Discover how strategic product planning drives a product from concept to market success, ensuring it meets customer needs and aligns with business goals. 

Behind every product there’s a story. It starts with an idea and ends with a new product sitting on a shelf, an exciting new game, new food or other innovative product. Before reaching its destination, however, that product had to undergo a long and arduous journey that was meticulously planned out. This is where product planning comes into play.  

Product planning includes all the steps that must be taken before your favorite products are launched onto the marketplace. When it is done well, the product has a higher chance of thrilling customers and turning a profit. When it is not done well, the product might very well fail to do either.  

This article explores the intricacies of product planning and how it contributes to a product’s success. Dive in to discover the key objectives, steps and processes that lead to effective product planning.  

You can start at the beginning or skip to the section that interests you the most:

• What is product planning
• Why is product planning important
• Key objectives of product planning
• Steps that go into product planning
• Additional items to consider
• Product planning and the product life cycle
• The product planning process
• Dos and Don’ts

What is Product Planning

Product planning is the strategic process of guiding a product from idea to launch, but it doesn’t stop there. True product planning doesn’t end when a product hits the market, it continues throughout the lifecycle of the product until the product is retired.  

Product planning is just that, planning. It is not a singular plan that you make, but rather a process that occurs throughout the life of the product. The plan evolves as new information comes to light, making the product plan a living document that grows with the product.  

Effective product planning ensures that a product not only meets customer expectations but also supports the company’s long-term strategy and growth. It involves understanding market trends, customer needs and competitor actions to develop a product that aligns with business goals and financial objectives. 

Why is Product Planning Important?

On the surface, product planning is crucial because it provides a strategic framework that makes it easier to guide products from concept to development and into the market. However, this simplistic view doesn’t capture the full importance of product planning. If you look at the big picture, you see that product planning plays a significant role in the overall success of a product for several key reasons. 

The process of product planning ensures that a product aligns with business goals, meets customer needs and uses resources efficiently. Effective product planning helps you identify market opportunities, define objectives, manage risks and even set realistic timelines. Each of these areas has a direct and measurable impact on the product’s success and profitability. 

Key Objectives of Product Planning

Aligning with Business Goals: Ensuring the product supports and advances the company’s strategic objectives and overall mission. 

Meeting Customer Needs: Identifying and addressing the target audience’s pain points and preferences to deliver a product that satisfies their requirements. 

Resource Allocation: Efficiently managing and utilizing resources, including time, budget, and personnel, to maximize productivity and minimize waste. 

Risk Management: Identifying potential risks and developing strategies to reduce them, ensuring the product’s successful development and launch. 

Market Positioning: Establishing a clear market position and competitive advantage to differentiate the product from competitors. 

Setting Clear Objectives and Milestones: Defining specific, measurable goals and creating a roadmap with key milestones to track progress and ensure timely delivery. 

Ensuring Product Quality: Implementing processes and standards to maintain high-quality output throughout the product lifecycle. 

Steps that go into Product Planning

Product planning is complex and includes many steps, from creating a product roadmap to setting release schedules and everything in between. Every step informs and shapes the product and plays a role in the product’s success or failure. This puts a great deal of importance on making sure you are diligent throughout  

Market Analysis: This involves conducting a thorough analysis of market trends, customer needs and the competitive landscape to understand where your product fits and how it can stand out.  

 Why it matters: This is important to product planning because it ensures the product is relevant and meets market demands. 

Product Vision and Goals: In this step you clearly articulate the product’s overarching vision and long-term goals, defining what success looks like for the product in the future.  

Why it matters: This is important to product planning because it provides a clear direction and purpose for the product development team.

Target Audience: You must provide a detailed description of the primary and secondary user personas. This includes their demographics, behaviors, pain points and needs.  

Why it matters: This is important to product planning because it ensures that the product meets the needs and preferences of the intended users. 

Product Features and Requirements: Using the information you’ve gathered so far, you will specify the core features and functionalities that the product will include. This should include detailed user stories that explain how each feature will benefit the end-users.  

Why it matters: This is important to product planning because it defines the scope of the product and guides the development process. 

Roadmap and Timeline: You need to develop a strategic roadmap and timeline that outlines key milestones, development phases and release schedules. This helps ensure that the product development stays on track.  

Why it matters: This is important for product planning because it helps manage resources and ensures timely delivery. 

Financial Projections: This includes a detailed budget, cost estimates and revenue projections.  Preparing these demonstrate the financial viability and expected profitability of the product.  

Why it matters: This is important to product planning because it ensures the product is financially feasible and aligns with business objectives. 

Marketing Strategy: You must create a comprehensive plan for market entry, including promotional activities, customer acquisition strategies and channels for reaching your target audience.  

Why it matters: This is important to product planning because it helps build awareness and drive adoption of the product. 

Resource Allocation: You must identify the necessary resources, including team roles, technology, and partnerships, to ensure the product can be developed and launched effectively.  

Why it matters: This is important to product planning because it ensures that all necessary elements are in place for successful product development. 

Risk Management: It is important to outline potential risks that could impact the product’s success and develop mitigation strategies to address these risks proactively.  

Why it matters: This is important to product planning because it helps anticipate and minimize potential setbacks. 

Identify Success Metrics: You must define key performance indicators (KPIs) used to measure the product’s success and track its performance over time.  

Why it matters: This is important to product planning because it provides measurable goals and helps assess the product’s impact and progress. 

Additional Items to Consider in Product Planning

When developing a comprehensive product plan, you may also want to consider including some of the following elements.   

1. Competitive Differentiation Strategy: Clearly define how your product will stand out from the competition and the unique value it will offer to customers.
2. User Experience (UX) Design Principles: Focus on creating an experience that is intuitive and satisfying for users, detailing how UX will be evaluated and improved.
3. Sustainability Goals: Outline any environmental or social responsibility goals your product aims to achieve, aligning with broader sustainability initiatives.
4. Innovation Pipeline: Plan for ongoing innovation, including future product updates, new features, and potential new product lines to keep your offerings relevant and competitive.
5. Legal and Compliance Requirements: Detail any industry-specific regulations or standards that the product must comply with, ensuring legal adherence from the start. 

Including these elements can help in creating a well-rounded and forward-thinking product plan that addresses modern market demands and opportunities. 

 Product Planning and the Product Life Cycle

Product planning is integral to the product life cycle because it lays the foundation for each stage within the cycle. During the introduction phase, it helps in defining the product vision and go-to-market strategies. In the growth stage, it ensures scalability and addresses customer feedback for improvements. During maturity, product planning helps sustain market share and optimize features. Finally, in the decline stage, it assists in decisions about product updates, repositioning, or sunsetting. This continuous planning process ensures the product remains relevant and competitive throughout its life cycle.  

The Product Planning Process

Product planning is a structured process that involves several key phases. These phases work together to ensure that the product aligns with business goals, meets customer needs and is successfully developed and launched. The following is an example of a product planning cycle with insight into why each phase is important. 

Phase 1: Market Review 

Analyzing market trends and opportunities: Understanding current market dynamics helps identify potential opportunities and threats. This is crucial for ensuring the product is relevant and competitive. 

Identifying key Customer needs: Researching customer needs and preferences ensures the product addresses real problems and meets market demand. 

Monitoring competitor moves and positions: Keeping an eye on competitors helps in understanding market positioning and potential gaps, allowing the product to differentiate itself effectively. 

Why it’s important: 

Conducting a market review ensures that a product addresses real customer needs and capitalizes on market opportunities. This process positions the product for success in a competitive landscape. 

