Are there any stages in product management cycle?
Product Management Cycle: The 6 Universal Stages
Product management is the skill that brings ideas into reality & thereby providing a viable solution to a number of user problems. For successful product launch & its sustainability any product manager should follow some basic steps. These steps help in providing a structure to the process & keep the launch cycle organized & intact.
There are 6 basic steps that is included in this process:-
- Market & User research
- Ideation
- Product Requirement Documentation
- Roadmapping & Prioritization
- Product Development & Delivery
- User Feedback & Improvements
Lets deep dive into these 6 stages & define these steps:-
- Market & User Research
Market & User research is the foremost step in the development of any product. Absence of this can lead to a failure for any organization or product. Market research includes identifying the customer base or market size of the product, identifying the competitor for the product, pen downing the strength & weakness of the competitors & identify the scope of our product in the market.
User research can be conducted through interviews or surveys. This will ensure a user/customer led product development.
2. Ideation
After identifying the market need or user problem that needs to be fulfilled or solved, we can look for the possible solutions accordingly. This does not include only brainstorming rather it should be using structured thinking. We should use flowchart based thinking & can take the help of MIRO in this. While such structured thinking we should identify different approaches & the pros & con attached to every approach & the impact each approach is creating. Then prioritize the ideas that will be the most suited. We can also create low fidelity wireframes for visualizing those ideas. Tools like Balsamiq or Whimsical or Figma are very helpful for creating such wireframes.
3. Product Requirement Document
After finalization of the ideas that will cater to the market need, we need to create the product requirement document aka “PRD” that will include the technical specifications of the idea. In PRDs, the list of ideas are converted into Epics & User Stories. In this we have to take care of all the corner cases that may arise during the ideation.
During this phase the Product manager needs to communicate with the UI(Design) Team for creation of a well defined prototype of the product to showcase the stakeholders for acquiring their sign-off.
In the PRD phase we also define the Metrics that we need to calculate for measuring the success of the Product. Here comes the role of Events triggering & storage of the data in the Database.
4. Road mapping & Prioritization
One of the prime KRA of a product manager is to define the Roadmap of the product. Roadmap is not the same as prioritization. Roadmap is usually defined by keeping in mind the broader objective or goal and the North Star metrics that the product will help in achieving. A NorthStar metric is not always driven by profit or revenue; rather it also has an element of Nirvana(Aha Moment) kind of feeling in user experience. Roadmap basically includes the different phases & timeline required for developing the product before Go-to-market. The Roadmapping is done at the Epic level where we define which epic to be delivered in which phase so that the organization can move faster in the direction of achieving the goal by tracking the said Northstar metric.
After creating the roadmap, we need to prioritize the different user stories that will be taken into development. While prioritizing, a product manager must ensure that the relevant stakeholders are aligned with the same. We use different techniques while prioritizing. For example- RICE(Reach-Impact-Confidence-Effort) Scoring method, MoSCoW(Must have, Should have, Could have, Won’t have) Prioritization Method.
While prioritizing we must remember that we don’t have to make everyone happy. Here the soft skills of the product manager comes into play where he brings every stakeholder on the same board.
5. Product Development & Delivery
Having a roadmap & setting setting the priorities, the product will enter the development phase where the actual coding task will take off. Here developer & program/project manager plays a key role. Here development & testing both are done side by side so that handover of features will be quick resulting in quicker release cycle.. In this phase the product manager remains involved in Testing of the features & listening to the demand & queries of the development team along with planning the Go-to-market(GTM)/Launch strategy.
While developing a product manager should take care that he/she has to deliver a Minimum Lovable product(MLP). This can be taken care by focusing on the values & user pain points that one wants to solve through the product. After testing the Feature, UI & data getting collected, the MLP is released for the users adhering to the planned GTM.
6. User feedback & improvements
After the product is released, it is the duty of the product manager to align the product analytics team to look into the metrics defined for the product & look whether the metrics align with the success benchmarks & ultimately is moving towards achieving the said North Star metrics. Also the product managers can conduct surveys or interview their users for the sentiment analysis of the released product.
Based on these findings the product manager can decide whether to increase the marketing of the product/feature or educate/nudge the users or remove the barriers of the users that come while the user uses the product.
Here the product manager needs to ignore or swallow his/her ego & listen to the feedback/inputs of the users & take into consideration the user’s opinion. This will help the product manager in gathering the ideas that will ultimately help in maturing the product and provide the Aha/Nirvana moment for the customers.
Conclusion:
Product management is not something which has a defined path or framework. Any theory can vary from organization to organization or from Product to product. Same holds true for these stages of Product management. However the basic skeleton remains the same & adhering to these stages helps in providing the requisite structure to the overall product delivery. One will always find that knowingly or unknowingly he/she is lying in one of the stages in the product launch journey even though it can be customized.
Thank you for reading !!!
