10 Popular Product Frameworks — A brief guide

This is a beginner-friendly guide to top 10 Product Management frameworks and everything is super summarized here with all the important keywords for almost all popular frameworks mentioned. To justify the title of the article, I will be keeping this introduction brief as well. Happy learning :)

1. North Star Metric

Source(s): amplitude.com

Core points

→ Captures the core values that your product delivers to customers.

→ Leading Indicator of future success.

→ Provides realized value to customers.

→ A product can have more than 1 North Star Metric.

Three critical purposes of NSM in a company

1. Clarity and Alignment on what to optimize for.
2. Communicate impact and progress to the rest of the team.
3. Holds product accountable to an outcome.

Two main parts

1. Product vision statement.
2. The key metric that serves the current product strategy.

Four dimensions

1. Breadth
2. Depth
3. Frequency and Efficiency
4. Productivity

Three attributes

1. Measure customer value.
2. Represent Product Strategy.
3. Leading Indicator of Revenue.

Three possible games for digital products

1. The Attention Game (Eg. Netflix and Facebook)
2. The Transaction Game (Eg. Amazon and Walmart)
3. The Productivity Game (Eg. Salesforce and Adobe)

2. Jobs to be Done (JTBD) — Customer Needs

Source(s): jobs-to-be-done, product-plan, hbr

Core points

→ Customers recruit services or products to fulfill a particular purpose.

→ For categorizing, defining, capturing, and organizing the inputs that are required to make innovations predictable.

→ Transforms our understanding of customer choices that no amount of data ever can.

→ Insight into the job that customers need to be done allows the company to differentiate from competitors that cannot comprehend or copy.

→ Need statements are valid for years together.

Two ways of using it

1. To understand market needs or wants better.
2. To create a better customer experience.

Principles

1. “Job” → Goal of an individual in a given situation.
2. Circumstances (from a customer’s perspective) > all others (new technologies, etc).
3. Good innovation → solve where inadequate or no solution exists.
4. Jobs → social + emotional dimensions along with function.
5. Innovate without guessing trade-offs.
6. Creating experience > creating products.
7. Integrate processes.

Three parts

1. When (situation).
2. I want to (motivation).
3. So I can (expected outcome).

Types of customers for product/company

1. The Job Executor.
2. The Product Lifecycle Supporter.
3. The Buyer.

Jobs getting done

1. The Core Functional Job.
2. Related Jobs.
3. Emotional Jobs.
4. Consumption Chain Jobs.
5. Purchase Decision Job.

Characteristics of the Desired outcome statement

1. Devoid of solutions.
2. Stable over time.
3. Measurable.
4. Controllable.
5. Structured in a quantitative survey for reliable prioritization.
6. Tied to the underlying job.

3. First Principles

Source(s): blackboxofpm

Core points

→ Basic, foundational propositional or assumption that cannot be deduced from any other assumption or proposition.

→ A Product Manager is purely a generalist.

→ Core is a great decision budging both the Principles.

Principle A

Maximize impact on the mission (left brain → logic/reason).

Develop product strategy on 3 inputs:

1. What the real goal is?
2. What environment around them is signaling (market+customer signals)?
3. What people, money, and time constraints exist?

Principle B

Accomplish everything through others (right brain → people/chaos).

→ Product Managers are like coaches in a game and coaches do not play.

→ Product managers need strong self-awareness to know when to partner, lead or support their team.

→ Coaches need to know what every player does to be effective and nurture the energy levels and the mental state of the team.

4. The Hook Model (Hooked by Nir Eyal) — Changing User Behaviour

Source(s): Hari-Vinod, nirandfar

Core points

→ Habits are a superpower

→ Building habit-forming products by establishing hooks.

→ Connect a user’s problem with your solution with a frequency enough to make it a habit.

NirAndFar.com

Four steps

1. Trigger —Actuator of behavior.

Types

i) External Triggers (Types — Paid, Earned, Relationship, and Owned).

ii) Internal Triggers.

2. Action — Done in anticipation of reward; based on the Fogg Behaviour Model.

3. Variable reward — Rewarding users for an action done (reinforcement);

Types — i) Tribe ii) Hunt iii) Self

4. Investment — Combination of asking users for Money, Data, Effort, Time, or Social Capital like followers.

Two goals

i) Increase the chances of the user making another pass through the Hook when the next trigger is presented.

ii) Asking the user for investment when the user’s brain is still hooked to the anticipation of reward.

Three core motivators of a behavior

1. Avoiding pain and seeking pleasure.
2. Avoiding fear and seeking hope.
3. Avoiding social rejection and seeking social acceptance.

Habit Testing

1. Identify
2. Codify
3. Modify

Manipulation Matrix

NirAndFar.com

5. AARRR (Pirate Metrics) — Product Analytics

Source(s): ProductPlan, Dave McClure

Core Points

→ Acronym for five user behavior metrics.

→ Also known as Pirate Metrics because of its “AARRR” sound while pronouncing.

