The 7 Steps to Creating a Product Management Process

Product Managers are constantly busy. They have many duties that range from researching, devising strategy, communicating plans, acting on customer feedback and analysis, and ultimately releasing the product in the market.

Hence they may not get enough time or resources to ensure that internal and external buy-in goes effectively.

We’ll explore how you can improve your product management process and obtain immediate buy-in for excellent results in your business in this post.

Product Managers must constantly learn and grow on the go.

The urgency to learn is because each job in every other company requires distinct abilities. They must develop different talents to fill them. 

As a result, despite our emphasis on the most common mistakes you may correct, there will be many more that we’ll discuss next time.

What Is a Product Management Process?

A Product Management process involves:

• Identifying customer pain points.
• Researching solutions.
• Building a Minimum Viable Product(MVP).
• Setting the strategy.
• Driving the execution. 

It is a long and complicated process that takes multiple steps to achieve the final goal.

There are product managers, and there are product management teams. The team size may vary, but it includes members from Engineering, QA, Sales, and Marketing Departments in most cases. 

A good product management process ensures that everyone is on the same page and working towards the common goal.

What Are the Benefits of the Effective Product Management Process?

• Product managers can get the buy-in from different stakeholders
• The delivery of products in the market is much faster
• Improved customer satisfaction as the product caters to their needs
• The process becomes more efficient and more straightforward with time
• Improved team productivity

What Are the Steps of the Product Management Process?

If you have a product idea in mind, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a great one. It is here that the role of product management comes into play. 

Product managers bring ideas to life and products to the marketplace by coordinating with the development teams.

To settle the work discipline, have a product outline, and guide your team members, you must have product management software to bring order to the overall chaos.

There is no rulebook for the product management process. However, the product management steps followed by organizations across are somewhat similar.

Here We Discuss the Seven Product Management Process Steps That You Can Follow. 

Keep in mind the participation of stakeholders and involvement of cross-functional teams is a must throughout the process.

Strike ideas!

You Can Find Ideas in the Following Areas:

Brainstorming sessions

Customer interviews

Keeping a tab on your competitors

However, it is the product manager’s responsibility to finalize the ideas. They must use various product manager tools available for them.

Using product management software, you can collect, segregate and store all your relevant ideas.

Add Some Detailing

Once you have the idea in place, you can look for detailed specifications in the product management process.

These product specifications must give you answers to the following questions:

• What product are you building and the reason behind it?
• What is your product’s vision in terms of its achievement?
• What metrics will you use to measure the success of your product?

The Ultimate Roadmap

Now you will question how we can craft a roadmap even before prioritizing them?

Your product vision can be advanced if you take the product roadmapping step before the prioritization stage.

The team’s conversation will divert from the usual debate of feature X versus feature Y. Product managers can focus more on themes, objectives, and goals.

Prioritization

Prioritization is one of the critical product management process steps.

Product managers will decide which items from the product backlog will take a front seat in this stage. 

Teams can decide which prioritization methods will help them categorize the items. It could be the MoSCoW method, the RICE model, or any popular prioritization framework.

Choose items that will impact your product’s strategy, vision, and KPIs.

Building, Shipping, and Delivery

Now that you have all the prioritized items and a roadmap, it’s time to build, ship, and deliver the product.

It is now time for product managers to step back and let the engineers and project managers take a front seat.

The delivery of products will vary from one organization to another. 

Some follow the waterfall model, where the shipping takes place only after teams finish the large chunks of work.

On the other hand, we have agile, where teams finish work with sprints.

Product Analysis and Experimentations

Once the teams deliver the product, you can gather connections, correlations, and other learnings using product analytics.

With the help of product analytics, product teams can also conduct specific product experiments. 

Customer Feedback Is Key

After shipping your products, it is time to collect various exciting and terrifying customer feedback. 

Gathering feedback and listening to the customer’s requests, complaints, and so on will make a big deal of your time which is worth every effort.

Don’t forget to take the ex-customer feedback as well. 

What Is the Importance of the Product Management Process?

The product management team is a market in itself inside the company. They are the voice of customers, noncustomers, and users. 

The product management team plays the role of market advocate and implements the business strategy.

The product management process is essential because these steps assure the teams that the ideas they implement align with the overall strategy.

Having a process such as product management will help the development teams and the other teams involved build products that satisfy the customers’ needs.

Product managers can use product management software such as Chisel to build top-notch products. 

The entire product management process figures out a way to build a product which is a blueprint for all the departments involved in crafting a product.

Therefore, the product management process and the product managers receive praise. 

Different Ways To Improve the Product Management Process

Enhancing your product management process is critical to getting more internal buy-in quickly and regularly. 

