Adopting product management best practices can significantly streamline your processes. It’ll drive successful outcomes, maximizing the value you can get from minimal resources. Given that we’re all feeling the squeeze these days, this really can make a difference that might just save your backside.

This article will delve into Lean product management best practices, drawing examples from three product management experts: Janna Bastow, Christina Wodtke, and Teresa Torres. First, let’s look at what the product management best practices are and why they are important. Then we can take a deeper look at each one.

What are lean product management best practices?

Lean product management best practices are principles and techniques designed to create maximum value for customers while minimizing waste and optimizing resources. This approach borrows heavily from Lean principles originally developed in manufacturing and adapts them to the context of product management.

Key Lean product management best practices include:

1. Focusing on customer-centric value creation: Creating value for the customer is key. Engage with customers regularly to understand their needs and feedback and continually improve your product based on these insights.
2. Having a clear product vision: Define and communicate a clear product vision. This is a long-term goal that guides all product-related decisions and ensures everyone on the team is on the same page.
3. Cultivating continuous discovery and experimentation: Validate your assumptions about your product and market through ongoing testing and learn from these experiments to improve your product. A culture of continuous discovery will keep you on top of market changes.
4. Implementing the Build-Measure-Learn cycle: This Build-Measure-Learn involves building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), measuring its performance, learning from the results, and then iterating or pivoting based on these learnings.
5. Using OKRs: Use Objective and Key Results (OKRs) to align goals and track progress within product teams. Regularly review these OKRs to ensure they remain relevant.
6. Working on your user empathy: Develop a deep understanding of your customer base. Use user research techniques to understand their needs, motivations, and behaviors, and design your product to meet these needs.
7. Establishing cross-functional collaboration: Promote collaboration and open communication between different teams involved in the product development process. This helps to ensure that everyone has a shared understanding of the product goals.
8. Prioritizing ruthlessly: Prioritize the most impactful ideas that align with your product vision. Use a prioritization framework to make sure that you are working to release the right potential features.

 Why are product management best practices important?

Product management best practices are pivotal to getting the most out of your team, and your product. They’ll provide you with the following benefits:

1. Efficiency: Following best practices streamlines the product management process. It reduces time spent on non-value-adding activities and facilitating a smooth transition from ideation to execution.
2. Customer Focus: Best practices, particularly in Lean product management, advocate for customer-centricity. By focusing on the customer’s needs, teams are more likely to develop products that truly resonate with their target audience.
3. Risk Mitigation: Best practices help to mitigate risk. By implementing a structured, proven approach, product teams can avoid common pitfalls, validate assumptions early, and make informed decisions.
4. Alignment and Communication: Best practices ensure alignment across the team. By defining a clear product vision, setting measurable objectives, and encouraging cross-functional collaboration, everyone involved in the product life cycle understands their role and the shared goals.
5. Innovation: Product management best practices often involve fostering a culture of continuous learning and experimentation, which can drive innovation and enable the development of unique, competitive products.
6. Quality and Consistency: Following best practices helps ensure consistency in product development processes, resulting in higher-quality products that meet or exceed customer expectations.
7. Scalability: Best practices provide a solid foundation that can scale with the company as it grows. They offer a systematic approach to managing increasing product complexity and larger teams.

So, embracing product management best practices is an investment that can lead to improved product success, happier customers, and a healthier bottom line. Not too shabby, really.

Now, let’s look a little closer at the 8 product management best practices then, shall we?

Product Management Best Practices: The Lean Way

1. Establishing customer-centric value creation

Creating value for the customer is at the heart of Lean methodology. Janna Bastow, our CEO and co-founder of ProdPad, is a strong advocate for this, and she often extols the virtues of a customer-centric approach.

Lean product management leans heavily into this philosophy by engaging with customers regularly, extracting critical feedback, and continuously finessing the product offering based on this invaluable insight.

A great product management phrase is “NIHITO” – Nothing Important Happens In The Office.  It’s best practice to look outside of your own organization to learn about your market and understand the problems you should be solving.

The best way to do this is by talking to your customers yourself in customer interviews or user testing, but you can also take advantage of the conversations your colleagues are having with their contacts, too. By bringing feedback into a single place, it’s easier to spot themes and identify the kinds of problems that rear their heads on a repeated basis.

ProdPad’s customer feedback tools and integration capabilities allow you to collect feedback from all the disparate places they’re circulating. It then allows you to link them to the ideas you have in your backlog to help understand the most valuable ones.

Even better, you’re able to engage your customers by involving them in testing the solutions they’ve asked for much earlier in the process, leading to better products and increased adoption rates.

For more ideas on how to gather customer feedback, check out our article on the 10 best ways to gather customer feedback online. 

2. The guiding force of a great product vision

According to our CEO Janna, the bastion of successful product management is a well-articulated product vision. This long-term goal encapsulates the aspirations for your product and influences every decision related to product development. It fosters a shared understanding within the team and helps to steer the product strategy.

When was the last time you reviewed your product vision? Are you still aiming in the right direction? Your vision serves as the guiding star for all product-related decisions. It ensures that everyone on the team understands the ‘why’ behind what they’re doing and helps in maintaining the product’s strategic direction.

Just imagine the chaos that would ensue if you arranged to meet your friends for a night out without anyone picking a destination – it’s a vital bit of info, needed to make the whole thing work. Your vision is exactly that – it’s the information everyone needs so they know where they’re headed, and why.

If you find yourself needing any inspiration, try our product vision template. It’s designed to help you ask yourself the important questions, and create a vision that inspires your team.

Don’t forget, once you’ve defined your vision, you need to make sure everyone can see it. ProdPad’s product and portfolio canvases help you keep the vision front and center, right where everyone needs it. By aligning everyone around the long-term goal, you’ll reduce misunderstandings and help your team stay on track.

3. Advocating for a culture of continuous discovery

Teresa Torres, a leading product discovery coach, promotes a culture of continuous discovery and experimentation. In Lean product management, it is crucial to validate your assumptions and hypotheses about your product and market through continuous testing.

Torres drives home the importance of continuous discovery, and integrating what you learn from these experiments into your product. It encourages curiosity, which helps to foster a culture of innovation. You should keep experimenting with different features and aspects of your product, learn from these experiments, and incorporate the learnings into your product.

