Product Management for Agile Businesses: Collecting Signals

5 min readApr 6, 2020

Small businesses need to be really good at product management. They need capitalize on their flexibility, yet make sure that they are exercising their resources in the best way possible — there is little room for error.

The Product Management lifecycle begins with Signals, and they are one of the most crucial parts of the whole process. This article will review the importance of Signals, the need for businesses to have a structured way to capture signals and provide some valuable tips for how to go about it.

Signals and the Product Management Lifecycle

At this point it’s worth reviewing the Product Management Lifecycle and understanding how Signals play their part.

Signals: Ideas for product improvement. We call these signals as they may be interesting or not, but are indicating there is something we should be paying attention to.
Validation: Determine what signals should be a candidate for Development.
Development: Find and develop a solution to the challenge posed in a candidate.
Go To Market: Launch your solution in the market place.
Adoption: Track your solution to make sure it is being used as expected by your targets.

What is a Signal?

“A signal is any idea or concept that could conceivably improve your offering.”

That is it as a definition and it is purposely simplistic. It does not at this point consider whether or not an idea is good, or whether or not it should be worked on. Some ideas are obviously misguided from their conception, some are fantastic no-brainers; but the majority live in a grey-area in between.

Signals can come from many different sources. The obvious ones are: sales, customer success, account managers, partners, support & development. However, one should also consider other sources such as: industry experts, blog posts, government and competition.

Why Collect and Process Signals?

Wherever a signal comes from, what you must be aiming to do though is collect as many as possible, and “process” as any as possible. Collecting all this information provides your business with a long term collection of industry intelligence, and a track of how you’ve considered that in the past.

A key outcome of collecting signals is the ability to see where and how they cluster. So if you have multiple customers requesting the same thing, you can start quantifying that and understanding that it’s a potentially good improvement to your offering.

On the other hand, if you have also previously rejected a signal, you can help your organization present consistent and rapid feedback to the client on why this is something you would not consider.

Working a Signal

Typically when you receive a signal, it’s likely to be very simplistic in its nature: “Customer X wants widget Y.” For a Product Manager, this is clearly not enough, so it’s really important to dig further into the request. Every signal should be “worked” to ensure it has:

Problem/Opportunity: what problem is addressed if this signal is implemented? That can also be an opportunity that is addressed.
Value: what value is created for the stakeholders(s) (customers, internally) is the signal is implemented.

Until these two key items are understood, a signal should not be considered ready to have a decision taken on it.

Value is particularly important. As Product Managers, this is inherently what we exist to generate, so we fundamentally must get to the bottom of the value that a Signal can potentially create. Without this, we’re taking blind decisions and are likely to create solutions that do not fundamentally address the underlining need that has led to the creation of the signal. Jobs-To-be-Done is a fantastic concept to use in order to get to this value.

Example of a Signal

Let us take the scenario where a client has requested a new report. This signal needs to be captured, along with the customer who has requested it, and then it needs to be worked to understand the value the report is expected to generate. Thus:

Description: client wants a report of when their data is updated.
Problem to Solve: client is not sure that the data they have in the system is up to date.
Value to Drive: clients having age of data means that the client can appear more reliable to their customers. Clients found that lacking this reliability led to 15% of their churn.

The Signal at this point is rather simple, however to get to this point multiple discovery discussions are often held within a company and with clients.

Tooling and Methods to Collect Signals

There is no silver bullet tool that will automate the process of working Signals, and neither should there be. It’s important that this process of working Signals is done as a conversation in a collaborative fashion. It’s very rare that a requestor will provide a clear definition of the Problem to Solve or the Value to Drive.

Signals can be generated at any moment, or they can be harvested at appropriate moments. Here are some ideas that can help generate signals for your business:

Internal:

Round tables with representatives from different departments. You could do this weekly, monthly or quarterly.
Open up a Slack channel where product ideas can be shared. The great thing about Slack is it’s easy to have a conversation with parties participating when they can.
Product open hours — publish a time where your door is always open and anyone can swing by.
Send a survey: regular surveys can push people to share their ideas. If you do survey, it’s important to share the results too!

External:

Set up meetings with a representative set of clients to ask what they need more from your product.
Survey clients who you can’t talk with directly.
Use in-app tools such as Pendo to ask for feedback — this is often a good opportunity to combine with NPS requests.
Set up a Customer Advisory Board to discuss with your key clients.
Listen and participate in Quarterly reviews.
Subscribe to the key blogs in your industry (you can have their RSS feeds pushed into Slack).

Once you have identified how to get new Signals, you need to put them somewhere. Using spreadsheet solutions such as Google Docs quickly becomes overwhelming and doesn’t scale well; especially as more people use them.

Luckily, there are some great Product management solutions available such as ProductBoard, AHA or ProductRoadmap that will enable you to easily capture signals. ProductRoadmap has a nice chat-style interface so you can provide it directly to your customer-facing teams and it will give them feedback on the value that their captured Signals have generated for the business.