Phase 2: Financial Review 

Reviewing company’s financial performance: Assessing past financial results informs better planning and resource allocation. 

Understanding revenue and profitability by product: Evaluating each product’s financial contribution helps prioritize investments and improvements. 

Why it’s important: 

A financial review ensures that resources are allocated efficiently and that the product is financially viable, supporting sustainable business growth. 

Phase 3: Corporate Strategy Development 

Outlining vision and financial goals: Defining long-term goals provides a clear direction for product development. 

Aligning with overall company strategy: Ensuring the product strategy supports the company’s broader objectives fosters cohesive growth and innovation. 

Why it’s important:

 Corporate strategy development ensures that the product aligns with the company’s vision and financial goals, contributing to the overall success and strategic direction of the business. 

Phase 4: Product Strategy Development 

Developing product strategy based on market dynamics, customer needs, and financial goals: Creating a strategy that integrates these elements ensures the product is market-relevant and financially sound. 

Specifying product changes and financial plans: Detailing necessary modifications and financial implications helps in planning and resource allocation. 

Ensuring alignment with corporate strategy: Synchronizing product and corporate strategies ensures cohesive progress and resource utilization. 

Why it’s important: 

Developing a comprehensive product strategy ensures that the product meets market needs, is financially viable and aligns with the company’s broader objectives. 

Phase 5: Product Roadmap and Release Schedule 

Creating a detailed product roadmap: Developing a comprehensive timeline guides the product development process and keeps the team focused. 

Setting release schedules for the coming quarters: Planning product launches in alignment with business cycles ensures timely market entry. 

Managing the roadmap with formal change control procedures: Implementing processes to systematically handle changes helps maintain roadmap integrity and adaptability. 

Why it’s important: 

A well-structured product roadmap and release schedule ensure that the product development process is organized, timely and adaptable to changes. This facilitates a seamless market introduction and continuous improvement. 

Dos and Don’ts of Product Planning

The following dos and don’ts provide practical advice for optimizing the planning process, addressing key elements that can enhance your strategy and execution. 

Dos 

Do Prioritize User-Centered Design: Focus on creating a product that offers a seamless and enjoyable user experience. 

Do Leverage Cross-Functional Collaboration: Foster collaboration across different departments to incorporate diverse perspectives and expertise. 

Do Utilize Data-Driven Decision Making: Make informed decisions based on data and analytics to optimize product features and marketing strategies. 

Do Embrace Agile Methodologies: Adopt agile practices to enhance flexibility and responsiveness to market changes. 

Do Continuously Monitor Market Trends: Closely watch up and coming trends and new technologies to make sure that your product remains relevant and innovative. 

Don’ts 

Don’t Ignore Financial Analysis: Always consider the financial viability of your product, including costs, revenues, and profitability. 

Don’t Overlook Risk Management: Identify potential risks early and develop strategies to mitigate them. 

Don’t Exclude Customer Feedback: Regularly solicit and incorporate feedback from potential users to refine your product. 

Don’t Rush the Planning Process: Take the time necessary to develop a comprehensive and realistic product plan. 

Don’t Neglect Post-Launch Strategies: Plan for the entire product lifecycle, including marketing, updates, and potential product sunsetting. 

Effective product planning is more than just a preliminary step—it’s a strategic practice that spans the entire lifecycle of a product. By focusing on market insights, financial analysis and alignment with corporate strategies, product planning helps navigate the complexities of product development and market competition. By having a continuous process of planning, you ensure that products remain relevant and profitable, meeting both customer expectations and business goals. 

Embracing these principles not only enhances the product’s success but also fosters innovation and sustained growth within the company. Read more about product planning with these helpful resources:   

How to create a strategic product plan 

A common-sense approach to product planning  

The post What is Product Planning appeared first on Pragmatic Institute - Resources.

This episode is from our latest Product Chat webinar >> watch the webinar

In a world where customer expectations are ever-evolving, delivering personalized experiences isn’t just nice to have, it’s imperative.” – David Tang, Product Leader (fmr. Dropbox)In this episode, Product Leader David Tang talks about the transformative power of personalization in today’s competitive market landscape, and how your company can learn from the players that do it best.Key Takeaways:

• Personalization and Customer Data: Learn how personalization shapes buying decisions and why customer data is key to understanding different customer groups.
• Customer Segmentation: Discover various methods of categorizing customers based on their behaviors and attitudes, and the importance of regular evaluation.
• AI-Driven Personalization: Explore practical examples of how AI and machine learning contribute to personalization, like reducing customer churn and recommending products.
• Evaluating Model Success: Understand the need for measuring the performance of personalization models using different metrics and KPIs to align with business goals.
• Building a Strong Personalization Engine: Get actionable advice for creating a data-driven personalization engine that improves customer satisfaction and business growth.

Dive into this insightful discussion to enhance your personalization strategies, better engage with your customers, and stay ahead in the competitive market. Want to learn more about using data in product practices and decisions? Take our Insight course to turn your data into product strategies.

The post How AI and Data Insights Can Help You Build Stronger Personas with David Tang appeared first on Pragmatic Institute - Resources.

The latest wave of AI is revolutionizing all professional fields, including the product world. As product managers and product marketing managers, it’s essential to understand how to leverage this new technology not only to become more effective but to build and create better products. So how can you optimize this new generative pre-trained transformer to improve strategies and performance, elevate your work and create powerful progression within your product roles?

Nils Janse, founder of Delibr, shares:

• An overview of GPT-3 and ChatGPT along with capabilities and limitations
• How to use it to prompt engineering, approaches and strategies
• Examples of how to build GPT-3 and ChatGPT into applications
• What’s next in AI for the product world

The post Powerful Ways to Leverage ChatGPT in Your Products and Workflows appeared first on Pragmatic Institute - Resources.

This article explores the importance of product data sheets, the essential information to include, and 10 unique tips for writing one.

Product datasheets are a checklist item in the technology industry. Your buyers expect you to have them (or, at the very least, your sales team does). But does anyone really read them? And, more importantly, how can we make them more engaging and impactful?

Ready to learn what to include in your product data sheet and how to write one that hooks your buyer? Keep reading, or use the links below to jump to the best section for you.

• What is a product data sheet?
• What to include in a product data sheet?
• How to write a product data sheet

What is a Product Data Sheet?

A product data sheet is a one-page document that provides customers with product information. They should present information in an accessible, easy-to-understand way, with clear text and helpful visuals.

Product data sheets educate customers on the products you sell. A good product data sheet can help influence product sales and perceptions of your brand. Product managers are typically responsible for writing product data sheets, among their other responsibilities of conducting market research and guiding products through development to launch. However, product owners and product marketing managers can also write product data sheets.

What Should You Include in a Product Data Sheet?

Anyone who has written a data sheet has wondered, “Will anyone actually read this?” The good news is that buyers WILL read a datasheet if it’s written well and easy to read.

The key is to include important information that helps the buyer quickly scan the data sheet to understand your product. If they find it useful or interesting, they’ll then dive into the remaining content.

Product data sheets should provide essential information about a product. Your product data sheet should include the product name at a minimum. You should also include the product price, a photo of the product (or the product’s brand logo for SaaS products), and a brief description. Consider including the product category, manufacturer, model, dimensions or technical specifications, technical parameters, material, durability, color options, sizes, or ingredients/composition when relevant.

How to Write a Product Data Sheet

If your datasheet passes the all-important skimming test, buyers are more likely to dive into the remaining content. So, start with clear and concise copy that quickly delivers the key points and then utilize a format that helps the reader focus on what matters to them.