Concentrate on the Comments of Your Customers

When a company launches a new item in the market, it usually gets a lot of requests, comments, outlandish demands, and other consumer expectations. 

This requesting time is a perfect moment to get everyone on the team to agree to the product’s future modifications. 

But how do you bring people with diverse ideas and personalities together around one issue?

Combine All of Your Client Comments Into One Location

The feedback is often across several locations. Team members, such as sales, marketing, and so on, may have a view but only a partial one. 

They’ll want changes to the product made solely based on their point of view.

As a result, it may be feasible to combine all of the data from various platforms such as emails, channels, and so on into a single repository to make the product management process more straightforward. 

This way, regardless of their position in the organization, all teams can access customer comments without being prejudiced.

Everyone in the organization, including the internal stakeholder, has similar feedback. In addition, they will better understand to identify pain areas. 

As a result, all team members will clearly understand what changes they need to make to the product.

Ask the Right Questions

Product managers always hear customers and improve the product based on customer input and feedback. Customers, however, may or may not be familiar with the technology behind the product. 

When you actually sit down and work on the product again, what they’ve asked for might be substantially different. These professionals need to ask the right questions to customers to get the most relevant feedback.

This approach will help them in two ways: first, it will give a clear picture of what the customer wants, and second, it will also assist in clearing any doubts the customer might have about the product.

Ex-customer Feedback

One of the essential aspects to remember throughout the Product Management process is considering the ex-customers feedback. What do we imply by this? 

A client purchased your goods but didn’t like them, or it wasn’t compatible with their interests. They’ve decided to back off and not buy anymore from your firm. 

In some cases, the said customer may leave constructive comments behind. 

There’s a lot to learn from ex-customers, and however, only some product managers follow their advice.

Set Measurable Goals

Make everyone on the team sign off on a document that outlines the product’s significant goals and how each team member plans to accomplish them. 

This approach will help guarantee that everyone is on the same page concerning what they’re attempting to achieve. 

It will foster more buy-in since individuals can see that their ideas matter.

Make sure you establish measurable objectives along the road to keep track of your development. 

Product management is all about making frequent changes and adjusting as needed; if you can’t measure your success, you won’t do it well.

Display Your Product Roadmap

The next step is to maintain your product roadmap accessible to all team members. One approach to accomplish this is to post a publicly viewable product roadmap. 

Product Managers may use publicly available product roadmaps to ensure that everyone on the team understands where the product is going and what planning tools and tactics are employed.

A product management software tool such as Chisel can help you keep track of all your tasks in one place. This feature allows you to share them with others, so they know what’s coming down the pipeline.

Organizing Tasks Effectively

The next step is to prioritize and manage tasks effectively. Product managers often juggle many balls, from developing new products and features to collecting customer feedback to meeting deadlines. 

It’s essential to have a system to help you stay organized and on top of everything.

Effectively managing tasks will help ensure that essential items don’t get overlooked and that employees are accountable for their work.

The Product Manager should do the following before providing regular updates on progress:

• Prioritize tasks and projects
• Determine what they need to do first
• Who is responsible for doing the tasks
• How will teams start with the tasks, and by when

Backup Your ‘No’ With Facts

After you have planned everything, various team members may or may not agree with what you, as a product manager, have to say. 

Even if it’s a stakeholder, a superior, or anybody else in authority, you’ll have to inform them how you plan to proceed. 

It is necessary to use data and explain why pursuing a specific course of action is the best option for your stakeholders, consumers, and other people. 

And if they don’t follow through on it, what are the possible consequences?

Product managers have to make tough calls. Sometimes, that may include saying ‘No’ to people who want the product manager to pursue their specific agenda.

This task could be difficult, but PMs need to remember that they are not working for themselves but for their customers. It is also necessary to get buy-in from all stakeholders before starting on any project.

Without this essential step, you’ll likely face obstacles down the line when trying to get team members aligned and moving in the same direction.

Step 1 is to rate the desired features according to how well they meet the goals and the time and effort it will take to develop them.

In Step 2, Consider how much time and effort it will take to build the features compared to their value.

And finally, you have the answer. Features plotted on the top-left side of the graph will be your top priority. This way, you will justify your stance and get buy-ins from all stakeholders.

Final Words

A product management process is a continuous flow of experimenting, learning, and applying what you’ve learned to product development. 

The steps mentioned above are not an exhaustive list, but they will give you an excellent place to start from. 

Improving your process is an ongoing journey, and it’s essential to be open to change. Always look for ways to make things simpler and more efficient for you and your team. 

And most crucially, have fun while doing it!