How to work on a side project as an aspiring product manager?

In this article, I am going to talk about a side project I worked on in a group through Clicked, a “free platform to make career exploration and skill acquisition friendly, accessible and easy-to-understand for beginners and masters alike.”

As an aspiring product manager, I’m always looking for new ways to gain experience in product management. One day, I was browsing through a Facebook Product Management group and saw a post by a member about Clicked’s program that provides experience for aspiring product managers. I checked the platform and saw some interesting materials. One thing in particular that I really liked was the Group Case Study.

I participated in the Canva for Education Group Case Study. The project lasted two weeks. The team consisted of two product managers, including myself, and two UX/UI members. The objective was to build a feature for teachers as Canva plans to help teachers with their materials post Covid.

Canva is a graphic design tool anyone can use. It has intuitive, drag and drop features. I highly recommend it to marketers, students, or those who wish to build a personal website.

All four members of the team met via Google Meet to map out the project. We used our knowledge of Canva to help define the problem statement.

Here’s a short summary of our thought process.

• Canva can be a platform where we address gaps in school ratings. For example, two schools can compare materials, so students can receive the same quality of education. Teachers from School A can interact with teachers from School B.
• A teacher said that she doesn’t use Canva, but she uses Google Slides.
• We need to provide a better way to market the platform to teachers.
• Here are some online reviews that helped inform our approach: Common Sense, TrustRadius, GetApp.
• Canva is focused primarily on K-12 teachers.

In our initial drafts, we defined the problem statement, target users, potential features, the PRD (Product Requirement Document), and success metrics.

We held additional meetings to refine our vision.

In the end, we presented our project to other teams using Google Slides. The final presentation included:

• A short story documenting our process
• Vision and problem statement
• Competitive analysis
• User personas
• Features and prioritization
• User flows
• Product roadmap
• Working prototype
• Product launch plan
• Marketing plan
• KPIs
• Working prototype
• Product launch plan
• Future plans

If you want to see our slide deck, click this link.

**Special thanks to my teammates: Khusboo, Leland, and Patricia.

Getting experience in product management doesn’t have to be difficult. You can pick a user’s pain point in your favorite mobile application and analyze how to solve it or validate and implement a new feature that you think is important. You may also join a hackathon, write your own blog, or start your own YouTube channel and comment on different products.