Hungry for more? We’ve written before about the value of continuous discovery in agile product management, and we’ve also had the pleasure of Teresa joining us on a webinar which you can watch on-demand here.

4. Embrace the Build-Measure-Learn cycle

The Build-Measure-Learn cycle forms the backbone of Lean product management. It encourages teams to build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), measure how it performs, learn from the results, and then iterate or pivot based on the learnings.

Christina Wodtke, author and lecturer at Stanford University, maintains that every step of this process is essential. Skipping one or rushing through another may lead to the development of a product that is not match up with market needs or customer expectations.

5. The power of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)

Christina also endorses implementing OKRs to align your goals and keep track of your product teams’ progress. If your product vision defines the destination, your OKRs help you to set the route.

Your objectives highlight what needs to be achieved, while the key results you monitor serve as tangible indicators of success. Regular reviews ensure your OKRs remain relevant and continue to drive the team and product forward.

Product management best practice suggests your objectives must be qualitative – what are you going to improve? Maybe it’s adoption, usability, scalability, or similar. Key results should be measurable – how will you know you’ve made improvements? What metrics can you check which will show you’ve made a positive impact?

Write up your OKRs and make sure they’re documented somewhere everyone can see them. You’ll find it much easier to see if what you’re doing is actually working as you execute against your roadmap.

If you need a bit more guidance on how to go about it, we’ve written about OKRs here. If you need a way to manage them, ProdPad gives you a place to document your OKRs and tie them directly to the plans on your Lean roadmap, so they’re always considered in your plans.

6. Understanding users through empathy

As highlighted by Teresa Torres, empathy is the bridge that connects product managers to their users and fuels a deep and nuanced understanding. It’s one of the things that makes a long-lived and successful product. To create a product that truly resonates with users and stands out in the market, it’s crucial to gain insights into their needs, motivations, and behaviors, their challenges and pain points.

Cultivating empathy goes beyond simply recognizing user needs; it involves immersing yourself in the user’s world, and understanding their experiences on a deeper level. This empathetic approach can enable product managers to perceive subtle nuances, discover unspoken needs, and design solutions that fit seamlessly into the user’s life.

A range of user research techniques can be employed to cultivate empathy. Torres points to the importance of conducting interviews, surveys, and usability tests to gather user insights. You can gain different perspectives for using each of the following tools in combination:

1. Interviews provide a direct line of communication with users. They allow product managers to delve into users’ thoughts and feelings, uncover their motivations, and understand the context in which they interact with the product.
2. Surveys enable product managers to gather data from a large user base. While they may not offer the same depth of understanding as interviews, they can provide valuable quantitative data and highlight common themes or trends among users.
3. Usability tests offer a first-hand look at how users interact with a product. By observing users as they navigate the product, product managers can identify any points of friction or confusion and refine the user experience accordingly.

Theresa underscores that empathy-building is not a one-time activity. User needs and behaviors evolve over time, and you need to be continuously researching to stay attuned to these changes. As the product evolves and grows, new user segments may emerge, and ongoing user research ensures that the product remains relevant and valuable for all its users.

Theresa suggests that empathy should not be the responsibility of product managers alone. Cultivating a user-centric mindset across the entire team—from design and development to marketing and sales—can lead to more comprehensive user insights and better product decisions.

By sharing user research findings and involving the team in user research activities, everyone can gain a deeper understanding of your users and work together to create a product that truly meets their needs.

Cultivating empathy is fundamental product management best practice that can drive product success. Through continuous user research, product managers can build a deep understanding of their users, design solutions that truly resonate with them, and ultimately, create products that deliver value and delight users.

7. Cross-functional collaboration for coherent product goals

A productive environment thrives when team members can freely express their insights and be an active part of the product development process. It boosts morale and ensures a holistic approach to problem-solving. Product managers are well-positioned when they embrace and empower their team’s diverse perspectives.

Having a centralized idea backlog (or “opportunity backlog” as Silicon Valley Product Group’s founder Marty Cagan calls it) gives everyone the chance to contribute their thoughts and get visibility into where they sit in the ideation process.

This shared platform brings double the benefits. It provides product managers with a rich reservoir of ideas from their teams and allows shared decision-making, increasing the likelihood of launching market-fit solutions by mitigating risks in decision-making.

Platforms like ProdPad exemplify these product management best practices by fostering collaboration among all internal stakeholders. Free Reviewer licenses mean you don’t need to worry about how much that extra help will cost.

Plus, having an efficient platform facilitates documentation of discussions and decisions, providing an easy reference for future review. Even your Slack and email chats can be captured along the way, making it much easier to backtrack and remind yourself how you reached a conclusion

8. Prioritization: the key to efficient execution

Janna points out the necessity for ruthless prioritization in product management. The pool of good ideas always exceeds the bandwidth for implementation. Identifying and focusing on the most impactful ideas that align with your product vision becomes crucial. There are many different prioritization frameworks that you can use to ensure that you are focusing on the right things.

At ProdPad we advocate using a Now-Next-Later roadmap – it’s not a static document, but a dynamic blueprint that mirrors the market problems you aim to solve, providing room for your teams to explore and experiment.

Customers resonate deeply with a problem-focused roadmap. It’s an assurance that their voices are heard and understood. Moreover, it offers them an opportunity to propose potential solutions, contributing to your product strategy without causing strategic upheaval.

Reflect on your existing roadmap. Does it target high-priority issues? Have you brainstormed potential solutions? Are the objectives clearly linked? Does it offer room to pivot as required? Is it comprehensible for all? Above all, does it provide the context behind your chosen focus areas?

If you’re answering ‘no’ to any of these questions, it might be an indicator that you’d benefit from pivoting towards a Lean roadmap. This approach aligns well with product management best practices, providing a more efficient and effective way to manage product strategy.

Bring product management best practices together with a Lean Now-Next-Later roadmap

The cornerstone of a well-coordinated team is a clear vision and set objectives, establishing a shared understanding of the product’s future and the journey to get there. This strategic plan is often embodied in a product roadmap.

