Customer Surveys
Customer Surveys for Product Managers Your company is in business principally because of customers. And how long it exists depends on your ability to continue to please those who buy what you offer. Customer surveys
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Eisenhower Matrix (Urgent vs Important)
The Eisenhower Matrix is a framework for prioritizing tasks based on their urgency and importance. It helps correct issues relating to poor time and task management.
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MoSCoW Prioritization
MoSCoW – A Simple Technique for Prioritizing Prioritization is crucial when looking to make the most out of your time and other resources. It can be hard to get right as well. Thankfully, there are
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Scrum vs. Kanban
What is the Difference Between Scrum and Kanban? The Agile methodology de facto now in software development. It offers an effective means of managing projects and products. It promotes continuous iteration and fast response to
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Efficient Sprint Planning
Sprint planning offers a means of ensuring product development runs smoothly in many companies, especially those using the Scrum framework. It assists in making everyone be on the same page, thereby increasing the chances for
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Great Product Teams
What Makes a Great Product Team? Behind every winning product is a great team. What makes a good product team? What are some of those attributes that are necessary to ensure success? We’ll cover these
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Product Leadership
What is Product Leadership and How Do You Get it Right? When it comes to bringing winning products to market repeatedly, a lot depends on product leadership. It is to a large extent what determines
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Why Lean Methodology Is So Popular
Tracing its origin to the industrial manufacturing industry, Lean is a popular methodology among companies that provide not only goods and services these days. It is revered for helping to create more values from available
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Assumptions Mapping for Product Discovery
It might not be correct to assume your market is excited as excited about your product as you are. Products that their originators thought would be great don’t always end up as winners. This is
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Continuous Discovery
What is Continuous Discovery? The traditional approach to product discovery involves devoting time to discovery before beginning development. A period, which may be several weeks or even months, is set aside to determine the needs
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Product/Market Fit
What is Product/Market Fit? Product-market fit is a popular concept and a quick search will provide you numerous pages discussing it. However, many people still do not have a good enough understanding of it, especially
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Problem Space vs. Solution Space
Good requirements are essential ingredients for producing winning solutions. However, Product Managers often struggle producing them, giving the engineering team something less valuable to work with. The issues in many cases are misplaced attention and
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Product Mgmt vs Other Roles
Product Managers have the unique opportunity to patriciate in every aspect of product development so it is important to understand the roles that we interact with, their primary function, and where the role of Product Management begins and those other roles begin.
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Porter’s 5 Forces
Using Porter’s 5 Forces Created by Harvard professor and economist Michael Porter, Porter’s 5 Forces model is a simple yet powerful business strategy tool. It helps to assess the viability of the market and the
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Features, Capabilities, & Enablers
When working with the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), features, capabilities, and enablers are terms that you need to be familiar with. A good grasp of these is critical for an efficient development process.
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Product Lifecycle Management
The Product life cycle is a concept that most companies, especially marketing teams, are well aware of. However, experience has shown that knowledge is not equal to effective application. Organizations often fail to make the
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Acceptance Criteria
Acceptance criteria (AC) are “conditions that a software product must satisfy to be accepted by a user, customer, or other stakeholders.” They may be described, in a broader sense, as specifications that a product must meet to satisfy users or stakeholders.
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User Personas
A persona is an imaginary portrayal of what you know about your customers. It is reflects the attitude, needs, and behaviors…
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Boulders, Stones, and Pebbles
Boulders, Stones, and Pebbles for Planning There are different levels of planning which is easily understood by applying the metaphor of boulders, pebbles, and stones. Boulders are are the largest themes that are often at
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Product-Market Matrix
What is the Product-Market Matrix? The Ansoff Product-Market Matrix is a map that helps Product Managers to map strategic market growth. The Ansoff Matrix was named after Igor Ansoff, a mathematician and business manager who
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Kano Model
The Kano Model is a simple four-point chart that is often used in Product development to help determine user satisfaction. The Model was created by Noriaki Kano and his team in 1984 to help categorize
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Objectives & Key Results (OKRs)
OKR’s are an example of outcome-oriented management. The OKR system suggests that leaders task their team with an objective, allowing the team to determine their approach by defining the key results, to achieve the objective.