Here are 10 tips to help you write a product data sheet that your buyers will read.

Tip 1: Relentlessly Focus on the Essential Information

Data sheets are short. Typically, a product data sheet is limited to one page. When you account for your template layout, you have only a few hundred words to describe your product. Spend some serious time thinking about the three or four essential points your audience wants to know (there isn’t room for more, even if your product team is clamoring to include every feature in the last release.)

Examples of basic questions to answer in your data sheet include:

• How does your product help your buyer solve their problems? Keep this to three to four points.
• What does it do? It’s amazing how often writers omit this! See #2 below for more tips on writing a product description.
• What makes the product unique? Remember, this should be from your buyer’s perspective. What would they find unique about it compared to competing solutions?
• How does it work from a technical perspective? Keep this brief and just hit the highlights.

The key is to consider your audience and provide only the essential information they want to know about your solution. Keep each topic concise. For example, if the data sheet is for business managers, you don’t need to elaborate on how the product works technically. On the other hand, that information may be critical for network engineers.

Tip 2. Include a Product Definition on the First Page.

Most technology data sheets rarely include a product definition, but it orients your reader to your product and provides context for the rest of the data sheet. Include a brief (two sentences or less) product definition at the top of the first page, including how it solves your audience’s high-level problem.

Tip 3. Summarize product benefits upfront.

Include a brief benefits list near the top of the page (or on the first page if your data sheet requires multiple pages) to give readers reasons to continue reading. You can utilize a bulleted list in a dedicated left—or right-hand column so it’s easy to scan. Keep the text short but compelling.

Tip 4. Compose Headlines and Sub-Heads to Summarize Your Main Points

Readers will scan these first, so make them concise and be sure they encapsulate your main content points. A good test is to read only the headlines and sub-heads of your rough draft—do they summarize your main points? If the reader only reads them and nothing else, would they be convinced they should read the data sheet?

Tip 5. Use Bullet Points and Bold Key Phrases

Bullet points break up your text so it’s easy to read and quick to scan. Keep the text short and start each bullet point phrase with an action-oriented verb. And here’s a copywriting trick rarely used in technology data sheets: Bold key phrases of your main benefits—especially those listed in bullet points. Skimmers and scanners will read these even if they don’t read anything else.

For example:

• Gain deep visibility about where critical information is located
• Eliminate passwords once and for all
• Protect information in use and in motion

Tip 6. Consider Writing Headers and Sub-Heads as Questions

FAQs, or frequently-asked-question documents, are popular with technology buyers. It’s easy to see why—they’re organized in a Q&A format, making them quick to scan. You can utilize this same principle by writing your headings and sub-heads in the form of questions and answering them in the paragraph immediately following the header.

Examples of good headers formatted as questions include:

• How Does Product X Compare to Other Big Data Solutions?
• How Does Product X Work?
• Why is Product X the Best Choice for Managing My Cloud Data?
• How Do I Learn More About Product X?

Tip 7. Include a Strong Quote in a Call-Out Box

Validation of your solution by an analyst, customer, or third party is always good. Include a positive but brief quote from one of these sources—preferably early in the data sheet. Rather than inserting the quote in the data sheet’s main body of text, where it can get lost, include it in a call-out box in the margin. As your audience skims and scans the data sheet, it will be one of the elements they’ll read first.

Tip 8. Write in the Second Person

Many technology companies write their data sheets in the third person (“he,” “she”), which sounds formal and somewhat stilted. Your data sheet will be more engaging and conversational if written in the second person (“you”).

The pronouns you choose may seem like a grammatical nitpick – after all, what’s the big deal if you use “IT managers can cut cloud data costs” versus “you can reduce your cloud data costs”? The reason for doing this goes far beyond grammar. We should always approach marketing with the goal of eliminating as many mental steps for our audience as possible. Make it easy for your readers to self-identify with the problems and solutions you’re presenting by using “you” from the get-go.

Tip 9. Include Use Cases (Especially If Your Solution is Unfamiliar)

Technology companies are great at explaining how their solution does something but forget to explain when a prospect would use it. Contextualizing your solution or providing examples of how people can use it is critical.

For instance, let’s say your solution finds nuggets of information from big data storage that would otherwise never be identified. This is a great promise, but if you don’t give specific use cases about how you can help them, you will leave your prospects scratching their heads. Instead, you should provide examples of when they can use your solution, such as identifying data breaches before they happen or pinpointing slow web services that could negatively affect customer orders.

Tip 10. Don’t Waste Your Call-to-Action

The call-to-action (CTA) is one of the most critical parts of your data sheet because you’re directing readers to the next step you want them to take.

Most CTAs say, “For more information, visit our website.”

Don’t waste your call to action in this way. Put basic company contact information elsewhere in the data sheet, such as in the footer, rather than using your valuable CTA. Consider where they are in the sales cycle and use the CTA to direct readers to another source of helpful information. If they logically want information about your product’s architecture, include a link to a technical white paper. Or have a link to a customer testimonial video.

The point is to avoid wasting the all-important CTA and keep the conversation going by highlighting other helpful resources. For example, here’s a product data sheet that uses most of these principles.

The post How to Write a Product Data Sheet appeared first on Pragmatic Institute - Resources.

Unfortunately, basic measurements of user-centered design are not enough to create websites and apps that cater to users’ unique needs. This work starts with separating aesthetics from function. A website might look great but may be challenging to navigate, which can be incredibly frustrating for users.

On the other hand, poorly designed websites or apps may function well, but they don’t align with the brand’s objectives. Achieving the perfect balance between aesthetics and function is difficult, but it’s crucial to remain competitive and retain customers.

To optimize the user experience, product managers must accurately measure how users interact with their websites and apps. This article outlines a three-stage User Experience Measurement Hierarchy and a simple approach to selecting the best user experience measurement tools and techniques.

User Experience Measurement Hierarchy

Stage 1: Most organizations are in stage one. They likely have general knowledge of their users’ online experience. This is understandable because measuring user engagement can seem costly and complicated, and user-centered design best practices are widely available. 

Stage 2: Leading organizations are often in this stage. They’ve moved on to trying to understand user behavior. They’re seeing significant returns on investment, such as increased revenue, reduced support costs, and improved customer satisfaction.

Stage 3: Few organizations make it to this stage. This is when they’re using sophisticated methods to influence users, and there is plenty of opportunity in this stage.

Stage 1 – General Knowledge

In the first stage, organizations are typically working with “heuristic analyses” or best practices to create assumptions about users. Whether performed by an internal usability expert or a usability consultant, the result is an “informed guess” of what users need.

Tools to find out general knowledge about the user include:

1. Heuristics

Heuristics refer to web standards and research from cognitive sciences that identify best practices in interaction styles, page layout and visual design. When conducting a heuristic evaluation, usability issues typically relate to interface aspects that are relatively easy to demonstrate, such as colors, layout and information structure, consistency of terminology and consistency of interaction mechanism.

2. Expert Review

An expert review is a quick evaluation of a website or application conducted by specialists in user-centered design. This review can help take your user experience measurement to the next level by systematically rating your performance on relevant dimensions such as navigation effectiveness, content selection, visual presentation, branding and interaction simplicity. Companies like UserTesting and Trymata offer user testing services for your website or app. You could find contractors or hire a UX designer.  

3. Website Analytics 

Website analysis involves using tools such as Google Analytics, Mixpanel and Kissmetrics. Tools like these provide insight into the number of pages visited and viewed, typical navigation flow, key drop-off locations, bounce rates and conversion metrics. When combined with customer relationship management data, website analysis is an effective way to map and understand user behavior.

