TUTORIAL

Gettings Started Guide

Our goal in building this software, was to create something that streamlines the end-to-end process of Product Management.  Something we came to realize after speaking with nearly 100 Product Managers is that everyone defines their role a little differently, but if you look below the surface, there is still a core set of activities that most of us have in common. And so we’ve distilled those commonalities and that is what you see represented here.

At the center of everything is the definition of a Product strategy – defining ‘true north’ provides directional guidance to the rest of the process.  As ideas flow in from the team then, we route smaller requests and suggestions directly to the backlog to be qued for work, or if its a larger feature-level idea that makes sense, it will be evaluated as a ‘feature project’ that is a candidate for the roadmap like everything else of that size.  The highest impact ideas are placed onto the roadmap and as those projects are defined, we’ll generate requirements for each project.  Those, smaller units of work, along with the smaller unit that flowed directly to the backlog from Ideas, will then be collated, prioritized, and generated into releases that can be pushed to the team for development – at which point those work units are leaving the Product Management process and entering the development domain.  That’s usually where another tool like JIRA or Trello might take over to track the team’s work tickets, and Productfolio can integrate with the most popular of these tools, to provide a seamless workflow for the team.

Planning Hierarchy

There are four levels of hierarchy in the Productfolio model.

i. Strategy – Product strategy is at the top of the hierarchy and represents the ‘north star’ for all activities in the Product Management workflow.  There is only one vision for the product, one perspective on the customers you’re serving, and one set of business objectives that you’re aligning your efforts to. .

ii. Themes – The next level down are Themes that describe the major focus areas of the product.  Ideas there are 3-5 Themes though larger teams could have more – these are the ‘focus areas’ (aka ‘problem spaces’) that a feature team might be organized around.

iii. Features (Projects) – Features are the tangible capabilities of the product that make the product useful and solve problems for the users.  Features are generally larger than a sprint (planning/work increment) and thus are organized as Projects/Epics.  Because these are larger units of work, they need to be vetted and scored, according to the impact of our strategic goals and declared on the roadmap.

iv. Requirements – the smallest unit of work and these are what are prioritized and worked on during a sprint.  Requirements can come from small stakeholder requests or continuous improvement activities by the team and go straight to the backlog.  They’re also the work breakdown from larger feature projects, breaking larger ‘stones’ down into ‘pebbles’.  Once all of those smaller ‘pebbles’ are collected in the backlog, they can be organized into releases and the team can take action upon them. 

Product Management Workflow

Now that you have an understanding of the process and hierarchy at a high-level, let’s dive a little deeper and talk about the workflow that is at work, with Productfolio.  There are three high-level activities in Product Management and that maps to a few of the tools you’ll see here, so we’ll break down according to those three topics – Discovery, Planning, and Development.

Product Discovery

Product discovery is performing the market and business research to really understand the context of the problem that we’re solving.  There are macro and micro cycles of this activity – the macro-cycle generates our product strategy (vision, customers, competitors, etc). In this workflow, we’re talking instead about the micro-cycle of discovery that is specific to the features that we’re looking for and defining.   For example, we may know that we’re building a digital real estate assistant solution for home buyers, and we know the customer segments this addresses, but what features are needed for this solution to really resonate and address the needs of our segment? 

And so we’re looking for great ideas for features, as well as what shape these features may take.  Productfolio comes in here by providing a single place to intake and capture ideas from the team, stakeholders, and customers.  The ideas can be tagged, organized, archived, and even commented and voted on by the team.  Productfolio provides a hub for all of this activity.

Product Planning

Product Planning begins with defining the product strategy.  The Vision, customer segments, and competitor profiles are useful constructs for the team to review and understand.  We also define objectives and themes here though – and those are integral to the planning workflow.  Objectives are the actionable goals we want to achieve for our planning horizon and typically carry KPIs for measuring success – we’ll use these to score our feature project ideas.  And themes are the related groups of functionality that are like ‘focus areas’ or ‘problem spaces’ for the team to focus on.  When you have multiple teams supporting a single product, themes can be especially helpful for mapping the feature team focus areas.