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ICE Scoring Method
What is the ICE Scoring Model? Prioritizing features, initiatives, and rollouts are at the very heart of Product Management. Choosing the right framework at the right stage of the process is the key to being
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TAM/SAM/SOM
What Are TAM, SAM, SOM? TAM / SAM / SOM is a model for market sizing and can quickly provide a sense of the opportunity before making deep investments in pursuit of it. The model
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Jobs to be Done (JTBD)
What are Jobs to Be Done? Customers don’t just buy a product, they “hire” a product to do a job. When you think about it from this perspective, you begin to understand the “why” behind
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DACI Roles
What is DACI? DACI is a responsibility assignment model for determining the roles a team will play, while making decisions or working on a project. It’s an acronym that stands for Driver, Approver, Contributor, Informed.
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Business Model Canvas
What is the Business Model Canvas? The Business Model Canvas has risen to popularity as a simple “lean” way to define a business model. The business model is an expression of business strategy, not product
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User Stories
What is a User Story? A User Story is a short description of a small piece of desired functionality within your product that is written from a user’s perspective. They are the modern form of
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Product Manager vs Project Manager
Product Manager vs Project Manager It’s very common for the role of a Product Manager to be confused with that of a Project Manager, and understandably so since there are only two letters that differentiate
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Impact Mapping
What is Impact Mapping? Impact mapping is a graphic strategy plan that aligns initiatives and delivery activities with overall organizational goals. Gojko Adzic introduced impact mapping with the publication of his book, Impact Mapping, in
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SWOT Analysis
What is SWOT Analysis? SWOT analysis is considered a tried and true method for strategic analysis. The acronym stands for strengths, opportunities, weaknesses, and threats. SWOT analysis can be applied to any organization, Product, or
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Hooked Method
What is the Hooked Method? The “Hooked” method came about from a book written by Nir Eyal in 2014 called “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products”. He spent years researching how Products and more specifically
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Smart Objectives
What are SMART Objectives? Have you ever felt like you’re running in place like a hamster on a wheel? Setting objectives means that you can clarify your goals and focus your efforts on achievable milestones.
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Innovation Ambition Matrix
What is the Innovation Ambition Matrix? Everything in our economy and with our technology is changing faster than ever. What was once innovative and differentiating becomes commonplace in time and the saying “the only constant
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Marketing Mix 4P’s
What are the 4P’s of Marketing? The successful marketing mix of the 4 P’s can be summed up as having the right product, in the right place, at the right price with the right promotion.
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Innovation Adoption Curve
What is the Innovation Adoption Curve? The Diffusion of Innovations theory illustrates how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technologies spread throughout a social group or community. The theory introduces the Innovation Adoption
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Google’s Heart Metrics
Google’s Heart Framework is a metric that helps you to monitor the quality of the user experience. Heart is an acronym that stands for Happiness, Engagements, Adoption, Retention and Task Success. It’s referred to as
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Generic Competitive Strategies
Harvard Professor Michael Porter spent years contemplating market strategy, eventually writing a book Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance in which he coined the phrase “Generic Competitive Strategy”. After much research, he eventually determined
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Double Diamond Product Planning
What is the Double Diamond? If you haven’t heard of the Double Diamond approach to planning and creation than it may help to start with its origins. Double Diamond is a process model that was
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Design Thinking
What is Design Thinking? Design thinking is a high-level framework that has become popular recently for people to apply design principles to solving other types of problems. The principal concept is that you identify the
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Customer Journey Map
What is a Customer Journey Map? A customer’s Journey is what a customer experiences from the beginning to the end of their time spent engaging with your product. The journey is a complete sum of
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Agile Product Development
What is Agile Development? Agile development is an approach to Product development that encourages adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, and continual improvement. As it sounds, Agile Product Development requires that everyone on the team
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Customer Personas
Product Personas are a technique for capturing insights from your users that help you to identify and understand the different types of customers that will be using your product. The persona is a fictional creation