However, it’s crucial to remember that web analytics/usage metrics rely on assumptions about user behavior and how those assumptions align with your web goals. While these tools can help assess the relative success of your website in achieving business goals, it’s challenging to determine if they accurately meet the needs of your target audience(s). The knowledge gained from web analytics may be too general to understand individual user thinking and persuade them to act or change their online behavior.

Stage Two – Understanding User Behavior

The user-centered behavior metrics in this stage can provide an in-depth analysis of obstacles to accomplishing tasks on your site(s) and applications.

To truly understand what your target audience is doing online, you must study a representative sample of individual users. In-depth analysis is typically accomplished through user (usability) test sessions performed remotely or in person. 

These sessions will reveal much more about how users anticipate the site, how the application works, and what design issues might stop a user from accomplishing key tasks.

The best tools for understanding user behavior include:

4. User Testing

User testing is highly effective in designing for specific user groups. User testing can be done in person, in a focus group or remotely. It involves interviewing individuals who are representative of your target audience. 

You can determine ease of use and find recommended improvements by asking them to accomplish specific, representative tasks. Through this work, you can gather first-hand information about how users behave. 

User testing is often most effective early in the design process, before development and visual design.

The advantage of user testing is you learn what the target audience can and can’t accomplish, understand why users are having trouble, how to correct it and receive direct feedback. 

The disadvantages are obvious: it can be more expensive to test individuals, especially when dealing with multiple user types and many test participants. In addition to finding a testing facility and moderator costs, there are also costs to recruit and compensate test participants. 

5. Session Analysis

Session analysis involves studying multiple single-user transactions, live or replayed, based on certain criteria (e.g., error message present, drop-off at buy button). They can reveal information about the user’s path and how to correct flow problems. 

With session analysis tools like Hotjar and MouseFlow, you can create heat maps and recordings of anonymous users browsing your website. 

These tools provide detailed naturalistic web session analysis, monitoring and replaying individual sessions and capturing the user experience either live or replayed for specific individuals. 

Error messages, broken links or users deviating from the expected path reveal critical system weaknesses. The ability to produce a recording of an individual user’s sessions—including the page sequence, form inputs and button selections—can help find and correlate an individual user’s behavior to application errors.

6. Online Surveys

Collecting larger population samples through online surveys is a quick and inexpensive way to capture likes and dislikes, most common feature requests and summary information about a user persona. It is important to collect larger population samples to ensure that in-depth studies represent the target audience.

Companies like Qualtrics provide various intercept survey options integrating best practices from web analytics, market research and other tools, such as the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), to help companies convert satisfaction data into user-driven web development strategies.

7. A/B and Multivariate Testing

A/B and multivariate testing allow alternative designs to be tested and measured with a small segment of users. Tools like Google Optimize and VWO are just a few available options.

The beauty of A/B and multivariate testing is they offer the ability to isolate and assess the performance of virtually every element of a website, landing page or application.

Stage Three – Influence Your Users

It has never been enough to “put something out there” that works. To influence users, you must directly measure what users think. Websites and applications must be compelling to the users to be successful and for key influencers to spread the word about their positive experiences. 

Increasingly, sites are ranked on their persuasiveness and influence on user thinking rather than just the ability to accomplish a goal.

The following tools are ideal for understanding user experience and satisfaction:

8. Eye Tracking

Eye tracking is a technique that has long been used in vision science and can be applied to user testing. By recording where users are looking first, what is capturing their attention and what they choose to act on, eye tracking can provide insights into the user’s behavior and thought process. It goes beyond measuring overt behavior and can provide a window into the user’s thinking.

Eye tracking studies are particularly effective in an online publishing environment; for example, in news and entertainment sites. By testing a subset of a target audience, product managers can gain powerful insight into critical data unavailable through any other means:

• What first captures readers’ attention when visiting the page
• How often do readers see the diversity of news and content the publication offers
• Where readers are looking versus where they click

Tobii is a leader in eye-tracking research, and they offer several eye-tracking products. Eyequant is another tool that utilizes AI to help with eye-tracking projects. 

9. Emotion/Trust Measurement

Various measurements, such as skin conductance, heart rate, facial emotion detection, and mood surveys, are used to determine how users feel while using websites and digital tools. There is an increasing consensus that explicit tools (such as surveys) and implicit tools (such as emotion detection) are necessary to understand user motivations. 

Of course, there is the tried and true Net Promoter Score (NPS), a customer satisfaction metric that measures how likely customers are to recommend a product or service to others. 

There are also tools like Affectiva that use AI software to detect human emotion. Emotient provides emotion detection software that uses machine learning algorithms to analyze facial expressions and detect emotions in real time. 

10. Neuro-marketing

While only a few tools have made their way from neuroscience laboratories, some applications of Electroencephalogram (EEG) technology and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) are being used in the commercial arena to measure the engagement and emotional response to user experience. These tools provide a window into user satisfaction.

The critical feature of these technologies is to measure the experience of your target audience and understand what they find compelling and appealing. Using these techniques, you can also identify which messages are most effective and what dictates trust and positive emotion from your website or web application.

The disadvantages of these “higher level” measurement techniques are many. They require more equipment and analysis. Given their lack of widespread adoption, it can be difficult to achieve buy-in within your organization to pursue such an initiative. Finally, product managers are cautioned to develop a realistic return on investment model before diving in because they cost so much.

Measuring and managing experience

While there may be limitations in terms of time and cost when measuring user experience, there is a clear progression in the sophistication of user experience measurement. This progression ranges from a general knowledge of user experience to the ability to influence user behavior. Regardless of the level of sophistication, gathering as much information as possible is important. 

Pragmatic’s Insight Course 

What do you do with all the data you capture? How do you make sense of it, and how do you take action on it? Pragmatic’s Insight course teaches you how to identify patterns within your data to uncover and prioritize the problems you should be solving. You also learn how to employ a scalable and repeatable process for successful data projects. 

Learn More About Insight

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Join us as we welcome Trishna Sharma, Product Manager of Meta for a conversation on how to look at the key components of a successful product launch and evaluation techniques you can utilize to ensure you are driving powerful outcomes.

In this conversation Trishna will share:

• • The key components of what drives a successful launch
  • How to plan and execute launch strategies that remain streamlined and on track
  • Metrics and Data Insights you can look to, to measure success and efficiency
  • How to conduct evaluation techniques post-launch to ensure you are consistently improving

The post Anatomy and Evaluation of a Successful Launch appeared first on Pragmatic Institute - Resources.

A successful product launch requires skill, experience, market knowledge and a process.

Product launch is a topic that either elicits nightmares or euphoria—there is no middle ground. Those terrified by the thought of planning the next product launch understand that expectations are high and failure is not an option. On the other hand, those with great excitement can lack the experience to know what can go wrong.

Launch story

At Company A, there is a lot of excitement for the upcoming launch of Widget 3.0. And Robin, the product manager, has been focusing all her energy on finalizing Widget 3.0.

She’s under enormous pressure, especially given the product is over budget and six months late. Everyone in the company believes this version will take the market by storm. The product is so good; it can’t fail.

Chen, the product marketing manager, has been sitting on the sidelines nervously awaiting word from Robin that Widget 3.0 is finally in a state where he can start planning the launch. There have already been two false starts.

The first was an unforeseen technical problem. The second happened when development—in a moment of false bravado—claimed the product would be ready to ship in a week. Both times, Chen invested his time and energy into planning the launch, only to stop, regroup, and try to save face with sales. Now, he isn’t going to move forward until he is certain Widget 3.0 is ready.

