The Why? What? When? of a product

As a product manager (PM) of a fintech product, I have to define the ‘what’ — critical and aspirational features, which would make the product successful. But how do I make sure ‘when’ is the right time to introduce them?

I will like to share the practices which have helped me in defining the product milestones so far, and will love to hear your PM experience as well!

The tradeoff between a “live” and an aspirational product generally forms the basis of successful product development.

For a PM, whether it is a new or well-established product in the market, the decision of prioritization and road mapping is as critical as product development in making the product successful. For example, an e-commerce app can have endless features, like sign-in, search, filters, wish-list, payments, etc., but the product roadmap needs to be incremental, to deliver a fully functioning app to the customer. As quoted by James Clear-

“When making plans, think big.

When making progress, think small.”

While there can be multiple outlooks on what is the exact roadmap of a product, a PM must understand the relevance and impact of a robust and rigorous short and long-term scope.

Being the owner of a product, it becomes imperative for a PM to assess multiple factors, such as the current stage of the product’s life-cycle, market trends, stakeholder requirements, etc. These factors set the premise to whether to drive the product strategy in a cruise-ship or a power-boat mode.

A product’s strategy needs to consider and assess an elaborate list of features created by the PMs, along with the timelines to develop and deliver them. A feature essentially is a function of a product that has value to customers — for example, a login/log-out feature in a mobile app. To create a feature list for either new or existing product, we need to consider the product’s definition and answer “what and for who are we solving?”

One approach is to by looking at factors –

In addition to these, a PM creates a feature lists other factors such as –

· Market research

· Competitive analysis

· End customer’s challenges

· Business requirements

Now, with an elaborate list of features in hand, a product scope has a significant bearing on the company’s costs, as it lays the blueprint for the project plan, development timeline, resource allocation and a strategic decision of investing efforts.

In the process of defining a lean scope, some of the key questions faced by me as a product manager are –

The “How” or the tactical part of the feature development is managed well by my tech friends.

The “Why? What? When?” must be aligned with the minimum viable product, but, in parallel, one should not lose sight of the aspirational version of the product.

The aspirational version will eventually drive innovation and a desire to create cutting edge products, which may not solve the customer’s current problem, but perform a job that the customer has not even considered today.

In my experience, development of a new product provides a blank canvas to a PM, where he/she can leverage tools such as market research, competitive analysis, and user scenarios, to draw a long list of features and functionalities. This creative freedom is akin to a “kid in a candy-shop situation,” where one would want to deliver everything, from a chatbot to personalization, coach marks with best UX experience to the customer.

However, since in every company, the resources — people, time & money are limited, the approach should be to create a viable and sustainable product to win customers.

So, for a new product, the need to zero-in on the “When” part of the feature list is imperative, as there is neither a cushion of an existing revenue stream nor the flavor of first response from customers or stakeholders.

In comparison, for an existing product with customers on board, the primary challenge is to keep the financial and business metrics such as revenue, repeat customers & the number of transactions constant and predictable. For an established product, the focus remains on adding the delta to a successful formula. This delta is a combination of new and updated features, which promise to contribute to the KPIs/metrics.

In both cases, there is a long list of product enhancing features, and a staggered scope helps define the release goals and map the project timelines to the product roadmap.

An iterative process of assessing features based on factors like impact on the product, time, and complexity to develop, can help funnel down the scope of the product.

It is also essential to create a functional, quality, and UX design scope while ranking the features.

Apart from these, the stage of the company plays a significant role in scoping the features as the ranking of the feature can differ massively for a company on the brim of going live vs. a company in initial stages of product development.

Do share your experiences and “the do’s and don’ts” practices of product road mapping. Until then, I am practicing- create, enable, negotiate, and repeat!