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OSlash for product management: Ten shortcuts to build outstanding products

Get ahead of the competition by shipping great products, very, very fast
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Product management is at the very core of the modern business organization.

You can get the smartest developers on board to execute the most innovative ideas, but they won’t hold water in the absence of a solid product-market fit. Likewise, you can hire marketers to launch the snazziest campaigns for you, but if the product does not solve a customer pain point, none of it will matter.

This is where product management steps in. By filling in communication gaps between diverse teams, product managers align the entire organization around the overarching vision. They do this at all stages in the product life cycle - from market research and product concept to launch, sales, and after sales.

Fortunately, there is a very simple way to bring different teams together on the same page - OSlash. With these ten OSlash Shortcuts you will be able to make even the most complex projects manageable. 

Top 10 shortcuts to build outstanding products

  1. o/roadmap
  2. o/prd
  3. o/standup
  4. o/backlog
  5. o/sprints
  6. o/bug-tracker
  7. o/design
  8. o/product-launch
  9. o/product-analytics
  10. o/user-feedback
  1. Simplify strategy and resource planning with o/roadmap

Aligning different stakeholders around a common vision becomes easier when the vision is clearly documented and outlined in a single place. A shared roadmap reflects the following key elements together:

  • Product strategy: charts the steps involved in realizing the product vision to meet the business goal
  • Product timelines: includes estimated and planned deadlines to reach specific goals, for example key product features, updates, new versions etc. 
  • Goals: are specific, measurable results which are derived from the overarching company objectives
  • Requirements: to illustrate what customers are looking for in the product, their problems and pain points, and desired solutions. They are the basis for prioritizing certain features over others.
  • Status tracking: keeps everyone aware about the progress made and can be used to plan for resources and adjust timelines accordingly
  • Metrics: lay down the what, why, and how of measurement, making it easier to assess performance consistently across the organization 

You can simplify strategy and resource planning using Notion or a spreadsheet that serves as a single source of truth, readily accessed by multiple stakeholders and updated in real time.  

  1. Collaborate effectively with o/prd

A product requirements documentation is usually the starting point of the product management journey. It defines the purpose of the product, the target market, customer personas, technical specs, early designs, release criteria, and success metrics for the product, pretty much everything engineers need to know before they can take it away. 

Storing all the PRDs together in an OSlash collection - o/prd - has proven to be a super efficient way for us to keep every team and stakeholder on the same page. 

A collection is simply a folder of URLs that have been converted into shortcuts. Brings your PRDs together into one folder, no matter how many apps they may be scattered across - Google Docs, Notion, Airtable, or Google Slides - to make sure they can be accessed intuitively by anyone in the company. 

This leads to elimination of bottlenecks in cross-functional and cross-departmental communication. It can fast-track feedback cycles and foster seamless collaboration. even across diverse teams.

  1. Meet the team conveniently with o/standup

As product manager, holding daily standups with the engineering team and all other stakeholders is a huge part of the job.

To do that efficiently, transform the location of your standup meetings from a messy Zoom URL to the more intuitive, easier-to-recall shortcut o/standup

Instead of jumping to check their calendars every day, your team will find it much easier to join the meeting with o/standup. Further, conveniently customize the shortcut to o/daily-standup or o/weekly-standup etc. depending on your meeting frequency.

  1. Get everyone up to speed with o/backlog

Project management is an unavoidable component of product management. And using a combination of planning tools such as Jira, Trello, Asana, or Basecamp etc. for maximum efficiency is how most product managers stay on top of the game. 

Create o/backlog to readily access, monitor, and delegate all priority tasks. You could save yourself the hassle of coordinating across multiple platforms and teams to get work done. 

It helps define and communicate expectations clearly in one go. Plus it’s a given you would visit the page all too often, so might as well save 5 mins every time by using o/backlog. 