Meanwhile, Jerri, the VP of Sales, is becoming more anxious each day when the product isn’t ready. She has a quota for Widget 3.0, and even though the launch is six months behind schedule, the CEO still expects Jerri to “make it happen.” Realizing she doesn’t have the luxury of time, Jerri instructs his sales team to start prospecting for Widget 3.0 customers—even when the product’s final details are unavailable.

So the sales team starts calling on prospects, with the hopes of building a pipeline for Widget 3.0. They create their own sales tools (without Chen’s input); and, before long, begin to see their prospecting work transition into a pipeline of opportunities.

The saga continues

Robin satisfied that Widget 3.0 will soon be ready, and meets with Chen to discuss the launch. With her back against the wall, Robin provides a delivery date but little in the way of direction or product positioning. Chen learns from Robin that the new reporting feature promised for Widget 3.0 won’t be in the release, and he’s worried about the backlash he will get from Jerri and the sales team, who are likely promoting the missing feature.

Chen meets with Rebecca in Marketing Communications to explain that it’s crunch time. The sales team is expecting brochures, web content, and the usual collection of sales tools—and they expect it now. Chen is under enormous pressure to make the launch of Widget 3.0 a success.

The fact that it’s late and missing a key feature doesn’t matter. When Rebecca asks what Chen needs for the launch, he requests one of everything, hoping that it will satisfy the sales team. With a little luck, something will stick and cause the market to take notice and buy in droves.

Chen hastily pulls together sales training for Widget 3.0 to explain all the great new features. He delivers a standard sales presentation and demo. Rebecca then explains the “air cover” marketing will provide to the sales team. During the sales training Q&A, Chen and Robin are grilled and ridiculed for dropping the promised feature, which the sales team believes is critical to hitting its numbers.

Chen knows that with greater visibility into what was happening with Widget 3.0, he could have better positioned it to the sales team—acknowledging that, while the missing feature is clearly important, there is plenty of value in the other new features.

On launch day, Widget 3.0 is announced. Unfortunately, all of the prospects in the pipeline were expecting the dropped feature—and, as a result, become lost opportunities. The sales team now has to build the Widget 3.0 pipeline from scratch, and they have lost confidence in the product. Under pressure, they focus on selling other products to meet their quota.

Sound familiar?

The mythical product launch checklist

Too often, the people responsible for a product launch seek out the mythical product launch checklist that will transform any launch into a monumental success. It doesn’t exist.

Product launch checklists do exist. They just aren’t very effective because they give the illusion of thorough planning.

Successful product launches require a planning process that examines multiple dimensions and adjusts according to prevailing conditions.

Assuming the product actually works and isn’t a liability, there are three critical product launch dimensions to evaluate during the planning process:

• Launch goals
• Launch readiness
• Launch constraints

Once the dynamics of all three dimensions are understood, then a product launch checklist can be effective in specifying specific deliverables and activities tailored for each product launch’s unique go-to-market circumstances.

Product launch goals

One of the most critical aspects of planning a product launch is to decide, upfront, the expectations.

Without a specific goal, there is no way to measure what winning looks like. Management’s expectations will go unrealized. Resources will be misaligned. Budgets will either be too high or too low. Without a goal, it is not possible to measure return on investment (ROI), which leads to skepticism about how wisely money is being spent.

Management’s expectations for the success of a product launch are usually too high. It starts when unrealistic expectations are set early in the product planning process and is compounded by unbridled enthusiasm that the product is so good it can’t fail.

Because launch goals are often unclear, the budgets that support product launches are all over the map. Without goals as a cornerstone, budgets can swing wildly based on opinion and internal political clout—rather than on fact-based rationale.

When management’s expectations aren’t met, they begin to question the credibility of the people planning the product launch. The loss of credibility bleeds over to subsequent launches, where every expenditure is questioned and requires justification.

Launch goals provide the anchor for a successful product launch. Unfortunately, many launches aren’t grounded in goals that are specific, realistic, or attainable.

Product launch readiness

The lack of organizational launch readiness is a point that many product launch planners fail to fully appreciate. Who is ultimately responsible for ensuring the organization is ready to sell and support the product? Is there a reliable way to assess launch readiness?

Product launches can be so focused on the product that getting the organization ready to sell and support it gets overlooked. We worry about product features, product quality, product documentation and product training.

Have you considered that virtually every functional area of your organization is affected by the launch of a product? The obvious functional area is sales. But what about customer support, accounting, Delivery, and Legal?

Successful launch managers understand that launch readiness goes beyond the product, extending into every nook and cranny of the organization. They don’t assume that other parts of the organization will be ready. They ensure that other parts of the organization are ready. They demand it. They measure it. And they make it happen.

The Launch Readiness Assessment

Launch readiness doesn’t happen on its own. It takes an understanding of what good launch readiness looks like for each functional area and the ability to reliably test readiness in an objective way. One way to address this is through a launch readiness assessment.

The launch readiness assessment is a tool used by the launch manager as a guide to determine how ready a functional area is to support the sale and service of a product. (Example Below) The information contained within the launch readiness assessment is a critical input into the development of the launch plan as it identifies readiness gaps that must be addressed in order to achieve the launch goal.

(If you’re a member of Pragmatic’s alumni community, download the launch scorecard template. Want to join the growing community of product professionals? It’s simple; enroll in your first Pragmatic Course, and you’ll gain free lifetime access.)

Consider the sales team in the preceding product launch story. Chen focused sales training on the product, which is not uncommon. Share the cool new product features. Show a PowerPoint presentation. Give a product demo. Is Chen’s job to create presentations, demos, and write content for marketing collateral—or is it to enable the sales team to be successful at selling Widget 3.0? How could Chen possibly know what level of training the sales team needs without a readiness assessment?

When products are thrown over the wall to the sales team without adequate training and market knowledge, you’ve guaranteed at least a three-month delay in building the sales pipeline. There will be multiple stops and starts while the sales team gradually figures out what works. If you’re the product marketing manager, you’ll be pulled into this thrashing process. You’ll create more slides, write more marketing collateral, and develop more product demos until you get it right.

When conducted ahead of a product launch, the launch readiness assessment provides context and rationale to management for actions recommended in the product launch plan. If the sales team is expected to call on a new buyer, the plan should show how they will learn to have a conversation with that buyer and the tools to use to move the prospect through the buying process.

Launch Readiness Assessment

Product Functional Area Sales Widget 3.0

Conducted by Wiley B. Coyote

0 = none; 1 = lowest; 3 = highest; a gap >1 indicates area to be addressed

Launch constraints

Launch managers don’t live in a world of unlimited resources. They are confronted with real constraints that represent challenges to overcome. It’s the creativity in addressing these challenges that determine the success of the launch.

There are many possible launch constraints, but the three big ones to always consider are time, money, and people.

Time Constraints

Time is a constraint when your launch window is too short to plan effectively, which leads to readiness gaps.

When faced with a time constraint, you have three options.

1) Reassess and adjust launch goals to align with the time you have and the readiness gaps you’ve identified.

2) Postpone the launch until adequate time to plan and prepare the organization. While difficult to justify, postponing may be the only option when there is overwhelming evidence that the organization is not prepared to support the launch.

3) Using the launch readiness assessment as your guide, attack the areas that have the most impact on the launch now. After the launch, systematically address other readiness gaps, such as customer support and delivery readiness.

Money Constraints

Underfunding a product launch virtually assures failure. Unfortunately, getting an adequate budget for a launch is often a chicken-and-egg problem. More money is available if some success is demonstrated, but money is needed to get to the first success.

