Introducing the Product Design Framework.
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you bring an idea to life is Product Management.
Product Management teaches you to answer the questions WHY, WHAT and HOW. It teaches a person agility of thought. I have always trained my Product Managers on the job because I feel we do things slightly differently than the rest of the world. Here are my reflections and my framework of thinking on lessons learnt as a Product Manager and from leading the work to take IBM through a Product Management Transformation and working with some of the best business and technical minds in the world.
START WITH THE WHY OR WHO: Take time to define why you want to build a product and who you are building it for. Look at the market opportunity in that phase and how people have gone about solving for it and how you can differentiate.
DEFINE & PROVE: Decide what offering you want to bring to market and can you differentiate or have market permission to play in that space. Conduct customer interviews and analyst feedback to see how you can bring an offering to market and do a business case to look at the market you can address and achieve.
DEINE THE HOW, BUILD & DELIVERY PLAN: Decide on the what needs to be delivered and how many resources are needed to deliver the product and what will an MVP look like. This is your commitment pitch.
LAUNCH PLAN: A lot of stakeholders have to come together to launch an enterprise product. We need to come with a solid launch plan with readiness of the product, routes to market, GTM and delivery capabilities.
SENSE & RESPOND: Once you have launched the product, we need to figure out a way how to gather market feedback and respond to it and roadmap the new capabilities.
Now there is a whole depth of activities that happen in each of the stages, this was just a preview of the Product Thinking Framework.
PRODUCT MANAGEMENT FRAMEWORK