Lean roadmapping holds a crucial role in communicating the product strategy. It offers flexibility, encourages innovation, and crucially, it focuses on the issues that need addressing.

Are you ready to take off? Start your free trial in ProdPad and get everyone ready for the journey ahead.

The post Product Management Best Practices: 8 Lean Methods Inspired by Industry Experts appeared first on ProdPad.

In this article we’ll cover:

• What is customer feedback?
• Why is gathering customer feedback so important?
• What are the best ways to collect customer feedback online?
• What should you do next with your customer feedback?

What is customer feedback?

Customer feedback is any information, good or bad, that you receive about the quality of your products or services from the people paying money to use them.

Sometimes you’ll find it really easy to collect customer feedback – especially when you’re doing things badly. People are naturally more inclined to leave negative reviews than positive ones. In fact, people are 1.7 times more likely to give feedback following a bad experience than a ‘normal’ one. 

So, if something’s really broken, you’ll probably already know about it thanks to some vocal, unhappy customers. But here’s the thing: negative customer feedback is actually a golden opportunity. It’s ironclad proof that something isn’t working; it removes assumptions and shows you exactly what needs to change.

Why is collecting customer feedback so important?

Nobody likes criticism, so it’s tempting to steer clear of willingly soliciting negative feedback. But living in a bubble won’t help your product grow and evolve, and not listening to your customers is a surefire way to frustrate them.

Besides, customers want to be heard, and they trust each other more than they trust you. In 2019, SurveyMonkey found that some 91% of people feel that product innovation should come as a result of listening to customers, versus just 31% who think a team of in-house experts can achieve the same thing.

And you know what else? Any customer feedback you did manage to gather is a powerful indicator of the feedback you didn’t. A recent ThinkJar survey found that only one in 26 customers will voice their complaints; the rest will just up and leave without so much as a murmur.

That means that for every negative piece of customer feedback you manage to collect, 25 other people feel the same but have already moved on to a competitor, without telling you why.

Oh, and another added bonus to sending out those survey questions: if customer feedback is really positive, then you can use what people write as testimonials, both on your site’s product page and in your social media activity.

What are the best ways to collect customer feedback online?

It’s never been easier to understand what people think about your products and services, and it’s never been more important to understand what your customer experience is really like. You need to know what people are thinking if you’re going to have an effective customer feedback strategy.

Here are the top 10 digitally-focussed ways to collect customer feedback:

1. In-app popups
2. in-app feedback widget
3. Customer feedback surveys
4. Customer feedback portal
5. Review sites
6. Live chat
7. Social media
8. Heatmaps
9. Product adoption analytics
10. Be easily contactable

1. In-app popups

If you have customers working within the confines of your tool, you have a captive audience that you can occasionally prod for feedback. A pop-up window in your product – perhaps set to appear after customers have been using it for a certain number of days – can be used to ask them for many different types of responses.

You might ask for:

• direct ratings out of five or ten
• qualitative “tell us what you think” feedback
• reviews on relevant app store pages

Just remember not to bug people too much; with great power, comes great responsibility. You don’t want to end up getting bad feedback about how you collect customer feedback.

2. In-app widget

One top trick is to make it as easy as possible for your users to provide you with their feedback. By including an in-app button that your users can seamlessly use to tell you what they’re thinking, you make it more likely that they will. You can even encourage increased engagement by offering incentives, and thanks to the added convenience you’ll be collecting more valuable customer feedback and gathering actionable insights.

You’ll get real-time information about issues as soon as they occur, which means you can get on with fixing them sooner, and avoid more unhappy customers reporting the same issue.

So many tools out there can help you do this, but we recommend you try using ProdPad to collect your customer feedback. Our in-app widget works hand in hand with our customer feedback portal (more on those below), and together they’re seamless and convenient.

They’re also fully customizable. You can adjust them to fit your branding, increasing trust and credibility with your customers, and providing a more cohesive user experience. It’s a great way to see how well certain parts of your app feed into your overall understanding of your customer satisfaction levels. The widget’s also a smart replacement for live chat if you don’t have the staff to make that work.

3. Customer feedback surveys

There are loads of online survey providers out there, from paid services like SurveyMonkey, or Typeform to free resources like Google Forms. Most are incredibly customizable and easy to use, and they all collate feedback in one place for easy analysis – or let you export it into other formats.

Remember to keep surveys relatively short. Unless you’re offering an incentive like money off a subscription or a prize giveaway, customers will soon tire of filling out questions and are likely to stop answering with any care or accuracy if things drag on.

It’s a good idea to try mixing multiple choice with a few longer-form open-ended question text fields, as well as asking the industry-standard NPS and CSAT questions. 

Customer surveys, whether you use a tool or send out a simple email survey, are a great way to get quantitative and qualitative data about customer satisfaction. Perfect if you want to dig in right in and see how your customers really feel about your product.

4. Customer feedback portal

Having a branded customer feedback portal on your website means your customers can come and ask for features they want and tell you what they think about the ones they’ve been using. This’ll give your product team a clear understanding of what the people who use your product want you to build next, and what needs fixing.

This is an invaluable way to get some good use out of the customer feedback you’re collecting, to close the feedback loop, and to make sure that you’re building things that will boost customer loyalty. 

Using something like ProdPad means you’re not just housing a feedback form on your website. We already mentioned that ProdPad has a customizable feedback portal, but it’s more than just that. You’ll also be collecting those feature requests into a place that helps you to do something useful with them.

You can link specific pieces of feedback directly into your Ideas in your ProdPad backlog, providing valuable insights on which features or fixes your customer base actually wants. That makes it much easier to prioritize the best thing to build that’ll improve your user experience.

PRO TIP – If you collect feedback with ProdPad, your Customer Support team is going to love you. They will know when the requested feature has gone live, so they can quickly email everyone who requested it. As the famous old saying goes, “Happy customers and a happy Customer Support team mean a happy life for a Product Manager.” Or something like that, anyway…

5. Review sites

According to eMarketer, a Bizrate Insights survey showed that a massive 98% of buyers scour online reviews before making a purchase. Like, that’s pretty much everyone.

