🧐 Do You Know The 7 Main Stages of The Product Management Process?

➞ A great idea doesn't mean your product will become unique. Some ideas take hard work. With this mindset, product management is central to bringing order to chaos. In other words, the product area/person will align with stakeholders, prioritize the development with tech team(s), and negotiate timelines to organize everything coming from different parts/goals of the company.

Below you can see the seven main stages of the Product Management Process. Of course, those steps and names can vary from company to company, but generically every product follows the same path.

1➞ Idea Management

• Everybody can come up with a new idea, which is easy. You can pick up ideas everywhere by:

• Interviewing customers;

• Talking to people that work in the support area and other areas of your company;

• Analyzing the data and discovering that maybe a feature is missing;

• Meeting with Stakeholders that know well the business;

• Doing Brainstorm sessions.

Ideas come up almost daily, and the product area is responsible for splitting the good from the bad by categorizing/tagging them. You can't work on everything simultaneously, so as a product person, you need to get all potential ideas and prioritize/categorize them. It's also crucial to present visibility of which ideas you will prioritize and share with Stakeholders why your team and you decided to pursue them. You should be careful about keeping good ideas that are not the best now. Save them on your product backlog, which may help you a lot in the future.

2➞ Specifications

When you capture and prioritize a good idea, it's time to evaluate it and work on details.

The product specification should be something simple that will answer the three questions below:

• What are we building, and why?

• What should this new product achieve?

• How do we measure success?

Your team should answer those three questions with Stakeholders' inputs/agreement (if possible, with cross-functional teams) to clarify the team's direction and remove wrong expectations about what will be delivered.

3➞ Roadmapping

Some Product Managers prefer to take all the main potential ideas and begin roadmapping them before prioritizing, estimating, and developing begins. This could be something good (if you take at least an idea of estimation with your tech manager or most experienced developer) because you are creating a pre-roadmap that will help stakeholders to focus on the main initiatives and avoid frustration, in other words, by presenting your plan you can negotiate, make adjustments, and proceed with every part of the company aligned. It also helps the team avoid outcomes based on only individuals and shift them to the higher-level goals, objectives, and themes that advance the product vision. Below you can see a roadmap example that I created on Google Slides. The link to access it is here.

4➞ Prioritization

Now is the moment to decide which items on the backlog will effectively go to your team's roadmap. Don't forget to prioritize your initiatives based on the following:

• Company/Cycle goals;

• Alignment with stakeholders and cross-functional teams;

• The potential impact of the initiative and quick wins are always ways to bring fast results.

How Does the Traffic Light Confidence Score Work?

There are great frameworks to prioritize, like the RICE score, but I prefer using the one I created, called The Traffic Light Confidence Score. It works basically like this, I use six themes, and I give scores to them:

• Relation with company objectives;

• Team & Stakeholders Priority;

• Potential Impact;

• Delivery Effort;

• Dependency with one or more teams;

• Team's Confidence.

The formula that I created is the following:

It's straightforward, the more green colors you have, the more your initiative is aligned with the six themes mentioned previously, and the more scores it will have. You can see a Google Sheets example, including the formula I created. Use this link here. You should think like this:

• All Red = Don't go ahead.

• All Yellow = It's a risk fellow.

• All Green = Quick win.

You can see a Google Sheets example, including the formula I created. Use this link here.

Despite the technique used, prioritization aims to calm down stakeholders, meet their needs, and solve urgent demands of the company.

Unfortunately, you cannot meet everyone's needs at the same time, and that is the reason why we use the prioritization process. In other words, prioritization will order the most urgent issues and structure what can be delivered within a cycle, which can vary from company to company (usually cycles of 2 months, 3 months, 4 months, and 6 months).

5➞ Delivery

Now that you have defined your roadmap, it's time to estimate deliveries with your technical team and focus on the ones that will bring more impact quickly or address urgent issues that are causing pain to customers (which is already making the company lose money).

If you work at an agile company like mine, this is the moment to break the initiatives into small pieces that will be delivered gradually. In other words, by breaking deliveries into parts, you and your team can always be shipping and checking with stakeholders if what you and your team are developing satisfies their expectations. However, it also makes things more unpredictable regarding knowing exactly when a specific item will ship.

Most tech companies work with continuous delivery. In other words, the team delivers everything considered done, which means that bugs, features, improvements, etc., will go to production as soon as they are approved. It's essential to consistently deliver products with every central part tagged/tracked by data tools, so you can analyze the customers' behavior and understand if your release is working well.

6➞ Analytics and Experiments

Once the product is delivered into production and tagged properly to be tracked by data tools, now is the moment where you start to measure if the mission of the new product/feature/improvement is working accordingly to what the company is expecting in terms of goals, KPIs, and customer behavior.

Product Analytics offers a unique opportunity to learn about users and your product. There are plenty of tools to track data, like Google Analytics, Amplitude, etc. With the proper tools, you can discover connections, causations, and correlations that can all be deduced using this information, which can clarify many points. If you know how to use/code in SQL, you can use your knowledge to make queries on the Database (on tools like Databricks, for example) and discover more about customers' behavior.

One thing noteworthy is always to have a cohort group, which means that you have a separate group of users that has a standard behavior, so you can use the cohort group to compare the data with other groups and understand if your new product or feature are going well or not against the usual behavior (cohort group).

7➞ Customer Feedback

A shipped product usually means you will have many users to collect data and solicit feedback from. You should understand that helpful suggestions are accompanied by insights, complaints, and unmeaningful requests, so put your ego aside and filter information that matters. Most of the time, insights and complaints can help you to discover ways to solve customers' pains.

There are many ways to gather feedback. I usually split feedback/survey/research into qualitative and quantitative methods.

What is Qualitative Feedback/Survey/Research?

Qualitative data focuses on the qualities of users. In other words, it looks to understand the “why” behind the numbers. Qualitative research is expressed in words and is typically used to understand ideas, thoughts, or experiences. The most common qualitative methods include:

• Interviews: Verbally asking open-ended questions to respondents.

• Focus Groups: Discussion amongst a group of people about a topic, usually hosted by an interviewer or moderator.

• Ethnography: Becoming involved in a community or organization for an extended period to observe culture; and behavior. These observations are recorded as words.

• Literature Review: Survey of published works by other authors.

• Surveys: Open-ended questions sent to a population sampling or a target audience.

What is Quantitative Feedback/Survey/Research?

Quantitative data refers to information that can be quantified. In other words, it can be counted or measured and given a numerical value. Quantitative research is expressed in numbers and graphs, typically used to establish general facts about a topic. The most common quantitative methods include:

• Experiments: Situations in which researchers control and manipulate variables to determine cause-and-effect relationships.

• Observations: Observing subjects naturally without controlling variables. These observations are recorded as numbers.

• Surveys: Close-ended or multiple-choice questions sent to a population sampling or target audience.

Chapter 2 - Links:

• ProductPlan | Text Inspiration - https://www.productplan.com/learn/stages-product-management-process

• Find the Best | Roadmap Example - https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1r76o6bEUktkKB2uF393mQoXaT4dD_WlSHgOfJXkyiKQ/edit#slide=id.p

• Rice Score | Prioritization Process - https://roadmunk.com/guides/rice-score-prioritization-framework-product-management/