User behavior metrics to be tracked

1. A — Acquisition (How do users find you?).
2. A — Activation: The core value of the Product is tested (Do users have a great first experience?).
3. R — Retention (Do users come back?).
4. R — Revenue (How do you make money?).
5. R — Referral (Do users tell others?).

Steps of executing the AARRR framework

1. Identify your product’s AARRR Pirate metrics.
2. Setup processes to track and analyze these AARRR pirate metrics.
3. Run tests (A/B tests) for all stages of user behavior to find better approaches.
4. Use these metrics to improve initiatives and take better decisions.

6. HEART — UX and Product Decisions

Source(s): Kerry Roden, Product-Plan

Core points

→ To use the right metrics to analyze and compare different interfaces and make proper product decisions.

→ You can’t manage what you can’t measure if you can’t measure.

Two methods

1. HEART framework (for quality of user experience).
2. Goals-Signals-Metrics process (goals of project or product).

Categories of HEART framework

1. H for Happiness — Measures user attitudes like Net Promoter Score, Satisfaction, etc.
2. E for Engagement — Measures the level of user involvement like frequency and intensity.
3. A for Adoption — Measures the rate at which new users join a product or feature.
4. R for Retention — Rate at which existing users return to a product or feature.
5. T for Task Success — Measures user experience behaviors like efficiency, effectiveness, and error rate.

Goals-Signal-Metrics Process

Identify goals to choose metrics (higher level) → Signal or failure signal (lower-level) → Metrics to track signals or use for comparison in A/B test.

Note: Do not add “interesting stats” to your list of metrics.

library.gv

7. RICE Scoring Model— Prioritization

Source(s): Intercom, Product-Plan

Core Points

→ To decide between hard-to-compare ideas

→ Four factors: Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort.

R — Reach

1. Answering — How many people each project will affect in a given time period?
2. To avoid bias.
3. Measured using the estimated number of events/people per time period.
4. Use reach measurements.

I — Impact

1. To beat the tangled mess of gut feeling.
2. Measured using impact on an individual person.

Scoring

3 = massive impact

2 = high impact

1 = medium impact

0.5 = low impact

0.25 = minimal impact

C — Confidence

1. To curb enthusiasm for ill-defined ideas.
2. Answering — How much support do you really have for your estimates?

Scoring

100% = high confidence

80% = medium confidence

50% = low confidence

nil = moonshot

E — Effort

1. Measured in person months.
2. Measures the work that a person can do in a month.

RICE Score (total impact per time worked) = (REACH x IMPACT x CONFIDENCE)/(EFFORT)

8. MoSCoW — Prioritization

Source(s): Product-Plan

Core Points

→ Prioritize User Stories and Tasks.

→ Useful while negotiating workstreams and product requirements.

→ Based on (Moscow) — Must-Have, Should-Have, Could-Have, Will-not-have.

Groundwork to lay before using the framework

1. Stakeholders need to be aligned.
2. Disagreements settled.
3. Finding what % of resources to allocate to each category.

M — Must-have

Non-negotiable product needs that are mandatory for the team.

S — Should-have

Important initiatives that are not vital, but add significant value.

C — Could-have

Nice to have initiatives that will have a small impact if left out.

W — Will-not-have

Initiatives that are not of priority for this specific time frame.

9. CIRCLES — Product Design

Source(s): Decode and Conquer by Lewis C. Lin, Product-plan, PM School

Core Points

→ Based on the Storytelling concept.

→ Framework that makes a complete thoughtful response to any product design.

→ To answer — “Design X for Y”.

C — Comprehend the situation

1. What? Why? Who? How?

2. Three-fold process

i) Clarifying the goal

ii) Understanding the constraints (resources, time, etc.)

iii) Understanding the context (foundational knowledge → no guessing or assumptions)

I — Identify Users

1. Identify Customer Personas and Users.
2. Segmentation.

R — Report Customer needs

1. Empathize.
2. As __, I want __ so that __.

C — Cut through prioritization

ROI estimates.

L — List solutions

E — Evaluate tradeoffs

1. Thoughtful, analytical, objective.
2. Reduce the number of solutions.
3. Impact, Complexity, Remark.

S — Summarize recommendations

1. What? Recap? Why?
2. Cohesive and Logical flow.

10. STAR/SOAR — Storytelling → Behavioural

Source(s): TheMuse, davidolszewski

Core points

→ Used for prompts where real-life examples of how a situation was handled are asked.

→ For creating a meaningful story of a previous work experience.

→ Tell stories about accomplishments in general.

→ STAR — Situation, Task, Action, Result / SOAR — Situation, Objectives & Obstacles, Action, Result.

S — Situation

Lay out a situation and give the required details.

T — Task

1. Highlight the task and the responsibility given to you.
2. Mention any obstacles that you faced.

A — Action

1. How you took the action.
2. Mention important steps related to it.

R — Result

Discuss the outcomes and results of your activities related to the given situation.

In this article, we have discussed some of the most important frameworks for Product Managers at a precisely high level generally meant for revision or brief introduction purposes for beginners. We will be adding more frameworks soon as well, thank you for reading!