So, it’s important to know what those reviews are saying about you online. That way you can fix any common concerns and reply to any particularly aggrieved users. In fact, there’s a solid argument to be made for replying to every single review you find, whether it’s good or bad.

The best way to keep on top of reviews on third-party sites is to employ a listening suite that can scour everything from reviews to tweets and aggregate them for you. The best customer experience management suites can collate this with feedback from any other source you can think of, and suggest actions and next steps.

If you work in SaaS in particular, you’ll be no stranger to sites like G2. Generating positive reviews there is a great way to get yourself some of those oh-so-recognizable badges. They’re a wonderful way to show that your product gets so much positive feedback that your customers love you enough to leave you a glowing review. 

6. Live chat

Live chat is a great way to answer customer questions and queries instantly, and it doesn’t require them to hang around on the phone because follow-up replies can happen throughout the day. Even better, live chat can also become a powerful feedback engine.

The end of every live chat is an opportunity to ask for the customer’s opinion – and not just about how their customer support query went. You can take the chance to ask them if they’d be willing to provide a quick review of your product or give insight into what they do or don’t like about it.

As with any method of collecting customer feedback, not everyone will bother. But if you automate the ask, you lose nothing and stand to gain a ton of valuable opinions.

7. Social media

According to Sprout Social, 47% of customers with a complaint to air will do so on social media. If almost half of your negative feedback is plastered over Facebook and Twitter, it pays to be on the lookout for it. Social listening tools (like Sprout Social) can do this for you, while also flagging priority messages that need to be actioned first.

But you can be proactive, too. Why not occasionally run polls in Tweets or Instagram Stories? Or explicitly ask people what they’d like to see in future updates? You’d be surprised how many great ideas and keen advisors there are out there.

The response rate on social media platforms is a real draw too: it’s virtually instantaneous and easy for your customers to leave. You’ll likely be amazed by how much information you gather, especially if you have a large audience on your social media channels. Just ask Wendy’s.

So remember – social media isn’t all eccentric billionaires and cats playing pianos. It’s actually a wonderful way to get direct feedback from an online community of super-engaged people!

8. Heatmaps

Heatmapping technology is a pretty technical way to understand how people are using your product, though it can also pick out any issues they might be facing with it – even ones they might not be able to articulate themselves.

By embedding tools like Smartlook into your product, you can get an aggregate view of scrolling, cursor, and click/tap behavior across all your users. One valuable insight you’ll get from using a heat mapping tool is seeing something in the user flow that you might not have picked up before the feature went live,

For example, you might see that your users are rage-clicking in a particular place, or bouncing when you don’t expect them to. Then, when you look into it a bit further, you might realize that a pop-up is blocking the next action, or that your CTA copy is misleading.

The catch here is that you can’t see individual journeys, and understanding what it all means requires a bit of lateral thinking.

9. Product analytics

Like heatmap tools, product analytics suites are platforms that monitor usage across your entire product. They can track a whole heap of product adoption metrics with feature-level granularity, making them a passive method of collecting customer feedback that doesn’t bother the user for input.

Let’s say you’ve released a new feature in the latest version of your product. Product analytics suites can look at metrics like feature adoption rate, time-to-first-action, and active users, to help you figure out if that new tool is landing how you’d like.

Product analytics tools can be really comprehensive, but they also suffer from the same major drawback as any analytics suite: you need someone who knows how to interpret data in order to derive actionable insight. After all, generating a bunch of stats around product adoption is great for morale, but what’s even better is the ability to learn as much from those metrics as you would from a piece of written feedback.

We’ve actually got a breakdown of the 7 best product analytics suites right here to save you the trouble of searching them down yourself.

10. Be easily contactable!

How many times have you had to dive several clicks deep into a website to find actual contact details for a company? It’s infuriating, right? So, don’t do that.

The humble email is still an excellent way to garner feedback from your customers, so don’t make it difficult for them to reach you.

Have a good long think about how quick and easy it is for users to send you an email. Maybe there should be a button in plain sight somewhere in the product itself? Or perhaps an email link in the footer of your website?

We’d advise cutting down on the required form fields, and maybe even using a dropdown list for possible topics, which are then delivered to separate inboxes.

What are the best ways to collect customer feedback in person?

While we do of course live in a digital age, there’s no better way to be sure of getting some feedback than having your customers there in the room with you.

Here are some of the best ways to collect some direct user feedback:

1. Interviews
2. Focus groups
3. Customer advisory board
4. User testing sessions

1. Interviews

Interviews are a fantastic way to get deep, personal insights into what your customers are thinking and feeling about your product. Start by carefully choosing a diverse mix of users, ensuring you hear from different perspectives. Flexibility in scheduling and creating a comfortable environment (be it in-person or online) is important if you want to encourage people to engage.

You’ll need to have skilled interviewers who can steer the conversation effectively, ask open-ended questions, and really listen, encouraging interviewees to share detailed experiences and ideas. And after each interview, make sure to send a heartfelt “thank you”! It’s more than just good manners; it’s about showing appreciation for their valuable time and thoughts, and building an even more personal connection between them and your product.

Sometimes, you might want to follow up for more clarity, but only if they’re comfortable with it. This follow-up can shed more light on the initial feedback, adding even more value to what you’ve learned. Either way, dive into the data from these interviews, looking for patterns, pain points, and other golden nuggets to build out your user stories. Then, it’s all about turning these insights into action.

2. Focus groups

In a similar vein to interviews, focus groups can be goldmines for getting diverse, in-depth customer feedback, by bringing together a small group of people from different backgrounds and walks of life to talk about your product. It’s fascinating how a mix of perspectives can shed light on things you might not have considered.

Again, make sure to have a skilled moderator to lead the discussion. They’re like the conductor of an orchestra, ensuring everyone’s voice is heard and keeping the conversation flowing and on point.

Preparation is key to getting the most from the process. Set clear goals for what you want to learn from each group. It’s not just a casual chat; you’ll need to have specific topics and questions in mind to steer the conversation. But there’s always room for spontaneity – sometimes the most unexpected insights come from just letting the conversation take its own course.

Try to create a comfortable and inviting atmosphere. You want your participants to open up, share their honest thoughts, and interact with each other. That’s where the magic happens – when people start bouncing ideas off each other, so it can help to use icebreakers to lighten the mood and get everyone talking.

