Building a Platform for Scratch

As a product manager with over ten years of experience, I have built a lot of products, some have been from an idea to a functional product that generates revenue and some have been as a new platform built from the features that made sense on an existing platform.  I have built features to drive revenue and increase urgency.  I have looked at areas of a company like setting up an ecommerce product and optimized their systems to ensure they worked more efficiently.  The reason I am telling you this is that I have experience in building products across various disciplines.  This is my first time looking at all of these different existing processes like project management, onboarding, and customer service all being done in different systems and putting it together into one system that meets their needs and is flexible enough to grow with them.  

So far, I have learned a lot about the business, the stakeholders' needs, and the goals of the organization.  I feel being a subject matter expert is truly important to building a great product. Understanding the organization's goals gives me a focus for the product and helps to determine the needs.    My goal when building a platform beginning to end is to create a visual wireframe that helps stakeholders understand what is being designed and eventually will be built and give the developers the resources to understand what we are trying to accomplish.  It's important to me that the development team understands the goals of the platform but also knows we are fully open to their ideas and thoughts.

The first thing, I created were the wireframes.  I use Balsamiq to create the pages, features and wireframes for the platform.  I also created a wiki which contains things like the terminology, goals for the pages, and eventually will contain the requirements for the platform.  Next, I will create a document that helps the development team understand how the systems will be used and the processes it will be used for.  I plan on creating process flows or swimlanes for this portion.

Have you done something like this?  If you have, send me an email at nabetsi@nabetsi.com, I would love to talk with you.