Questions every product manager must ask to define a product roadmap
Every product is undoubtedly in a fiercely competitive business landscape despite the industry vertical they represent. Every business is continuously striving to announce diversifications, market development, and more importantly new product development to stay competitive and innovative to grab continuous limelight in the market.
The role of a product manager
Product manager plays a critical role in setting the right direction for the product team to get to the solutions that precisely addresses the expectations of target customer. Usually this involves working with business leaders, customers and the product team who’s speciality spans from research, UX, engineering practices.
Most businesses tend to follow a stereotyped approach to introduce new products to the market leveraging a popular external environmental turbulence just to be in the spotlight. For instance, many businesses leveraged the recent Covid-19 outbreak to introduce new technology and start new businesses vertices, with or without a proper analysis whether there is an actual need in the market or sustainability of these new products and services. The role of the product manager becomes critical in these situations, to ensure the business achieve desired long term outcomes than just being in the spotlight for a moment.
Product development lifecycle
Theoretically speaking, product managers should consider the phases of product development where the product team will initially discover the opportunity, then frame the problem clearly and subsequently attempt to design a solution and deliver/refine the same solution.
Having a clear idea about your target customer and their needs is a definite baseline for product managers. For instance, product managers can precisely explain to all internal departments about “why this product is important?”, “what will make this product a success?”. Having this message communicated to internal stakeholders enable them to put the right level of effort into developing the product. This initial research will be beneficial for companies not only to build a product that matters but also help them to look at the client’s needs objectively and develop a product that will gain market traction.
Question 1 - Who is our customer?
This is the simplest yet mostly overlooked area on most of the product teams. A clear understanding the “Target Customer” profile can help the business to focus their efforts in solving a very specific set of problems that are relevant and useful. It will help the product team to stay focused and avoid adding unnecessary features to the products. The profile of the target customer will unearth the specific features required by the users and sets the direction for the team to deliver only such functionality which ultimately saves time and effort.
Continuously discovering new insights and updating the target customer profile, helps the product managers to achieve long-term growth instead of optimizing for just for short-term wins.
Question 2 - Do we know the problem well?
Quite often product teams are in a fast-paced environment. Therefore sometimes we develop solutions without fully understanding the scope of the problem. Sometimes we release features at the wrong time, ether too early or too late. This is where product manager can spend time to full understand the problem domain and who are being affected by the problem.
A problem framing workshop with internal and external stakeholders will help to gain this understanding. In addition running the design sprint will help you share that understanding across the product team. Making them aware about the full extend of the problem that your team is solving.
It will help you work collectively with all stakeholders to develop a feasible product and launch it at the right time.
Question 3 - How are our customers solving the problem today?
This is an important question you need to ask and the answers will lead you towards interesting insights. By speaking and observing your target user groups you will be able to see how they workaround these problems and also see who are your competitor products. More often than not users are either working around the problems by using multiple tools or using a competitor product. These are critical insights to inform your product decisions.
You will learn the strengths and weaknesses of these competitors and tweak your offer accordingly and even inform the go to market strategy.
Keep in mind that a competitor analysis should entail meaningful information, not an exhaustive list of features of competing products. This analysis will help you to define the unique value proposition to differentiate your product, and market the product in unique ways, that grabs the attention of your target customer groups.
Question 4 - What is our unique approach to solving the problem?
Once you share the above findings with your team, you can draft multiple ideas of solving a problem. Your UX team will love this :) A potential outcome of this is to identify unique solutions with improved UX.
This enables you to update your product roadmap leveraging the uniqueness of your product. Keep in mind being unique is not the goal. Solving the problems effectively is.
Unique approach dose not have to be limited to features of the product. You can also decide what unique content you have, unique access you have to partners and suppliers, unique ways of marketing the product, unique pricing strategy, all these factors contribute to the unique approach you are taking to solve the problems.
Question 5 - What do we not know about customer?
This is a rare questions many product managers don’t bother asking. In my career as a product manger asking this question proven lot of our early decision wrong and saved many products going down the wrong direction.
There could be heaps of information you don’t know. During the product life cycle you will have plenty of unknowns reveled by users, research teams and even observing market movement in your product vertical. You can onboard domain experts, focus on market research and conduct one on one user interviews to revel these findings. Planing these sessions at least once a quarter will keep you on top of your game.
Continuously exploring what you don’t know about users will revel risks early. Thus your team can be better prepared or change the course of the product.
In summary
Product management is not easy. Product managers play a critical role in the overall success of the product team. Being a successful product manager is all about continuously collaborating with stakeholders and bringing diverse views and skills together to develop a compelling solution for a customer. That will help your team make informed decisions of the product roadmap and stay ahead of the curve.
How can we help?
We are a boutique software product engineering practice specialized in product design and engineering. At Amplifyn we work at the intersection of business and technology to enable our clients to gain competitive advantage and drive bottom-line impact.
Read more about our work https://amplifyn.com or email us at about your ideas on hello@amplifyn.com