3. Customer Advisory Board

Your Customer Advisory Board (CAB) is like the Small Council from Game of Thrones, made up of your most engaged and influential customers. These members should be hand-picked for their diverse experiences and deep understanding of the market. The idea is to keep this group tight-knit, usually around 10-15 members, to foster meaningful discussions and easy management.

CAB meetings are like regular check-ins, usually happening every quarter or so. Again, you should always be clear about what you want to get out of these sessions – it could be anything from feedback on a new feature to strategies for tackling market changes. The key is to have structured agendas but also leave room for open, candid conversations.

These sessions aren’t just about you talking at your customers. It’s a two-way street, giving you space to dive into problem-solving, and tapping into the diverse expertise of your board members. Their unique perspectives often lead you to innovative solutions you might not have considered otherwise.

Post-meeting, don’t just pat yourself on the back and call it a day though. Follow up with a summary of what was discussed and the action points you plan to tackle. This follow-through is the whole point. It shows your CAB members that their input isn’t just valued, it’s instrumental. And, by implementing their feedback, you’re not just fine-tuning your product; you’re building a partnership with some of your most valuable customers.

4. User testing sessions

User testing sessions make for great reality checks. Bring in people who represent your actual users – you’ll want some that are already customers, and some that might be potential users. The goal is to see your product through their eyes.

It’s all about understanding how your product fits into their daily lives. By creating realistic scenarios for them to work through, you get a window into how intuitive and user-friendly your product really is. After all, you probably know your product inside and out, which means you’re probably not a good judge of how new or less experienced users approach it.

Note where they stumble, what makes them pause, and when those ‘Aha!’ moments crop up. It’s a fascinating process and can be super informative. Encourage them to think out loud as they navigate, giving you a peek into their thought process. This fresh, immediate feedback is gold – it’s raw and often points out things you might not have noticed with your burden of product knowledge.

Next, sift through it all, looking for patterns and key takeaways, then turn these into action points for your team. It’s an ongoing cycle – test, learn, improve, and test again. And again we make sure to loop back with our participants, showing them how their input is shaping our product. It’s not just about finding flaws; it’s about constantly evolving and making our product the best it can be for those who use it.

What should you do next with your customer feedback?

Ok, so you’ve got ears and eyes all over collecting customer feedback, and you’re running feedback sessions and interviews. If what you’re hearing is positive, you proudly display what’s been said on your website as customer testimonials, and share it with your team as a morale boost. But… what if it’s negative?

Well, that’s when you act. Don’t get mad, get fixing! You need to take what people are saying and turn it into improvements that positively impact every customer – not just the ones giving feedback.

Let’s look at a few examples:

“I like what the product does but it’s too pricey for me in the long term.”

If this is a one-off criticism, you might be able to take it with a pinch of salt. But if you hear this a lot, you need to think about your pricing structure. Maybe you can offer a stripped-back free tier or a student rate, or maybe you need to reassess your entire pricing strategy. You could do worse than use this feedback as a jumping-off point to run a focus group on pricing.

“Too complicated. The app has way too much going on.”

You’ve got navigation issues. Sometimes what seems obvious to the team making the product seems alien and confusing to outsiders, and it can be difficult to see the wood for the trees. It would be worth combining this written feedback with some technical insight via eye-tracking software to see how people are navigating your app. Alongside this, why not workshop a more user-friendly set of tutorial screens?

“Crashes all the time.”

Red alert! Even one user claiming that your product is unstable should be enough to launch a full-scale QA investigation. If your product crashes regularly you need to find out what the variables are, and whether it’s a specific browser, chipset, or OS that’s rubbing up against your architecture the wrong way.

What’s crucial is that this becomes a cyclical process. You should be aiming to collect customer feedback as often as humanly possible without it becoming a burden on your target audience.

The aim of the game is to collect feedback and opinions, act on what you learn, and then ask again. If you’re receiving fewer complaints about that issue, you can move on to a different priority on the roadmap.

Developing a product is an infinitely long process, and customer feedback plays a vital role when it comes to closing experience gaps that you might otherwise miss.

And once you’ve used your new feedback-fu, and identified those experience gaps? It’s time to update your roadmap so that the whole team knows what needs to be tackled Now, Next, and Later. 

Top tips for collecting customer feedback

Finally, before we leave you to go listen really hard to your customers to find out exactly how to make them happy, here are a few final ideas to help you nail your feedback loop:

1. Timing is everything: Request feedback following an interaction or at relevant moments. Avoid times when it might be intrusive or irrelevant.
2. Incentivize responses: Offering rewards or incentives can help to increase response rates.
3. Target a diverse audience: Ensure you’re gathering feedback from a wide range of users to avoid biased insights. Consider different user types, demographics, and levels of engagement with your product.
4. Context is king: Choose the right medium (in-app, email, social media) based on the context and nature of the feedback you’re seeking.
5. Keep it short and simple: Lengthy surveys or complicated feedback mechanisms can deter users. Aim for clarity and brevity.
6. Acknowledge and act: Show users that their feedback is valued by acknowledging their contributions and, where feasible, implementing changes based on their input.
7. Continuous process: Regularly update your feedback mechanisms and keep the process ongoing, adapting to changes in user behavior and preferences.
8. Privacy and transparency: Assure users of their privacy and be transparent about how their feedback will be used.
9. Respond quickly to feedback: Reply swiftly to feedback, especially if it’s negative. This shows customers that their opinions are valued and taken seriously, and can turn a negative experience into a positive one.

Now go forth, intrepid feedback hoovers! Unleash the power of your newfound knowledge, engage with your customers in meaningful ways, and turn their complaints and praise into the golden keys that unlock the potential of your product.

The post How to Collect Customer Feedback in 2024 appeared first on ProdPad.

The top 15 women in product you should be following

Here’s a not-so-exhaustive list of just some of the influential women who ought to be on your radar and in your feeds.

