This article provides a quick guide and some resources to the product management.
The Product Manager (PM) is an important organizational role in a company. So important that quite often, they are considered the CEO of the product. Indeed, PMs are responsible for the strategy, road-map, and feature definition for a product or product line and sometimes the position may also include marketing, forecasting, and profit and loss (P&L) responsibilities. In other words, PM are responsible from the product’s conception through to its launch.
The role of the product manager spans many activities and it provides cross-functional leadership between different functions, such as engineering, sales and marketing, and support.
Product management activities can be grouped in 5 main categories:
- Requirement Management
- Roadmap Management
- Release Management
- Portfolio Management
- Business Management
And they are organized based on the below model (note: if you don’t like my model, there are a lot of alternative. One of my favorite is the Roman Pichler’s one. )
Let’s see in details each of these 5 area.
Requirement Management
Requirements management is the process of collecting, analyzing, refining, and prioritizing product requirements and then planning for their delivery.
The purpose of requirements management is to ensure that the organization validates and meets the needs of its customers and its external and internal stakeholders
It is composed by the following five phases:
- Requirements and ideas gathering
- Requirements identification
- Requirements organization
- Requirements prioritization
- Requirements conflict resolution
Idea and Requirements Gathering
The scope of this activity is to capture feedback and insights from internal and external stakeholders to add it into future products or product releases.
Requirement Identification (aka promote ideas to features)
Once an idea has proven value for customers and the business, the next step is to promote it to a product feature.
Requirement Organization
In this phase, raw product features are “cleaned”, “filtered” and organized in a coherent product feature list.
Requirements Conflict Resolution
In this phase functional dependencies between requirements are addresses and resolved. A good article on requirement conflict resolution is: Complex Requirements On an Agile Project Dr.Dobbs journal.
Requirements prioritization
Once organized, product features are prioritized. Features prioritization is one of the most critical aspects of product development as it can be the difference between the success or failure of a product. Prioritization is a constant activity balancing delivering value and the limited resources available. A great article on requirements prioritization is Enter The Matrix – Lean Prioritisation.
Release Management
It is the process of managing, planning, scheduling and controlling a software build through different stages and environments; including testing and deploying software
It is composed by four stages:
- Release Scope and Planning
- Release Build (aka product development cycles)
- Release Validation and Test
- Release Launch
Release scope and planning
It is the phase where the release components and planning are decided. It is composed by three stages:
- Scope of the release
- Release components identification and prioritization
- Plan and schedule release activities
Release build (aka product development cycles)
It is the phase where the release is physically built
Release validation and test
It is the phase where the release is tested
Release deployment and launch
It is the phase where the release is made available to the customer as software package or SaaS configuration. In this phase, marketing campaigns are launched, and partners are trained on the new release.
Product planning (aka road-map management)
An effective road-map is a carefully designed document that clearly communicates the product vision and the product areas of focus. Reading a road-map, anyone in the company should be able to understand what features we are developing, why we are developing these features and how this is related to the company strategies.
Generally, the road-map is composed by three areas: Current, Near Term and Future
- Current release:
- Granular areas of focus
- Specific Scope
- Clear features and design
- No changes allowed
- Near term release
- Wide areas of focus
- High level features
- Changes allowed
- Future release
- Wide areas of focus
- High level scope
A good source for road-map classification, description and examples can be found at https://www.aha.io/roadmapping/guide/product-roadmapaha.io roadmapping guide page
Portfolio management
The portfolio management defines the strategy on how position, market & sell solutions we have and to build, acquire or partner for solutions we need.
It is composed by three areas:
- Market Analysis
- Product Lifecycle
- Partner Management
Market Analysis
- Target markets
- What segments are most conductive for our organization’s goals and why
- Segment target markets
- Analyze portfolio SWOT
- Assess competition
- Map core competences to target markets
- Target Customers goals
- What are the goals of our target customers and their biggest obstacles and why?
- Research Markets & Interview Target Customers
- Determine the Target Customer’s Market Dynamics, Business Goals & Strategic Initiatives
- Determine the Impact to their Business Functions, Activities, and Workflows
- Identify the Target Customer’s Biggest Obstacles and Define Their Business Requirements
- Product relevance analysis
- Which target customer obstacles can our organization impact most? Which solutions have the highest value?
- Identify Target Customer Scenarios & Workflows That Have the Biggest Impact on their Goals
- Evaluate Ideas for New Solutions
- Determine Improvements to Existing Products/Services
- Quantify & Compare the ROI of Proposed Product & Marketing Investments
- Create and Update Market Positioning
- Create/Update Value Propositions
- Create/Update Marketing Materials
- Deliver/Update Sales Enablement Tools & Training Programs
- Execute Brand Awareness & Demand Generation Programs
Product Life-cycle
- Product creation – In this stage, the product is still in prototype mode. The product is proposed and tested on few selected customers. The investments are focused on testing the idea behind the product.
- Product growth – In this stage, the original prototype is become a real product and it is proposed to the market. The focus is on customer acquisition and revenue generation. Investments are used to develop new features and to acquire new customers.
- Product Maturity – In this stage, the product is well established on the market. The focus is on margins increase on existing customers. Few new customer’s acquisition.
Investments are limited to few new features and the focus is on support and cost optimization. - Product retirement – In this stage, the product shows a negative growth on the market and margins decline. End of support is announced to the customers
Partner Management
Product manager interacts with several company’s entities to provide full support to partners. The main responsibilities of the partner management are:
- Partner agreements and contract
- Partner pre-sales support
- Professional Service Support
- Join marketing event
- Product Support
- Field enablement and training
Business Management
The scope of this activity is defining the product value proposition and how the product will be monetized (revenue and cost projection). It is based on 3 steps:
- Cost analysis
- Revenue projection
- Market analysis
The output of this phase is the Product Business Plan
Some interesting resources on how to create product business plan can be found here.