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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:

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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:

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:

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.