In December, the focus from my Coalescing Principles post centered on three fundamental areas Product Management leaders should be focused on: Vision, Execution, & Measurement. And it further explored the idea of competencies by asking the questions what is the organization expecting of us in this role? How are we doing against those expectations?

Providing clarity around these questions, to the team as well as to the organization at large, was a theme I took into our annual Sales Kickoff Event. It starts with an understanding of what Product Management is (and to be clear there are many perspectives out there if you were to search the term). I like this adaptation of one I found on Wikipedia because it is simple enough to follow, and if you were to evaluate the essence of the many Product Management frameworks out there, they all build their models around this context:

Product Management is the business process of managing the entire lifecycle of introducing a product or service … from ideation to planning to development to launch.

Ideation

Many moons ago, I posted about innovation being a funnel, not a pipe … keep the ideas flowing and try something new. After all, when you look at the Ideation stage of the Product Management Lifecycle, it should be fed with many ideas. Key to this is having a place for key stakeholders to go to feed the funnel. We are using the Ideas Portal from Aha! as the primary mechanism to solicit such feedback. The intent of having the Portal is to:

  • Encourage innovation: Ideas are essential for innovation.  The Portal serves as an interactive hub to submit the ideas customers want, or improvements to process, or other innovative ideas.​
  • Centralize/Crowdsource feedback: Contributors are empowered to not only suggest enhancements, but also to vote/comment on the product ideas most likely to drive the greatest impact such that they rise to the top for consideration.
  • Manage requests efficiently: Ideas will be reviewed, organized, and scored as part of the intake process in preparation for consideration on the roadmap. Ideas which demonstrate tangible business benefits will be promoted and worked through the process.
  • Promote transparency: Stakeholders will remain informed about status/progress of their submission.

And remember, sometimes focus is about saying no! Not all ideas warrant progression to the next stage.

Planning/Roadmap

Promoted Ideas will be the primary basis for all work prioritized by the Product Team for planning purposes and will feed product roadmaps.  But to borrow a quote, the reality is the number of demands will always outnumber the supply of your time.

So how do you approach situations where feature enhancements are stacking up, but capacity constraints prevent everything from getting done? The answer is through planning and prioritization. The focus should be on a stack ranked perspective of the things deemed most important to the business. This stack ranked perspective, alongside understanding the capacity of the team to deliver, inevitably leads to Product Roadmaps. Roadmaps serve not only as guiding strategic documents, but also as a plan for executing the product strategy. They allow for:

  • Prioritization: Roadmaps allow product managers to think through priorities before making any promises about when or how objectives will be met.
  • Sharing: Roadmaps align teams on how and when we will reach desired objectives and facilitate transparent communication with stakeholders.
  • Accountability: Roadmaps keep product managers accountable to the stakeholders who are depending on them.

Launch

Launch (or commercialization) is the process of driving an idea to market. Done properly, it is how Ideas turn into dollars. The bottom line behind this discussion is a pay me now or pay me later equation.  Yes, this will take a lot of time and effort up front.  But if you invest in it up front, it mitigates issues on the back end where you would end up spending even more time.

  • Identification: Commercialization identifies all affected stakeholders early in the process, and officially begins when a project is committed for delivery.
  • Alignment: Commercialization aligns stakeholders with what tasks need to be finished by when and is complete only when all Stakeholders have approved.
  • Excitement: The goal is to build awareness, excitement, and momentum for new capabilities and maximize the launch potential.

To dig a bit more into this topic, check out my post are you sure you are ready or this one on go-to-market.