05. Non-user stories

2. Scalability:

With the right go-to-market strategy and strong market fit, your growth can take-off. The architecture (system design) to support user growth is very different from a product that is being launched to test and iterate before going live to a large scale of users. You need to discuss with the engineering team the possible peak in demand and average demand, so they can plan how to scale the application up and down without impacting the user experience while keeping the costs manageable. You want to avoid a scenario of users arriving at your website or downloading the app in 1000's and millions only to have it temporarily down or crashing.

3. Reliability and disaster recovery:

• The availability of the product to serve users at all times is defined as uptime or high-availability. In my experience for enterprise products, high-availability is considered to be 99%. Discussing this explicitly with engineering will ensure they plan for failure when servers fail to respond and have a disaster recovery plan in place.
• what is the turnaround for product to be up and running
• what is the acceptable loss of data,
• do they have a system or process in place to alert key engineering and product stakeholders that the system or product is down
• Can they manage internal stakeholders and customer expectation proactively while the problem is being addressed.
• Which team will work on monitoring app crashes to isolate and fix critical issues asap?

4. Auditability requirements driven by regulations, legal and compliance.

Depending upon the industry, geographical location and market you are trying to serve, the number of government regulations, legal and compliance that the company and product must strictly adhere to varies significantly, As a PM, spend some time familiarizing yourself with these to ensure the product has the necessary checks in place to meet these requirements or captures data regularly for audit. Failure to adhere to these regulations can damage the company's reputation and result in huge fines. For e.g., if your product sends non-transactional emails to customers regularly then it needs to include the option to unsubscribe which needs to be respected for all other emails. Another example is where system needs to capture user's email subscription preferences, acceptance of Terms of Use, acceptance of updated terms of use etc.