The launch readiness assessment is your best tool to demonstrate where money should be invested. What’s more, connecting launch plan actions to launch goals is the key to getting an adequate launch budget. Make it easy for management to draw a line between the amount of money being spent and the expected outcomes.

People Constraints

The most common complaints about resources are too few, wrong skills and wrong experience. The easiest way to highlight your resource constraints is to tie people, skills and experience to your launch goals. In our example, one of the launch goals for Widget 3.0 is to achieve $9 million in revenue in the first nine months.

The average sales cycle is three months, and the average selling price is $100,000. The VP of Sales indicates that each salesperson can manage six sales opportunities at a time, and the company has seven salespeople.

Marketing believes they can add 15 qualified opportunities to the pipeline each month. And the VP of Sales states her team will close one in three qualified opportunities (33.3%).

Let’s do the math

Is the launch goal achievable given the people constraints?

In this example, the launch goal is off by 69%

Here we see an example of a marketing team capable of generating sufficient deal flow but a sales team that can only manage 42 qualified opportunities per month. Clearly, the launch goal is limited by the number of available salespeople. By bringing this resource constraint to management’s attention with a fact-based approach, you can better explain the need to address the problem or adjust the launch goal.

Product launch success in three dimensions

Successful product launches are planned with three critical dimensions in mind. The launch must first be anchored in measurable launch goals. The launch goals have to be believable and attainable. Then, the launch goals must be checked against the reality of the launch constraints of time, money and people. The launch goals and constraints must then be balanced against the organization’s launch readiness.

When the three critical dimensions of a product launch are understood, an effective product launch plan can be developed that demonstrates how the launch goals will be achieved and how launch readiness gaps will be addressed, something that is not possible to capture in a generic product launch checklist.

Enroll in Launch

In Pragmatic’s Launch course, you’ll learn how to

• Create a more strategic approach to exceed your business objectives.
• Execute successful launches, aligning your entire organization with the same strategies and goals.
• Empower sales with the tools and training they need to succeed.
• Align the buying and selling processes.

Learn More 

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The vital importance of asset assessment is often overlooked in the bustle of your next deadline. While we are busy strategizing and streamlining, we often don’t realize that one of the most effective ways to support, nurture, and expand our products lies within the existing resources of our own companies’ DNA.

So how can the assessment of our assets, tools, teams, and content help us to capture opportunities and deploy strategies ahead of the competition?

Join us as we welcome Sandi Olson, Senior Marketing Content Manager at Microsoft for a conversation on how utilizing the right asset assessment techniques can help you to analyze, prioritize and make forward-thinking pivots before your competitors.

In this conversation Sandi will share:

• How to approach asset assessment through a lens that allows you to revive, streamline and support any business strategy
• Ways you can utilize assessment to better integrate positioning and messaging
• How healthy asset hygiene enhances strategy development
• Archive, archive, archive
• Tools and processes you can leverage to ensure you are finding meaningful opportunities within your assets

The post How Asset Assessment Can Help You Outmaneuver The Competition appeared first on Pragmatic Institute - Resources.

The article explores the challenges and solutions in bridging the gap between product managers and designers to foster better collaboration and improve product development outcomes.

For many product managers, design can feel like a black box. You provide the designer with information about the customer’s problem, wait a while, and—voilà!—creative work issues forth. Sometimes the output is amazing, elegant in its intuitiveness. But sometimes, the output doesn’t even approach the product manager’s expectations, creating a sense of frustration and wasted time. How did the design go off the rails, and how can both teams work together to get it back on track? Without mutual understanding and a focus on collaboration, reaching successful outcomes is harder.

Similarly, the role of the product manager can mystify designers. How do product managers prioritize their decisions and balance different factors based on a product direction? What methods do they employ to gather user insight, and how does empathy play into that process? Inconsistent experiences with different product managers can contribute to designers’ confusion around roles and frustration around collaboration. This “black box” understanding of each other’s functions can create real problems, like poor communication and lack of trust, and result in inferior product outcomes.

Transitioning from Mystery to Collaboration

How did we get here? For one, we’ve reached this crossroads from different paths, bringing along varied skills, vocabulary, and perspectives that muddy the waters of understanding. Plus, organizations often oversimplify the separation of roles and responsibilities. This lack of nuance and an emphasis on ownership can contribute to an us-vs-them mentality. Ideally, both design and product management take an outside-in approach to problem solving.

By breaking down walls and learning about our partners’ processes, we’ll find the key collaboration points that increase productivity and successful outcomes.

Designers and Product Managers Have a Lot in Common

In their ideal states, both design and product management take an outside-in approach to problem-solving. Over the years, both practices have evolved to understand buyers and users better, concentrating on research and problem-framing before building solutions. However, these practices evolved parallel, resulting in somewhat different approaches to identifying, articulating, and solving market problems.

Both practices have also found greater influence within the industry. Neither wants to give up their focus on understanding user problems—and they shouldn’t have to! There’s strength in multiple perspectives. Each group has superpowers that, when combined, act as a force multiplier for the products they work on. But first, they must understand each other better, applying the same curiosity that serves them in research to their cross-functional relationships. For product managers, let’s start by peering into the mysterious world of design.

What Designers  Care About

It might surprise you, but designers and product managers care about some of the same things. Let’s look at some of the common areas shared between these complementary roles.

Understanding People and Their Problems

To do their best work, designers crave a deep understanding of their target users. As Shannon likes to say, “Good designers often begin their work with a deep knowledge of design patterns and best practices, coupled with an intuitive sense of empathy. Over time, good designers become great by developing a rigorous curiosity about people.”

Designers apply empathy to step into the user’s shoes when imagining potential solutions. To activate their empathic powers, designers need deep user context: where the user is situated, what goals the user wants to achieve, who the user must collaborate with, what the user currently understands, and what decisions and actions the user needs to take with the information at hand. This desire for context frequently appears as a request to be “brought in earlier in the process.” Translation: Designers want to be included in discovery or given rich context on the user.

Framing Problems Before Jumping to Solutions

Designers employ problem-framing techniques to explore problems that have been identified and prioritized. These techniques inspire the generation of innovative solutions and offer criteria for evaluating those solutions. A well-framed problem helps designers activate their creative talents. So, designers may want to collaborate with product managers on reframing the market problems they have been given.

Exploring Multiple Potential Solutions

Experimenters at heart, designers pinpoint the best ideas by generating a multitude. Knowing that the first solution is rarely ideal, they try out various ideas and permutations before selecting the right one for the job.

There are specific methods for exploring alternatives individually and techniques for groups to generate and evaluate multiple ideas before settling on one. You can take advantage of this skill by dedicating time to the schedule for this approach.

Narrative and Storytelling

It’s common for both designers and product managers to use narrative and storytelling during product development. When it comes to designers, they craft stories in their heads to help them think through how the user might approach a product or a feature. These narratives are the easiest, cheapest form of prototyping: A designer can write a story that explains how the product helps the user solve a problem, stitch together multiple features into a coherent whole and use it to get others’ feedback—all before committing to build it.

Stories are also a compelling way to present work in progress, communicating the user’s perspective and ensuring the product experience is optimized for their goals.

Feedback and Refinement

Designers need feedback from colleagues and users on their designs to continually refine the solution to achieve the best possible fit. While they try to approach the problem from the user’s perspective, they may overlook some aspects of the problem in their solution. By giving productive feedback—grounded in the user’s context and problem—you help refine the solution.

What Designers Wonder About Product Managers

The role of a product manager comes with different goals, processes, and expectations than that of a designer. Understanding these differences can make it easier for each side to understand the priorities and challenges faced by each.