1. Melissa Perri
2. Teresa Torres
3. Janna Bastow
4. Erin Teague
5. Reshma Saujani
6. Aileen Lee
7. Julia Grace
8. Amanda Ralph
9. Julie Zhuo
10. Rashmi Sinha
11. Michele Hansen
12. Sallie Krawcheck
13. JJ Rorie
14. Melanie Perkins
15. Laura Klein

For even more, be sure to keep a beady eye on our webinars.

1. Melissa Perri

Melissa’s bag is all about helping to build great leaders in the space. She runs a couple of great online schools on the subject: Product Institute and The CPO Accelerator, which both aim to create a new generation of Chief Product Officers that can solve product issues in scientific terms.

She’s also the author of “Escaping the Build Trap”, a book that dives into why product managers are the key to ensuring product value. In the Product Thinking podcast, meanwhile, Melissa connects “with industry-leading experts in the product management space, and answers your most pressing questions about everything product.”

Watch Melissa and Janna Bastow, our CEO and Co-Founder, talk about product operations in our free-to-stream webinar here.

Where to find her: Twitter | LinkedIn | Blog | Podcast

2. Teresa Torres

Teresa knows the importance of continuous discovery in the product world. Her book, Continuous Discovery Habits, digs deep into how and why you can make your product infinitely better the more you uncover about its place in the world, and she’s got a range of classes and resources on hand to boot.

As she puts it, her focus is on how to “Better understand your users or customers so that you can deliver an irresistible product, integrate experiments into your product development process so that you can be confident that every line of code matters, and make data-informed product decisions that drive both business and customer success.”

We’ve been lucky enough to have Terresa join us for a webinar on continuous product discovery, you can stream it here.

Where to find her: Twitter | LinkedIn | Blog | Watch

3. Janna Bastow

Hold up… how did our co-founder and CEO sneak into this completely unbiased list?! Janna’s a meticulously-focussed problem solver who puts a pragmatic focus on getting right to the heart of any given product-related issue. Oh, and she’s a champion of the Now-Next-Later approach to roadmapping.

Janna’s written oodles of blogs right here on ProdPad.com, and organizes ProductTank events around the world, and is one of the co-founders of Mind The Product, a global community of product managers. How could Janna not be on this list?  

Where to find her: Twitter | LinkedIn | Blog | Watch

4. Erin Teague

Erin is currently the Director of Product Management at YouTube, focusing on sports, shows, and movies alongside Racial Justice, Equity, and Product Inclusion product team. Erin’s a huge advocate around issues to do with equality and diversity in the space – as her Twitter bio puts it, she’s “working hard to make my ancestors smile!”

Before working at Google, Erin made moves at both Twitter and Yahoo!, and sits on multiple tech advisory boards. She cut her teeth designing trading algorithms at Morgan Stanley, and now routinely ranks in lists (just like this one) about the tech world’s most influential women. Oh, and in 2019, Erin won the 2019 B.E.T. Her Tech Maven Award. She’s a pretty big deal.

Where to find her: Twitter | LinkedIn | Watch

5. Reshma Saujani

As the founder of both Girls Who Code and Moms First, it should come as no surprise that Reshma’s insanely focused on helping women break into – and flourish in – the tech space. She’s a bestselling author, a renowned public speaker, and the CEO of an organization that has “taught 300,000 girls through direct in-person computer science education programming.”

If you’re looking for some lunchtime viewing, Reshma’s iconic TED Talk about how to help young girls feel empowered has racked up some six million views across various channels. She’s also a keen investor – with a portfolio built around unique companies and underrepresented business founders.

Where to find her: Twitter | LinkedIn | Blog | Watch

6. Aileen Lee

Aileen is the founder and managing partner of Cowboy Ventures, a VC funding group that specializes in consumer-led tech. But she’s also the founder of All Raise, a nonprofit that focuses specifically on improving funding prospects for female founders.

Fun fact: Aileen was the person who first coined the term ‘unicorn’ when referring to businesses that hit $1 billion without being listed on the stock market.

Where to find her: Twitter | LinkedIn | Podcast

7. Julia Grace

Julia is the VP of Product Engineering at Netflix, which would be impressive enough by itself. But Julia was also the Engineering Director at Apple and a Senior Director of Engineering at Slack. So it’s safe to say she knows a thing or two about growing products. 

The talk linked above, from the 2019 NYC Lead Developer Conference, is a great watch for any product managers looking to navigate the tricky waters of scaling rapidly. In it, she discusses taking Slack from 100 to 500 team members.

Where to find her: Twitter | LinkedIn | Watch

8. Amanda Ralph

Aus-based Amanda is a thought leader in the product space with a string of speaking and podcast appearances to her name alongside the hugely successful blog, That Product Chick. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s well worth digging into that site as it’s an absolute goldmine of industry knowledge – on everything from diversity in the field to how to put OKRs to work. 

Amanda also founded the thousands-strong Product Women Meetup community to “provide support and mentorship for women who are looking to meet other women in Product Management.” 

Where to find her: Twitter | LinkedIn | Blog | Listen

9. Julie Zhuo

Julie was the vice president of product design at Facebook for 13 years, helping take the platform from 8 million users to over 2 billion. She now co-runs Inspirit, a tech-based advisory and consultancy firm.

Moreover, Julie’s the author of The Making of a Manager, a best-selling field guide that aims to build incredible product managers out of newbies who might feel out of their depth. As well as writing for the likes of the New York Times and Fast Company, Jule’s Year of the Looking Glass blog is a great look behind the curtain at product design (and life in general).

Where to find her: Twitter | LinkedIn | Blog | Watch

10. Rashmi Sinha

Even though Rashmi’s LinkedIn profile quite brilliantly describes her as an ‘Entrepreneur at large”, she actually says that she “did not set out to be an entrepreneur. It’s just the easiest way to make an idea come alive.”

The idea you’ve probably interacted with is SlideShare, which she co-founded with her husband and brother. But Rashmi’s also a scientist; her SJIA Foundation is currently researching cutes for Systemic JIA, Adult Onset Still’s Disease, and MAS.

Where to find her: Twitter | LinkedIn | Listen

11. Michele Hansen

Michele is a SaaS founder (Geocodio), speaker, and author. Her book, Deploy Empathy: A Practical Guide to Interviewing Customers, is all about her key passion: uncovering your product’s value from the best source possible: the people who use it.

