The 04 dimensions of Product Management beyond Delivery — Practical Tools

In this article, I’ll tell you about the areas of Product Management that a PM person should be aware of, which are: Discovery of objectives, Discovery of product, Construction of the product Go-to-Market Strategy.

This article is also available in Portuguese.

I was a Product Manager in 2015 working for a Telefónica’s Group company, which is a gigantic group with a worldwide presence. I don’t remember exactly why I meet up a person named Michael Thompson. Michael was the Global Vice President of UX for the Telefónica Group, with previous experience in wonderful companies such as SAP and Apple. Michael came to Porto Alegre and presented to my team an amazing study that he had produced after an extensive exploratory research among different Telefónica Group companies.

He wanted to understand the Product Manager’s role for the Group, and after a large research, interviews and studies, he was able to consolidate the role in four dimensions of responsibility:

I kept with this this concept of DIMENSIONS and it constantly reminds me that my work cannot be focused on DELIVERY if I want my Product to be successful.

Shall we understand each dimension? Throughout this article I’ll list some practical tools that we can use in each dimension.

DIMENSION 01: Goals

This is the dimension that involves all the activities necessary to understand the business problem well and establish objectives to be achieved. Here is where OKRs lives, for example. OKR is an amazing tool which allow us to break a long-term objective into smaller objectives, by quarter, accompanied by key results.

What we need to understand is that everything we are going to develop and deliver to users should be created in order to reach business objectives. So in this dimension we have a tremendous responsibility to understand very well the results we are looking for before looking for solutions. In order to navigate this universe, it is interesting to know our company’s product portfolio and understand our value proposal. It is also essential to understand the industry and the business environment. It context will allow us to find opportunities.

The main tip here is to be curious and questioning:

• Who are the competitors, what do they offer?
• Which business models are succeeding in the market?
• How is revenue generated? What are the costs?
• How do we sell? What is the after-sales strategy?
• Which data are we analysing?
• Do we have any research to get some inputs? Do we need to collect data?
• What are Stakeholders’ expectations?
• Do we need to find partners?
• How profitable this product can be?

Choosing the best opportunity is fundamental, given that our capacity is always limited and we cannot build all our ideas at the same time. Make products is make trade-offs everytime.

Tools:

DIMENSION 02: Product Vision

Product Vision is about creating the vision of the product to be built. It's time to find a potential approach to solve our user’s problem while generate the expected results for our company.

In this dimension we are creating hypotheses, triggering quantitative and qualitative researches and putting our best efforts to empathize with our customers in order to find a suitable solution.

Don’t be economical: invest in user research, expend tome analysing the competitors and all the alternative solutions available on the market. Learn, learn a lot. Take a look at the current products results if you can. Seek for data in different sources, like satisfaction rate, list of complaints, social media information, everything that could makes sense. To get insights you want to be fed with value information, and there are 3 types of information to consider:

• Input: stakeholder expectations, business data, financial data, etc.
• Output: Product data (if it already exists), such as Analytics, satisfaction rate, complaints and feedbacks in general.
• Outcome: expected results. Those OBJECTIVES in the first dimension must guide the solution we are looking for.

In this dimension we are going to create, or rather, co-create. Let’s design the user’s journey, let’s brainstorm solutions, let’s make some sketches, let’s prototype. We must iterate until we have evidences that our proposed solution can work. And let’s do this with the development team together! It is useless to idealize a solution that is not technically feasible.

Is your idea good before or after it has been tested?

The ideation process can involve several tools and may require several attempts. It is tiring, but the message we need to take is that it will be even more tiring to invest time, money and energy in an unverified idea when it fails. I am very suspicious when urgent work requests arise based on a stakeholder “certainty”. An unverified idea is just an idea. A validated idea is a good idea.

Tools:

DIMENSION 03: Product Development

This is the DELIVERY dimension and embraces all those necessary activities to develop the product. It is in this dimension that an Inception Workshop lives. We want to create a delivery plan, based on MVPs, in a continuous delivery environment.

We should build a backlog, prioritize each item, plan iterations and run a development cycle of continuous and quality delivery.

Do not forget to validate your product while you are building it. You can make small validations with stakeholders through showcase ceremonies or a communication plan. You should prepare some presentations for different areas such as Marketing, Sales, Customer Service and show them your progress. You can validate even with final consumers, applying usability tests for example.

Tools:

DIMENSION 04: Go-to-market strategy

For our product to be successful it is not enough to develop with quality and agility. We need to take it to the market in a strategic way, so that we can reach the target audience, call their attention and follow the initial results.

There is a lot of work to do with the commercial and marketing teams. We need to define price and discount policies, incentives for use, we need to create internal training and service scripts. A possible launch plan, for example, is to deliver a pilot for limited users just to collect first feedbacks. We can fix some features and go for a soft launch for a bigger (but controlled) audience. As we understand the product’s performance, we can invest more strongly, reaching more audiences.

Different advertising strategies will be useful, such as Press Releases, active telephone sales, Social Media, publicity at events, etc.

There is undoubtedly a lot of work and a lot of material to produce. For all these related activities that some Product teams already have the role of Product Marketer. They are Product people who follow the development teams from the beginning, but who have an incredible knowledge in Marketing and Sales, so they will help us to build internal and external communication. It is very valuable work, which can determine the success in the adoption curve of a product.

Tools:

These 4 dimensions are not a framework. Their activities are not done in a linear way. The benefit of understanding that they exist is seeing the amount of work that needs attention in order to have a chance to succeed. The most important thing is to realize that the responsibilities of a product manager start long before the first line of code is written and continue long after the last commit.