In the first of our blog posts in the understanding product management series, we outlined the key role that product managers face turning commercial and customer needs into a compelling product. In this blog post, we’ll look at one of the most important – and underrated – tools in a product manager’s arsenal: the visual mock-up, and examine how this can be used most effectively to meet many of the typical challenges which product managers face.
What is a mock-up?
A mock-up, simply put, is a sketch of how individual screens on the digital product (be it an desktop application, mobile application, web app etc.) might look. It is a rough sketch: the point is not to indicate how the site will look graphically, but how it will work functionally. It should contain all the buttons, menus, inputs and other functionality that each screen will have.
Here is an example mockup, one of a series created for a B2B client of ours:
A single mock-up is not especially useful, but a collection of the different screens that make up an application are enormously valuable. That’s because collectively, they can be used to see how a user would step through the different workflows that make up an application. (Indeed some mock-up tools let users connect individual mock-up screens to create interactive prototypes of finished products.)
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