Michele is also the co-host of the Software Social podcast, a great show in which she sits down with friend and fellow SaaS founder, Colleen Schnettler, for an informal chat about all things product.

Where to find her: Twitter | LinkedIn | Blog | Watch

12. Sallie Krawcheck

Sallie’s a finance and investment powerhouse who’s been described in the past as “the most powerful woman on Wall Street.” Right now she’s the founder and CEO of Ellevest, a financial advisory company aimed at helping women secure investment, but she’s been all over the finance sector, including CitiGroup and Bank of America.

If you work in product and you’re wondering how best to speak to investors and secure funding, then Sallie’s blogs, books, and talks should definitely be on your list.

Where to find her: Twitter | LinkedIn | Blog | Watch

13. JJ Rorie

JJ’s a product management guru whose book, Immutable, is a one-stop shop for mastering the techniques you’ll need to become a truly well-rounded PM. Also on the slate is the Product Voices podcast, in which JJ talks to voices from around the product space about today’s biggest SaaS subjects.

Her experience comes from more than 15 years of product management at brands like FedEx, Verizon, T-Mobile, the American Hospital Association, and RBC.

Where to find her: Twitter | LinkedIn | Blog | Listen

14. Melanie Perkins

Ever used Canva to make a presentation? That was Melanie’s baby – and it made her one of the youngest women ever to garner a $1b net worth (money she plans to give away).

Melanie’s Twitter, Medium page, and even Insta account aren’t the most active in the world, but she has a wealth of knowledge on the subjects of developing a product and getting funding, so it’s worth setting up a Google alert for any interviews with her; she’s done a decent number of podcast interviews over the years.

Where to find her: Twitter | LinkedIn | Blog | Listen

15. Laura Klein

Laura’s the absolute boss when it comes to all things UX. Her books, Build Better Products and UX for Lean Startups run through everything product teams could ever want to know about how to integrate purposeful UX design that solves real customer needs.

As well as writing and making numerous conference appearances, Laura’s also involved in a couple of podcasts: What is Wrong with UX, and What is Wrong with Hiring. Oh, and she’s also appeared on a ProdPad webinar all about the nuances of UX needs…

Where to find her: Twitter | LinkedIn | Blog | Watch

Join the ‘Women in Product’ Slack group

Women in Product is a collective that was founded in 2015 to create a supportive space for women in product to talk about their work, get advice, and celebrate their successes.

What makes this Slack group so special is its ability to really help lift you (and your career) up. Whether you need help negotiating new contracts or pay raises – or just want to find out more about female-friendly companies – this community should be your go-to. Fill in this form to join.

The post 15 Women in Product You Should Be Following appeared first on ProdPad.

Luckily, you’re not an ogre. If you’re here, you’re much more likely to be a product manager – more specifically, a product manager who wants to figure out how to toe the difficult line between agile, ever-adapting workflow, and maintaining a long-term product vision.

And that’s where onions come in. Learn its ins and outs, and the agile planning onion could be just the solution you’re looking for: and your new best friend when it comes to getting stuff done in the here and now, without losing sight of the bigger picture.

Here’s what we’ll be covering in this piece:

• What is agile planning?
• What is the agile planning onion?
• What are the agile planning onion layers?
• How the agile planning onion supports a now-next-later roadmap
• Useful next steps

What is agile planning?

Agile planning is, as the name suggests, more lithe and ready to pivot than traditional planning methods. Whereas traditional planning will see senior teams block out a fixed plan for a year or a quarter and doggedly stick to it until the end, agile planning deals in much shorter bursts that serve an immediate need – and with a more egalitarian approach across the company.

In the agile planning world, these bursts are usually known as sprints, and agile teams will work through a number of sprints of different lengths throughout the year – each one of which will ladder up through various stages to an overarching vision.

The big, juicy benefit of this approach is that it means you’re suddenly able to adapt to customer and business needs as and when they occur. 

Traditional planning methods that block out projects for up to a year at a time are slow and creaky. By the time all’s said and done, the market may have moved or technology may have shifted so dramatically that it’s too late to turn the ship away from disaster. 

That kind of planning is fine when you’re making something static that’s unaffected by shifting markets. If you’re building a skyscraper, for example, you’d probably want to plan every part out first and then get to work. But the world of software is different, requiring that project managers constantly have their ear to the ground – and an ability to make sharp turns when needed.

A competitor just released a game-changing feature? Agile teams can put the brakes on what they were working on and shift focus in a heartbeat. Comparatively, the act of unpicking projects and resources planned out with traditional methods is a complete nightmare. 

Agile product management means…

1. Faster time to market

Quick delivery through regular product updates and feature launches thanks to working in sprints. This reduces time to market and keeps you ahead of the competition.

2. Flexibility

Agile allows teams to adapt to changing market conditions and customer needs, keeping your product relevant and valuable.

3. Customer focus

With your customer needs at the center of the development process, you’ll ensure you’re solving actual needs and wants.

4. Collaboration

Teamwork and transparency are at the heart of Agile. And that teamwork often results in better communication and more streamlined problem-solving.

4. Continuous discovery

Iteration and continuous discovery are key. They let you highlight issues as they’re flagged and improve the product on a regular basis.

Agile planning, then, ensures that every project you undertake is timely and necessary in the moment – all without losing sight of your overall vision. The focus here is on small, frequent project deliveries that work together to form something larger than the sum of their parts.

What is the agile planning onion?

The agile planning onion is a visual representation of the concentric layers of agile planning, ranging from the day-to-day to the long-term vision. In other words: each onion layer is a level at which you can apply an agile planning framework.

That’s important because it’s easy to think that you can only be ‘agile’ with more day-to-day stuff. In actuality, it’s best to think in agile terms at every level, because that’s how you adapt to customer needs and solve problems as they arise.

The onion diagram represents both time and effort, with the smallest value at the bottom, and the biggest at the top:

Time

At the bottom of the onion, you have more frequent projects, sprints, and iterations. As you work your way toward the top, things slow down, but it’s important not to fall into the trap of thinking that you can fall back into traditional planning techniques here. Infrequent doesn’t mean ‘yearly’ or ‘never’.