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Five Whys
What Are the 5 Whys? The 5 Whys is an iterative interrogative approach to solving a problem, that explores cause and effect. Using the 5 Whys is like peeling an onion, every “Why” gets you
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Minimal Viable Product (MVP)
What is an MVP? A Minimal Viable Product (MVP) is a product that is introduced into the market in the early stages of development, in order to elicit feedback and find product-market as quickly as
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Dual Track Agile
What is Dual-Track Agile? The Dual Track Agile Process (aka Dual-Track Agile) was popularized by Marty Cagan, founder of SVPG, who often gives credit to Jeff Patton for coining the term. Dual Track Scrum has
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Product Owner
What is a Product Owner? The role of Product Owner comes from Scrum, a popular Agile planning methodology. It is a role that a Product Manager often plays while doing Product Development with a development
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Waterfall Methodology
What is Waterfall Methodology? The Waterfall methodology is a “stage gated” process that requires you to complete the first activity before going onto the second activity and so on in sequential order until all of
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Acceptance Criteria
What are Acceptance Criteria? Agile User Stories often include Acceptance Criteria that must be met before a User Story is satisfied. Since Product Management is responsible for understanding the prioritizing the problems for the team
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BCG Growth Share Matrix
What is BCG Growth-Share Matrix? The BCG Growth-Share Matrix was developed in 1970 by Bruce Henderson of the Boston Consulting Group. BCG developed the matrix to help companies determine how to best allocate their financial
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AARRR Metrics
What is the Pirate Metric? (AARRR) Often coined the “Pirate Metric”, AARRR is a 5 step metric created by Angel investor and founder of startup accelerator 500 startups, Dave McClure. The metric is often called
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RICE Scoring Method
The RICE Scoring Model The RICE Prioritization scoring model is a framework designed to help Product Managers make informed decisions about which products, features, and initiatives to prioritize on their roadmaps. Messaging-software maker Intercom developed the RICE
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GIST Planning
What is GIST Planning? GIST Planning is a relatively easy approach to planning that can be used in place of a roadmap. Recently introduced by Itamar Gilad, former Product Manager at Google, Gilad created this methodology
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Go To Market Strategy
Go To Market Strategy The Go-To-Market Strategy, also sometimes referred to as a Marketing Strategy, describes how we will take a new product or major new feature to market. As the name implies, this is
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Release Plan vs Launch Plan
Difference between Release and Launch The terms ‘release plan’ and ‘launch plan’ are sometimes used interchangeably but they have different meanings and involve different groups of the organization. In this article we’ll set those terms
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Agile Manifesto
What is the Agile Manifesto? The Agile Manifesto includes four values and twelve principles for software development. These are not a set of hard rules for how to use Agile, rather they are outline a
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Scaled Agile Framework
What is the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)? The Scaled Agile Framework, referred to as SAFe, is intended to be a version of Agile that works for large, enterprise organizations, that have multiple teams, dependencies, and
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Weighted Impact Scoring Model
What is Weighted Impact? Weighted impact scoring is a standard framework for prioritizing your product roadmap. The framework entails ranking several features on various criteria using a benefit-versus-cost analysis. One of the most challenging aspects
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Product Differentiation
What is Product Differentiation? Product differentiation is the practice of separating your product from others in the market to create a distinct selling advantage. By creating a USP (unique selling proposition) you can elevate your
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Product Ideation
In today’s hyper-fast and intensely competitive market, a continual stream of ideas is necessary to keep the innovation of your product ahead of the competition. With attention spans being shorter than ever, Product Managers have
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Buy a Feature Prioritization
What is Buy A Feature Prioritization? Buy-a-Feature is a prioritization framework that puts the decision of feature prioritization in the hands of the customer. Typically feature prioritization falls on the Product Manager and their team.
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Voice of the Customer
What is the Voice of the Customer (VOC)? Voice of the customer, or VoC, refers broadly to the various processes by which organizations gather feedback from their customers, and advocate for the interests of customers
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Product Requirements Document (PRD)
What is a Product Requirements Document? In the realm of product development, a Product Requirements Document (PRD) stands as a linchpin, serving as the bedrock upon which the entire process hinges. This comprehensive document meticulously
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