  1. Find and address issues faster with o/sprints

Tools like Jira and Linear have been a panacea to the collective pains of project management. Yet, it can sometimes be a hassle for engineering teams to dig into the archives and find a particular issue from a sprint urgently. 

Our own product managers agree that grouping tickets belonging to one sprint cycle together can make them easier to find. In our experience, we found it sensible to create a collection o/sprints. It contains dedicated shortcuts for Jira tickets belonging to each sprint.

The use of variable shortcuts further simplifies the search for individual Jira tickets directly. We created variable Shortcuts for tickets by selecting and replacing variable parts of the URL in curly brackets. Simply saying o/jira/issue-{ticket number} such as o/jira/issue-32 will get you to the relevant ticket in less than a second. 

  1. Deliver a flawless product with o/bug-tracker

Bug-tracking and bug-bashing projects are often shared across the frontend, backend, testing, and QA teams. They form the backbone of a flawless, complaint-free product and user experience. 

It is sound to streamline the debugging process by providing everyone in the company a common platform to register bugs they (or users they’ve interacted with) have encountered in the product. 

This can as easily be an Airtable spreadsheet as a Notion document or even a simple Google Sheet to make it easier for the teams to work together without wasting hours scouring for scattered bug reports. 

  1. Create aesthetic visuals with o/design

When it comes to designing a beautiful product, just the right features are not going to cut it. Looks do matter! And since beauty often lies in the eyes of the beholder, opinions on what’s good aesthetic can vary differently and starkly. 

Here’s where it makes sense to collect ideas and exchange feedback with both internal and external stakeholders. User research can help, so can idas from within the team. 

The collection o/design is where all ideas can be collated for a bird’s eye view. And then adapted according to the brand guidelines referenced from o/design/branding in the design application. Improvements in user interface at o/design/UI, and the mockups can be stored for quick access at o/design/mockups.

  1. Launch right on time with o/product-launch

Building a great product is not enough anymore. Ensuring a grand launch is as important and requires indispensable alignment with all the teams in the organization, including engineering, executive leadership, product, marketing, and sales. 

To launch at the right speed, every product manager needs to coordinate blazingly fast across departments. This is made possible by tracking everything in one place - from the features’ timeline and the launch assets to the marketing campaigns planned. You can minimize the time spent looking for information and use it instead for planning the perfect launch.

A timely (better still, ahead of time) launch can help capture the crucial first-mover advantage in a new market, or open up a niche in an existing one - possibly changing the game and putting the business on the map forever.

  1. Review performance on the go with o/product-analytics

It is a common mistake to assume that a product manager’s work is done when the product is officially launched. Post-release is when the second leg of the journey begins. It is the time to compare the goals established before the release to the actual performance, weigh the expectations against reality, and plan for the future on the basis of the past.  

So you need copious amounts of data to figure out what worked and what failed, what can be optimized, what has to be discarded, and what’s next. What if you did not have to jump between documents to locate all this data? 

After all, you may have set OKRs in Google Sheets, or tracked KPIs and metrics in Amplitude. And you may want to share the findings with others on your team via simple visual reports drafted using Visme or Google Slides. With the collection, o/product-analytics, bring all the numbers you need for building better, into one place. 

  1. Build better and create delight with o/user-feedback

Product management ultimately aims to deliver a delightful product that brings the user back, spreads positive word of mouth, and creates a virtuous cycle for the business. 

Delivery is crucial, but so is timely feedback. User delight can occur as a natural byproduct when user-feedback is documented religiously, taken seriously, and employed as a guidemap to build better. It can be immensely helpful to organize the feedback by the date, product version, and user type. A simple perpetual living Google or Notion document can do the job. 

Conduct user surveys, polls, and interviews to get a thorough understanding of their complaints and suggestions. Send an email updating the user when specific pain points get resolved, or requested features are added. 

The mark of a great product manager is to go above and beyond to make customers not only come back to you, but also bring other potential customers along for the next purchase.


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