SaaS (actually more like PaaS), you don’t need to worry about the underlying infrastructure; simply focus on your design. One-stop shopping. This includes hosting so when your prototype is ready for Customer feedback, simply send them a link.
Once you learn how to use Bubble, you’ll be amazed how quickly you can create a prototype. In this first of seven blog posts, you’ll see that a full-feature calendar app can be created in less than 2-hours using Bubble. This “case study” includes creating user accounts, scheduling appointments, confirming appointments, email to Clients and more.
The power of Bubble is amazing. And for you as a product manager, leveraging Bubble can be a career enhancing skill to learn; a real game-changer. Check it out.
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