3 Pillars of Product
The core functions of Product Management are straight forward, clustering around a primary objective of Product-Market fit. If you start with a Northstar of generating business value by creating solutions that solve real problems and general real demand from customers, then what you need to do is obvious. Yet the adoption of Product Management into software organizations has conflated this truth with the tactical role of a Product Owner, which arguably is closer to Program Management than traditional Product Management. When you combine that with a lack of clear definition and it seems the role of Product is a little different in every organization.
To this end, I thought it might be helpful create a simple model that defines this role, and the areas we should really be paying attention to. With that, I introduce the 3 Pillars of product Management: Here’s a quick discussion of each of the three areas:
I. Opportunity Discovery – This is the heart & soul of Product Management, since this where we really understand the big picture about our users and their needs. We perform market research to understand the competitive set and we work with UX/UXR to conduct customer surveys and interviews to understand their needs, and bring opportunities back prototype and size with Finance. This ideally is an ongoing stream of work that informs regular planning, but it can also kick off major new initiatives when new opportunities are identified.
II. Product Planning – Planning starts with an articulation of the vision, and creation of goals to determine prioritization. Once we have those in place, we can prioritize development initiatives according to what is going to be most impactful toward our vision and our goals. This is our opportunity to be strategic and make sure the entire team is aligned around the most important work.
III. Feature Development – Lastly, development is where it all comes together into a tangible product. By this point, we’ve identified the most important initiatives and when they need to happen. Now, each initiative needs to be defined with product requirements, and the user interface needs to be designed and validated. And depending on process and the size/type of initiative, this is also where PM’s will get more involved with the development teams, answering questions, performing UAT, setting up and calling A/B testings, etc.
End-to-End Process Flow
The following diagram shows a typical step-by-step Product process and how the 3-pillars model overlays with, to put it all together. As you can see, market analysis leads to opportunities in the discovery phase, which leads to prioritization and the creation of a roadmap), which ultimately feeds the product development backlog (user-story level priorities) and a release plan for when increments will be delivered.