Business Expectations

Designers are used to adopting the user’s perspective, but only a select few have a deep grounding in business strategy. How can you provide a deeper context on the business goals you want to achieve to ensure the alignment of user and business needs?

Prioritization Approach

How do you decide what problems to solve and solutions to employ? How do you balance market data, business objectives, user needs, and technical considerations when choosing a path forward? Describing how you weigh these factors and, if possible, including them in the process (so they can see firsthand your rigor in understanding and prioritizing market problems) will help designers understand and buy into your decisions.

Data Sources

Product designers and researchers are steeped in user research practices. Consider partnering with designers on NIHITO user research: You’ll reap solid insights, and your designers will be fortified with the deep user context that inspires great work. Designers are less likely to be experienced in buyer research, so share your buyer insights with them, especially in cases where the buyer’s objectives might seem to conflict with the target user’s needs.

How You Like to Collaborate

This is a true unknown area for designers. Some product managers hand off interface sketches with a request to make them real. Others define the problem and simply hand it to the designer to generate the solution. Some are looking for a happy medium: the product frames the problem, collaborates with the designer to find a solution direction, and then leaves it to the designer to perfect the details, with conversations along the way. Start a dialog with your designer about how you both prefer to collaborate, and select a model that makes sense for your working styles, business environment, personalities, and project priorities.

How You’ll Negotiate Conflict Together

Conflict is inevitable, especially when approaching the same problem through different lenses. Making a plan for overcoming conflict ahead of time will minimize the potential stress in your relationship. What happens when the best solution for the user doesn’t address your business objectives? How will the two roles bring this up and work toward a resolution that satisfies all needs? What’s your plan for identifying conflict early, leaving you enough time to resolve it?

An Expanded View of Collaboration

The only way to understand each other is to work together more intentionally. Partner to set up consistent spaces to play in the sandbox together throughout the process—with the necessary tools to achieve alignment.

Create collaboration points as mechanisms for deeper communication and idea-sharing. The key is meaningful collaboration. Everyone is busy, so you’ll all want to be intentional about crafting the right cadence for partnership. Avoid getting sucked into the “quicksand” of over-collaboration. And it’s good to remember that conflict can have its benefits. You can mine diamonds from the pressure of divergent perspectives!

Moving from the black box to the sandbox will require transparency, communication, and effective collaboration. While focusing on relationship-building may require a small time investment upfront, it will pay dividends in the quality of the products you deliver and your team’s efficiency in achieving those market-winning, delightful solutions.

Training that Improves Your Approach to Business Strategy

The Business Strategy & Design course equips you to confidently contribute to strategy conversations by tying your design work to business outcomes and ensuring you can measure and communicate how design fits into the strategic landscape.

Pragmatic Design courses are developed for designers, by designers. They are facilitated by experts and built within Miro—an infinite canvas platform—for an immersive, interactive learning experience.

Learn More about our Business Strategy & Design Course

The post From the “Black Box” to the Sandbox: Advancing Product Management and Design Collaboration appeared first on Pragmatic Institute - Resources.

For example, what is the product strategy that is driving roadmap priorities? And how is the product strategy linked to the company’s overall strategy?

Since most technology companies’ revenues come primarily from their products or services, you would think that the product strategy would be carefully crafted with the scrutiny of the executive team and that it would be meticulously aligned with an overarching corporate strategy.

But this is often not the case.

Without the engagement of the leadership team most responsible for determining strategy and direction, the risk is suboptimal financial performance at best and complete company failure at worst.

Let’s take a look at some practical approaches to making product management more strategic by engaging executives in key product strategy decisions and encouraging better corporate strategic planning.

The Strategic Product Plan

The essential goal of a product plan should be to ensure that a product delivers some business value to a specific set of customers to meet certain financial goals based on a defined corporate strategy.

A product plan describes the market opportunity, profiles the target customers, specifies pricing, identifies the financial goals, indicates the key priorities for development and enhancement and provides a roadmap for delivery for at least the next four quarters.

A comprehensive MRD (Market Requirements Document) might serve as the product plan for a new product. But each product that continues to be offered to customers should have a product plan updated yearly.

So, how does product management create a good product plan?

Let’s assume that the product management department is already managing several products that are currently serving customers.

After getting feedback from customers, speaking with the sales teams, obtaining a list of the top technical support issues, surveying competitor positions and features, and receiving new ideas from development, the product management team has generated a list of possibly hundreds of potential product enhancements across the product line as well as some new product ideas.

Project prioritization

Since there are limited resources, prioritization is a key step for any product plan.

Unfortunately, many companies apply some arbitrary prioritization scheme based upon the perceived number of times the feature/product has been requested or how much revenue they think the feature can generate.

The product manager (or their development friends) may also make assumptions about value based on how they think the product should be used. The product management team then creates a roadmap and a release schedule based upon these priorities and voila, the product plan is done, right?

No, it certainly is not.

The product plan is incomplete because the company’s strategy has not yet been considered. The executives who are chartered with running the company have not influenced the product plan. The plan merely reacts to random market facts and events. So how exactly does the corporate strategy relate to the roadmap?

Focus on What Increases Revenue

The goal of almost any technology company is to increase revenues.

Without a strategy to indicate HOW the company plans to increase revenue, then just about any product plan could arguably help the company achieve its goal, including the plan we just created.

But with a strategy that specifies how new revenue would be generated, a product plan tailored to support that strategy can then be developed.

For example, your company could plan to grow revenue by selling its flagship product into new geographic regions. Your company could establish a new reseller channel. Your company enhances its existing products to appeal to a wider base of customers. Your company could develop new products that appeal to the existing customer base. Each of these decisions carries with it significant implications on the product plan.

Selling into new geographic regions would require local language support and may have other specific regional requirements. Selling through a reseller channel may require multi-tier administration and branding. Enhancing products to appeal to a wider customer base requires profiling that new customer and understanding his/her unique needs and requirements. And developing new products requires new analysis, requirements, design, and development work.

Each of these strategies would result in a different prioritization of the projects on the product manager’s candidate list and a different allocation of resources. The product plan we created previously is reactionary and haphazard, while the product plan that responds to corporate strategy is directed and intentional.

So why aren’t corporate strategies incorporated into product plans?

There are several possible reasons, but three of the most prevalent ones are:

1. No strategy exists
2. The strategy has not been clearly communicated
3. The strategy appears inconsistent with market and customer data.

Let’s analyze each in the following sections and propose some ways to solve them.

If no strategy exists, then one should be created. At one company, the executive team employed a process where they reviewed and prioritized the top project requests every six weeks. This approach resulted in constantly shifting priorities since the highest priority projects were always related to the biggest sales opportunities at the time. Less critical product features never made the cut, resulting in an increasingly uncompetitive product line. Without a driving strategy behind it, your company risks being pushed by short-term opportunities.

Product management is in a good position to persuade executives to develop a high-level strategy as part of the product planning process.

Here are some key questions that product managers can ask executives to help with product planning that might very well stimulate some strategic discussions.

• What are the top 3 most critical challenges our company will address this year?
• In which geographic regions will we focus on selling our products?
• Will there be any changes to the sales or channel strategy?
• What are the revenue and profitability expectations for each product line?
• Will there be any changes to the focus of marketing and advertising?
• Are new markets or product lines being considered for the future?
• What strategic partnerships are on the horizon?
• What resource changes are expected for the coming year?

Now an astute executive may ask the product management team to answer or help answer many of these questions. And that makes sense since product management sees market opportunities, has heard customer feedback firsthand and aggregates it from others, has tracked competitors’ moves, and has an in-depth view of their products’ financial trends.

