Let's do some practice.
Switching Frontend Frameworks
You are pitching switching from Backbone to Solid.js (JavaScript frameworks, not important if you know anything about them) for the client-facing frontend of your e-commerce site to the VP of product, the CEO, and the VP of engineering of a 5,000 person company. This is a pitch to convince them that they need to change frameworks.
Your primary reasons for doing so are
- You believe you will get better performance on your frontend
- It is easier to recruit Solid.js engineers
- Developers will get an opportunity to rewrite buggy parts of the code
- You believe the team will be able to move faster with a more modern codebase
Your pitch is
"Solid.js is a modern JavaScript framework which allows you to write flexible, composable, reactive code. It has many declarative primitives which allow you to embed reactive data directly in your templates. It is a component based framework and those components themselves do not carry their own states; rather they have factory functions that allow them to generate derived data on the fly, something that our old Backbone code isn't able to do. All the industry has moved past Backbone and it's time for us to keep with it by moving our frontends to Solid.js."
What is wrong with this approach? How could you rewrite it better?
Implementing an A/B Testing Tool
You are pitching implementing an A/B testing tool (if you don't know what that is, just Google it, fairly easy to find a good explanation.) The people you are sending a memo to are the engineers who will be working on the project as they get ready to start writing code. This is for them to gain context and ask questions as part of your project kick-off.
Your primary reasons for doing so are
- You will be able to A/B test different UIs and experiences and prove which one is better
- A lightweight way to be able to turn off problematic features after launch without a redeploy
- A way for us to prove that our new features are improving user experiences
- A way to experiment faster
Your pitch is
"We are going to be implementing VWO as an A/B testing tool. We spent a lot of rounds doing research, kicking the tires on various tools, and looking into the feature sets that each products. Freshmarketer didn't integrate with all the tools we use internally. Due to Google competing in the same market as we do we did not feel like we could ship our data to them. HubSpot's offering offered too little in the way of feature richness. In the end VWO's offering matched more closely to ours and we believe it is the best tool we should move forward with."
What is wrong with this approach? How could you make it better?
Adding a Social Share Button to Classifieds App
You are convincing a group of stakeholders of mixed engineers, product managers, and designers to pick your design on a social share button for a classified listing over another one proposed by a third-party design agency. This is an email where people will weigh in and decide whether or not to choose your design.
Your primary reasons for so are
- You like the design better
- It is consistent with your design system, whereas the other one is not
- You can reuse existing code to implement it, whereas the other does not
- The other one is flashier but doesn't gel well with the existing site
Your pitch is
"Hello fellow engineers, product managers, and designers. We discussing today the possibility that we may indeed partake of the design created by yours truly to be most masterfully achieve the outcomes our charter and team has been seeking so diligiently. By adopting said treatment a myriad of boons are but at our fingertips. Instead of the gaudy, garish proposal delivered to us by unfamiliar figures, such a proposal could have only been delivered by a product manager from within. Our current consistency with the tomes of design systems are threatened by such an ostentatious design and implore all of you to consider my proposal to right our ship into the horizons of tomorrow."
First of all, I hate myself for writing that. Secondly, please identify what is wrong with it an how you can make it better.
