What is Product Excellence?
In product management, Product Excellence is a way to reach the highest levels of product perfection based on user feedback and key insights. It involves collecting and analyzing user provided data about the product’s features. Based on this analysis, strategy making and roadmapping is done.
This looks like a two step process, but it gets heavy when practiced so it requires smart prioritisation, product strategy and clear roadmapping of all the relevant subtasks.
Importance of product excellence
By the name itself, we are concerned with the excellence of the product, we want to attain the highest possible level of excellence and that’s what the product management team is striving for.
So by following the product excellence approach, we gain:
• efficient prioritisation of features and functions.
• better product strategy
• better project layouts and roadmaps.
Steps to achieve product excellence
• In depth knowledge of user insights: The product team gathers information about the user needs through feedback collection and analysis. This involves the practice of KYC or Know Your Customer. This is directly helpful to the design team in prioritizing the features. Through the interviews or feedback, the user gives information about the features they like and dislike. On the basis of this, the design team prioritises which feature has to be added or retained and which feature shall be replaced. This is known as feature prioritization.
• Comprehensive product strategy: To ensure proper functioning with a focused approach, the organisation should have a clear product strategy which all the departments adhere to.
• Lucid roadmapping: Preparing systematic roadmaps by the managers that helps in focusing on the product development process. A product roadmap is key to achieve product excellence. A coherent roadmap represents a common vision for the product development process.
Drawbacks of using a product excellence approach
So you might have heard this dialogue from the movie Spiderman (2002), ” With great power comes great responsibilities.” This quote fits well here.
Product excellence is a process or an approach involving a lot of other methods of collecting data, analysis, functions, and more and this can make product management a very hectic job where you are prone to some mismanagement and may skip relevant features. So for product excellence, one needs to be stable and also make the process stable because you have to deal with too much data.
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FAQs
A product roadmap aligns all the departments and guides the product development. In product excellence we deal with a lot of information and data and involve numerous subtasks. So in order to stay focused and drive the process on the right track, the product roadmap plays a key role.
It helps in implementing prioritisation by marking up relevant features to roadmap
The basic steps include:
1)Collection of deep valuable insights from the users through feedback forms, interviews, KYC, etc.
2) Product strategy and prioritization based on the collected user feedback. Add or replace or enhance any feature on the basis of user experience.
3) Preparing a product roadmap that keeps the process on track and helps in prioritizing the subtasks and relevant features of the product.
So, in product creation, it is an approach that must be included in the company’s work culture to ensure high-quality results and optimum performance from the employees.
Product excellence literally means to create an excellent product. Quality is something that is identified with product excellence. So quality emphasizes product excellence.