The next step of planning is to gather and qualify feature projects. Feature projects are analogous to ‘Epics’ in Agile vernacular and represent larger chunks of work that are big enough that they need to be planned and declared on the roadmap (not just a story).  Because these take more time, we need to define them enough to understand Level of Effort (LOE) and score them in terms of how they impact our goals/objectives and then score them in terms of value (impact – effort = value).  This will give us a clear view of where the best ROI is for our team’s effort.

Once we’re clear on the valuable feature projects, we can then start lining up those candidates for the roadmap and scheduling them according to our understanding of resource availability, dependencies, milestones, and priority.

Productfolio provides tools for doing all of this planning work, from defining the objectives and themes in the Strategy section, to scoring feature projects against the objectives and tagging them with the themes.  Once projects are prioritized they can be easily dragged onto the roadmap which you can share with your team and stakeholders.

Product Development

Once the larger feature projects are prioritized and defined, all of the requirements for those projects are collected along with the smaller requests that came in.   Now all of those smaller units of work are available in the product backlog.  We can easily filter them to see their origin if they’re associated with a feature project, what theme they’re a part of, and their working status.  We can create containers to bundle items into releases and make those ready for our teams to work on, defining the user stories, acceptance criteria, and attaching any sort of wireframes or files they may need. The work is ready for product development.

It is also easy to integrate Productfolio with tools such as Jira and Trello to push these requirement tickets over to your development team’s preferred working software.  Once integrated with JIRA for example, you can push the tickets in a release over to Jira, ahead of backlog grooming, so you can introduce them to your team before the next sprint.  And then as the work is taken up, you’ll be able to track the status of those requirements in Productfolio, as it stays synced with Jira on the items you pushed over to that environment.

Another benefit of this workflow, is that you can easily track the completion of a project on the roadmap, according to how many of the associated requirements have been completed.  Let’s say for example that you have 10 requirements associated with a project on the roadmap and 5 of those requirements are now complete, when you click the ‘%’ icon on the roadmap, you’ll see a visual depiction that your project is 50% complete. Tracking of completion can be done through automated syncing or on a manual basis, as preferred.

Productfolio Organizational Model

Now that you have a good sense of the concepts that underly the Productfolio software, let’s quickly review how it’s organized, to see how it maps to these concepts — you’ll see there are a lot of parallels.

Productfolio assumes there is an account for each organization. A company or a business unit for example, might have one account – it is at this level that an Administrator can manage user accounts, create any number of products, set account-level preferences such as terminology and type of roadmap, and integrate 3rd party tools such as JIRA and Slack.

Stepping into a Product, that product will have a product strategy, a roadmap, and collections of ideas, projects, and requirements/stories (aka the “Backlog). The product vision, market strategy such as customers and competitors are defined at this level, along with strategic objectives and planning/investment themes.

Ideas are collected and mapped to themes. If they’re promising, they can be promoted to the list of projects that are candidates for the roadmap (or if they’re small, they may just go directly to the backlog). Projects are then scored in terms of their impact upon our strategic objectives and placed onto a roadmap, which is the expression of our plan for achieving our strategic product vision. Those projects are then broken down into requirements that are collected in the backlog and can be prioritized and organized into releases. Ultimately these requirements can be tracked and managed directly in Productfoliom, or synced to a tool such as Jira, where your technical team manages their work.

As you can see, Productfolio is a purpose-driven tool, specifically designed to support the workflows of Product Management which are described above.

Conclusion

Congrats on reading this entire document – you should now have a solid understanding of Product Management process and the underpinning concepts that Productfolio is based upon.  Hopefully, the tool is now intuitive for you as you keep these concepts in mind. Look for the help section throughout your journey for more information on any of the flows for the product.

Thank you for using Productfolio – enjoy!