Intro To Product Management
What is product management?
Definition of Product Management
All products (and projects) can be either build with or without processes and stages. Building single feature project with least functionality is ideal to be build without much complications. But when it comes to big products with many features, multiple stakeholders, and teams, structured manner helps a lot to ensure the outcome to be aligned with the plan.
With that said, product management is the strategic function which takes a product from its initial conception till public release and ongoing optimizations. It is intended to achieve the business goals while solving the customer needs.
Product Management Lifecycle
In common, Product Management Lifecycle is defined as six core stages. Discovery, validation, planning, development, release, and post release.
But as it should be always, starting with defining the business objective clearly, which the organization is required to achieve should be the first step. This helps to ensure focus the efforts throughout the lifecycle to what is most important to your overall company.
Discovery
Identify the pain points of customers and the larger market is next crucial step. This helps to understand what all problems are standing in the way of achieving the business outcome. Analysing questions like what is preventing customers from retaining at a higher rate? What is blocking adoption? What do users need in order to be more successful.
In this phase you will understand the pain points of the customers and larger market.
Validate
Validation is the process of collecting data to ensure you are headed in the right way of providing solution to the users. From discovery phase, you will have a clear understanding of problems and potential solutions to these problems.
In this phase, you will work to validate your product ideas in order to determine the right solutions to move forward with.
Build
Partner with engineers and product designers to ensure your idea comes to life as intended. After getting aligned with what to build, engineers get to work. But the work of product manager is not done yet. During the build phase, you will partner closely with engineers and product designers to ensure your idea come to life as you intended, or determine how to pivot if needed. This is also when you will share and to an extend defend the product roadmap.
Launch
This is where to get the new functionalities out into the world and ensure customers adopt and continue using it. Build a launch plan to make sure customers adopt and continue using new functionality.
In this phase, you will work closely with marketing, customer success, and sales to build a go to market plan that is scaled to the size and importance to the release.
Evaluate
After you have launched a new product or feature, it is critical to evaluate its success using both quantitative and qualitative data.
Iterate
This phase is an ongoing process, till the product is retired. Here we determine how you can improve what is built.
The phase of discovery restarts after this phase to identify what to build next. Also, you might not move through these phases in perfect order. You might also be in the middle of multiple life cycles at once. And you might have to balance between being in discovery for one feature and iterating on another