Product Frameworks
As a digital analyst I have supported Product teams with customer insights. In this article I’d like to talk about some frameworks that every Product Managers used in their work.
Take a phased, long-term approach to forming your product vision. To outline the GLEe model for your product and company, ask yourself these three questions:
- What is the initial product that enables the company and product to “Get Big” over the first 3–5 years of its life
- What will you “Lead” 3 to 5 years in the future: the next wave your product or company will ride?
- Once your product establishes a leadership position, how might it “Expand” even further?
Uncover your product strategy as you learn what would help you achieve your objectives.
Product Strategy is not a plan to build certain features and capabilities. Product Strategy is a system of achievable goals and visions that work together to align the team around desirable outcomes for both the business and your customers.
A successful Product Strategy contains the following core parts:
- Vision: a high level, ultimate view of where the company or business line is going.
- Challenge: the first Business goal you have to achieve on the way to your longer term vision.
- Target Condition: break down the Challenge into smaller problems you need to tackle along the way.
- Current State: the current reality compared to the Target Condition, measured and quantified.
Ditch the timelines and create discovery-centric roadmaps based on outcomes, not features.
Discovery means staying aware of customer needs and business opportunities, and ensuring that the company is building the right thing according to recent data.
The Now-Next-Later roadmap is a product management tool that organises work into three time horizons, from immediate to long-term, starting with the most urgent problems to solve that are clearly defined and detailed.
Place your product ideas in one of three buckets:
- metric movers: features that will move your target business & product metrics significantly;
- customer requests: features that your customers are actively requesting;
- customer delights: features that customers haven’t necessarily asked for, but literally delight them when they see them.
Jobs-To-Be-Done Theory provides a framework for categorizing, defining, capturing and organizing the inputs that are required to make innovation predictable.
Make your implicit assumptions into explicit by visualising how you’ll reach your desired outcome.
Good product discovery requires discovering opportunities as well as discovering solutions.
Get clarity on what you’re going to build by creating the documents you’ll need when you launch first and then work towards documents that are closer to the implementation. The process typically has four steps:
- Write the Press Release describing in a simple way what the product does and why it exists;
- Write a Frequently Asked Questions document by building on the skeleton provided by the press release and answering questions raised when you wrote it;
- Define the customer experience for the different things a customer might do with the product;
- Write the User Manual that a customer will use to find out about what the product is and how they will use it.
Ask three questions to help guide your product thinking:
- What people problem are we trying to solve?
- How do we know this is a real problem?
- How will we know if we’ve solved this problem?
Customer Problem Stack Ranking
Get clarity on how important a problem is to your customer by asking them to rank it against all their other problems.
Evaluate if an idea is worth pursuing before you make a big investment in it.
Tool 1 – Quick reference table
Tool 2 – Score your idea
The LNO Effectiveness Framework
Spend your time on the tasks where you can have the most leverage for your product, your customers and your organisation.
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