How can I contribute as a Product Manager (PM) to a Hackathon or Opportunity Hack?

Here are 8 general PM expectations and how you can leverage these skills to help us! 

After you integrate in with a team or teams, look to help in these areas.

1. Define the product vision: This involves identifying the problem that the product will solve and the target audience for the product.

Interface with nonprofits, surface new problem areas for us to solve.

2. Conduct market research: Gather and synthesize information about the target audience, their needs, and the competition.

See what nonprofits are currently using today and understand their cost and ease of use.  Where you find gaps, Opportunity Hack is a good avenue to make an open-source solution that is easy to use.

3. Develop a product roadmap: Outline the key features and milestones for the product.

Take a look at our current projects, help lay out milestones and chunk out the work where we can deliver small pieces of value at each iteration.

4. Prioritize features: Prioritize the features based on their importance and impact on the product.

Help us to focus on the projects and features that can deliver the most value for what has the most need.

5. Develop a product backlog: Work with engineering teams to maintain list of all the features that need to be developed for the product.

Look at what would be nice-to-have features for our projects and add those to the GitHub issue backlog.  Even look at ohack.dev or ohack.org and give us feedback on what we should be building.

6. Work with the development team: The product manager should work closely with the development team to ensure that the product is developed according to the vision, OKRs, roadmap timelines, and feature backlog.

Jump into a Slack channel and see what software engineers are working on.  Ask how you can help to craft a user journey, understand target users, market fit, ensure we have good instrumentation for metrics, create a more clear product vision - anything you can think of can help us refine our purpose.

7. Test and launch the product: Hands-on, thorough testing to ensure that it meets the requirements. Once the product is ready, it should be launched to the target audience.

Test, test, and more test! Use the products we've delivered, interview our customers to get their input, add GitHub Issues for any bugs you find.

8. Analyze metrics: Ensure features are delivering based on projections, prioritize improvements based on these metrics.

Project future growth, ensure we are tracking the right Key Results (KRs) that are meeting our product objectives.