But at the same time, you still want to leverage the knowledge and experience of the executive team and make sure they agree with the assumptions and logic being used.

Therefore, a practical approach to strategic planning could involve a meeting (or series of meetings) where product management presents their market and customer information to executives, who then have a chance to discuss what they have heard and how they think it should apply to the future of the company.

You could expand the discussion to include input from other functions like sales, marketing, and finance so that everyone is hearing key information that will lay the groundwork for the strategy.

In a subsequent meeting, product management can replay the conclusions and decisions from the previous discussion(s) and then present a proposed product strategy that responds to them. Hopefully, by then, a consensus on the strategy will be reached, and the product management team (with the assistance of development) can then present an updated roadmap and proposed release schedule for the coming quarters for final review and approval.

The second reason why corporate strategies are not incorporated into product plans is that product managers don’t know about them or don’t understand them.

It is certainly possible that an executive team will define a company strategy and then succinctly describe it in a form that can be handed down to all employees for successful execution. More typically, however, the executive team communicates the strategy to their teams less formally. At one company, the executives felt that the strategy was too sensitive to share broadly and tried to share it on a “need-to-know” basis only. Most of their employees were in the dark about executing the strategy successfully.

The product management team is a key executor of the strategy.

They will translate corporate strategy into product strategy and will create roadmaps that drive the work of many of the company’s employees. So the entire executive team should present the strategy directly to the product management team. This will facilitate the necessary dialogue and allow for a joint understanding of the implications. Product management should then be required to develop a product strategy and proposed roadmap and present it back to the executive team to close the loop and ensure alignment with the corporate strategy.

The third reason a corporate strategy may not be adequately incorporated into product plans is that the strategy itself appears to be inconsistent or contradict market and customer data from product managers.

This is likely if the executive team developed their strategy without being adequately in touch with the market and customers.

If the product management team is being utilized appropriately, then they will be serving as the “headlights” of the company driving the front-end of the product development process, and they will be spending most of their time discovering market opportunities, customer needs, technology trends and competitor positions.

Now executives should always make it a part of their jobs to speak with customers and review market trends. But to ensure they hear the wealth of available market and customer information, it should be considered a prerequisite to developing the corporate strategy to have the product management team present a review of what they have learned.

You may have noticed that in all three of the cases where corporate strategies are not adequately integrated into product plans, the solution was direct communications between product management and the executive team.

Why Product Managers Should Join Senior-Level Discussions

Product management can help educate senior executives with their market and customer knowledge, can help mold the strategy, and hear it first-hand so they can properly execute it. However, there are reasons why this direct communication does not occur.

It is common for the product management team to report to a VP of Marketing or Product Development who represents them at senior-level meetings. These are broad functions with many responsibilities. Marketing executives are often measured and rewarded for driving revenue (with sales) for the company.

Product development executives are expected to deliver quality products on schedule.  So when sitting at the strategy planning table, what types of things are they most concerned with? How well do they understand customer needs and market opportunities? Is profitability one of their primary concerns? Are they concerned with short-term or long-term issues? In other words, will they be good representatives of the market and will they push to defend the bottom-line?

This brings us to a broader issue at many technology companies. Who is actually concerned with profitability and balancing short and long-term goals? Who ensures every key decision is made with key business goals in mind? In short, who is minding the store?

For most functionally-aligned technology companies comprised of sales, marketing, operations/support, development, and finance, the lowest level of management where accountability exists for profitability and long-term strategic issues are the COO, if one exists, or the CEO if  not.

Think about it. The sales organization is primarily concerned with revenue and tends to be short-term focused. Marketing typically supports sales objectives. Operations and support keep the services running well, maintain customer satisfaction and are primarily cost centers. Development focuses on delivering quality products on schedule and is also managed as an expense. Finance tracks revenues and costs but is in a limited position to influence them.

So, who is thinking about profitability and achieving long-term goals? If it is nobody other than the CEO or COO, then there is a real danger that the myriad of decisions made daily by managers across the company will not be made with the right focus.

One solution is to elevate the role of the product management function, given its critical strategic responsibilities, and have it report directly to the COO or CEO (or for larger companies, the relevant business-accountable executive). This makes product management a direct member of the leadership team making strategic decisions about the business.

This product management function will be chartered with providing market intelligence to inform the executive team, managing product profitability, and determining and driving product strategy consistent with corporate strategy.

This function becomes a resource for the CEO/COO/business leader to explore and manage long-term opportunities. The function has P&L responsibility and will drive business decisions deeper into the organization. It is a function that gives business leaders greater control over the plans that drive so many of the company’s resources, roadmaps and product plans.

Since product management is in such an influential position to execute the strategy and needs to work with so many of the other functional organizations during product development and delivery, it may be desirable to include other cross-functional delivery teams in this function as well.

The Strategic Planning Process

So let’s step back and take a look at what an end-to-end product planning cycle might look like when integrated with the company’s strategic planning cycle. Assuming that a company resets its corporate strategy, financial plans, and product plans once per year, the planning process would ideally occur during the 3rd and 4th quarters of the fiscal year in preparation for the upcoming year.

The five basic steps in the planning process (as depicted in figure 1) are:

1. Market review
2. Financial review
3. Corporate strategy
4. Product strategy
5. Product Roadmap and Release schedules

Step 1

product management presents a market review to executive management sharing facts on market trends and opportunities, key customer needs, and competitor moves and positions. Though product management will keep tabs throughout the year on many of these items, this is the opportunity to update the information to ensure it is complete and current. Other functions may be invited to provide their perspectives on the market and customers as well.

Step 2:

The finance team presents results on the company’s financial performance overall, for its sales channels, and for its products. Providing revenue and profitability by product is critical to making good product decisions and developing effective strategies.

Step 3:

This is when the company’s executive team outlines its corporate strategy regarding its vision, financial goals, and plan for achieving those goals. The corporate strategy should be explicitly presented to the product management team to facilitate product strategy development. For some smaller businesses, steps 3 and 4 may be combined into a single step.

Step 4:

Product management develops its product strategy considering market dynamics, customer needs, financial goals, and corporate strategy. It specifies what product changes are needed and indicates the financial plan for each product area. The product strategy should be reviewed by the executive team to ensure alignment with the corporate strategy before proceeding to the next step.

Step 5

This last step involves the development of a product roadmap and more detailed release plans for the coming quarters consistent with the product strategy. This roadmap becomes the official “product plan of record” and should be managed with formal change control procedures. This step is executed after the annual planning cycle and is repeated every 3 or 4 months to allow responses to changing market conditions and deployment schedules and should be re-approved by executive management.

Success is Determined By Product Success

Effective product plans to address market and customer needs AND supports the company’s growth strategy. Creating effective product plans can only be accomplished with strong communications between the product management team and the executive team because:

1. Product management has critical market information that executives need to develop effective strategies;
2. Product management can help develop strategies by asking key questions and discussing product implications; and
3. Product management must clearly understand the company’s objectives and direction to create product strategies and roadmaps.

By leveraging the product management team as a strategic resource, you will ensure that your products have been influenced by the best minds and information your company has available and you will gain greater control in driving your company’s success.

Enroll in Foundations

Foundations is an excellent learning opportunity for product teams who want to improve their communication.

Course Overview:

• Understand the market and the problems it faces
• Use market knowledge to build and sell products people want to buy
• Master the Pragmatic Framework and the activities needed to bring a successful product to market
• Learn to listen to the market, prioritize projects and drive result

Learn More 

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