Product Management Process

What is the product management process?

What are the stages of the product management process?

There isn't a single blueprint that applies to all product management processes. However, the fundamental structure of most organizations is very consistent and the key stages of the product management process are:

• Idea management - Not every product idea deserves to make it to market! And since a team can’t implement all the ideas they have, separating out the good ideas (and then prioritizing them) is key in the early stages of the product management process. If or when you have multiple product or feature ideas that your team feels strongly about, and that have product-market fit, you need to decide which to focus on now and which to tackle in the future. 

• Specifications - It’s easy for teams to become misaligned during the product management process, but having specification documents and agreeing to a few key objectives will keep things going smoothly: ‘How is success measured?’, ‘What does this new product/feature need to achieve?’ and ‘What exactly are we building and why?’

• Roadmapping - We are big fans of roadmaps here at airfocus! Roadmaps can, and should, be used to track everything from the features you build to your operations, innovation, and even content marketing. Put your roadmap together before the product development process has begun.

• Prioritization - Now that you have all your key milestones and objectives together in a roadmap, the moment has come to choose the backlog items that are worth working on first. Several prioritization techniques and frameworks exist to make this easy, even if you’re completing the product management process as a big, remote team.

• Delivery - At a certain stage, the product management team will step back slightly and let the dev team take over. PMs act more as advisors or consultants while project managers and engineers take the helm.

• Experiments and analytics - Even once your product is live in the market, you need to keep testing and optimizing it. Before launch, though, the final stages of the product management process are concerned with user testing and running prototypes through various analytics.

• Customer feedback - This can be acquired through focus groups, usability tests, customer interviews and advisory boards for customers.

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