Product Management
Guide 1
Discover Your
Product’s Users.
When kicking off a new project, it's crucial to maintain a clear view of the overall product purpose (the forest) before delving into specific features and capabilities (the trees). This is where Product Management plays a key role, ensuring that your customer has a comprehensive understanding of the product's purpose. To build this foundation, you need to understand who your product is for and what problems it will solve. Here’s how:
- Get to Know Your Stakeholders: Start by understanding your customer’s business case and their goals for the project. Build a good relationship with your Product Owner (PO) to get insights into the market, find existing artifacts, and identify user groups.
- Get to Know Your Users: Understand your product’s purpose by learning about the users you’re building it for. Use interviews to uncover their needs and pain points, conduct contextual inquiry sessions to observe them in their environment, and analyze web analytics to track overall user behavior. Utilize various user research methods to gather comprehensive insights.
- Describe Your Users: Use the gathered research to identify your primary user groups and create realistic user personas that define their goals, needs, and pain points. Develop user journey maps and flows that illustrate how each group interacts with your product from start to finish.
Guide 2
Define the problem.
With a clear understanding of your product's purpose, you can focus on identifying the core problem it needs to solve. Arriving at a concise problem statement that describes the key issues is essential. Here’s how to craft an actionable problem statement:
- Understand the Context: Refine your customer’s initial idea of the project problem through user and market research and collaborative workshops. Identify the core problem the project aims to address.
- Define the Problem: A solid problem statement is rooted in a user or stakeholder need, describing the “why” of the project without offering solutions. Validate the problem with data and document it in writing.
- Define Sub-Problems: Once you have the core problem, delve deeper to identify smaller issues that stem from or are part of the larger problem.
- Do It Right: Invest time in problem definition to avoid issues later on. A well-defined problem makes it easier to find solutions down the road.
Guide 3
Clarify the product purpose and vision.
After conducting discovery and writing a problem statement, you can create your product vision, which aligns the customer and delivery teams around a common purpose. Here’s how to define your vision:
- Define the Vision: Using your discovery findings, create an aspirational vision statement that concisely describes the long-term goal, purpose, and intention of your product.
- Tie It Back to the Mission: Connect your product vision to your customer’s larger goals by adding a second sentence that ties it back to their mission.
- Create Your Product Strategy: Develop a strategy outlining how the team will achieve the mission and vision. A good product strategy includes goals, limitations, risks, and other critical elements.
Guide 4
Align stakeholders around the vision
Ensuring that all stakeholders and delivery team members are aligned with the product vision is vital. Here’s how to maintain alignment:
- Use Stakeholder Mapping: Visualize all stakeholders and their connections to each other.
- Establish Clear Communication: Set up communication processes with stakeholders, using Product Roadmaps to show the long-term vision and direction, and RACI Charts to define roles and responsibilities.
- Keep Business Value in Mind: When recommending changes based on user needs or technical constraints, focus on the business value to gain stakeholder buy-in.
Guide 5
Set goals and measure success
Use refined personas to guide ideation and prioritization workshops, journey and workflow mapping, and software development. Displaying user personas in workspaces keeps real user needs front and center for the team.