Effort 

Likewise, as you climb up through the layers, you’ll find that projects and sprints require more and more effort. Short sprints to fix bugs or deploy patches, for instance, require much less effort than overhauling an entire product vision or strategy.

What are the agile planning onion layers?

There are five agile planning layers:

1. Vision: The overarching goal or mission for your product.
2. Strategy (or Roadmap): The high-level approach or plan, and sequence of major milestones 
3. Release: The plan for delivering a specific set of features or functionality
4. Sprint: The plan for the current iteration, including specific tasks and deliverables
5. Day/Business as usual (BAU): The day-to-day stuff, including things to get done, progress updates, and challenges.

Shield your eyes; it’s time to break open that onion and explore each layer in a bit more detail.

1. Vision

Defining your product’s vision is an exercise in deciding what you want it to do for people, how it differs from others on the market, and what your dream is for it. This is topline stuff, which shouldn’t be taken lightly; your product vision will inform everything that happens further down the onion.

Vision can (and should) change from time to time depending on trends in the market and where your product currently sits on the product lifecycle, but generally, this is a more abstract, long-lasting part of the onion. We’ve got an article here with some example product vision statements from brands that have become household names.

2. Strategy (or Roadmap)

The strategy layer is all about taking that vision and turning it into something attainable. If your goal for your product is for it to be the world’s most useful communication tool, for example, you’ll need to map out some strategies for achieving that goal – including figuring out priorities and an order in which to tackle things.

In other words: the roadmapping stage requires that you can plot a path between your lofty aims and actual work. You’ll want to group features, updates, and projects into releases, remembering not to get too far into the nitty-gritty of daily work – that comes further down the onion.

3. Release

Here you can get a bit more specific about what each release is going to entail, and what it’ll mean for both the product and the user. Projects ladder up to releases that can be moved around depending on priority, and each release should tick a strategy box that helps your product edge closer to the vision you have for it. You don’t need to get caught up with specific deadlines – getting releases mapped out sensibly and regularly should be enough to ensure that everyone can deliver things on time, without going over capacity. 

4. Sprint

Releases are essentially a compilation of completed projects (called ‘stories’ in the Agile world), that are usually planned out every couple of weeks, and carried out as sprints. These one or two-week sprints are the foundational blocks of your project’s ongoing evolution. By breaking things down into these short sprints, you’ll ensure that you can pivot if circumstances change.

5. Day/Business as usual (BAU)

Being agile really means being capable of changing your plans quickly. That’s why most agile teams have a daily morning ‘standup’ – an all-hands meeting or call in which everyone updates on their progress, flags any blockers, and adjusts the plan for the day ahead accordingly. 

These daily planning sessions inform the nature of each sprint, which bundle up toward releases, which are planned out on your roadmap, which help fulfill your vision. Now that’s a tasty onion.

How the agile planning onion supports a Now-Next-Later roadmap

Roadmapping is a massive part of the agile planning onion – it’s got a whole layer dedicated to it. But roadmaps are tricky to get right. 

When you’re bundling features up into various releases and you need to communicate when specific ones are going to land, it can be tempting to get bogged down with exact deadlines. But deadlines aren’t agile, and they’re a nightmare to unpick if things slip or the market changes on you.

Here are four reasons why truly agile teams think in terms of Now-Next-Later when it comes to roadmapping their product’s future:

1. It’s not about specific deadlines

Deadlines can be paralyzing. The more stock you put in a specific date that’s been plucked out of thin air, the harder it is to be truly agile – you can’t pivot to focus on emerging, customer-centric needs if your whole roadmap is built around some far-flung date. 

2. It helps you stay nimble 

Say you’re working towards a release that adds a specific new feature, but you learn that a lot of customers are experiencing bugs with an existing one. Or maybe a competitor launches something completely different, and you realize that that’s where the customer need is. A Now-Next-Later roadmap makes it ridiculously easy to park things in the Later column and add things to the Now one – or to swap priorities in a hot minute.

3. It’s customer-centric

Traditional planning makes a lot of assumptions. It takes a snapshot of the market environment and plans things out for years at a time, as though nothing will change. But customer needs do change, a lot, which is why agile planning is great from a customer experience point of view. 

Planning on a Now-Next-Later roadmap lets you make rapid changes based on customer needs – and the best roadmapping tools know how to make customer feedback useful. ProdPad, for example, has a customer feedback portal baked right in, which lets you focus on the things people actually want.

4. It’s egalitarian

Agile planning is bottom-up and top-down. The vision proliferates down from the top, and the daily planning informs releases and roadmaps. That makes it a pretty egalitarian framework, where everyone needs to be involved for quick decisions to happen. So it makes sense that any roadmapping software you use can adhere to that transparent, communal ethos.

When you get teams in daily standups letting you know that something isn’t working, or that a previous priority now shouldn’t be, that’s an insight that can make or break a sprint, a release, and a whole product’s future. We’ve already said that a Now-Next-Later roadmap makes swapping and changing priorities so much easier than any deadline-based Gantt chart ever could. But beyond that, it’s super simple: planning under those three pillars is a methodology that everyone involved – from developers to investors – can easily understand.

Useful next steps – After the agile planning onion

Hopefully, that’s a good quickfire course on how you can use agile planning to flesh out a roadmap that keeps the whole team happy, productive, and solving customer needs. But if you’ve got an enquiring mind, we know you might want to know what happens next. So here’s a handful of links that might help you take this theory and turn it into practice…

Go in-depth on agile planning

Here’s the complete A-Z of everything agile. If you’ve got a question about the agile methodology, it’s probably answered here.

Learn how to be Lean and Agile

Lean isn’t the same as agile: one’s a mindset and one’s a practice. Here’s a quick guide on what that means for product teams.

Understand the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)

Big companies struggle to be agile from top to bottom. That’s where the SAFe framework comes in. Read this piece and become an instant expert.

Use agile planning to provide transparency

The agile methodology can be a game changer for company-wide transparency. Here’s how.

3 ways to introduce agile planning to your product management

Enough theory. Here are three pragmatic, strategic ways to turn your company into a hub for agile product development.

The post Using the Agile Planning Onion with a Now-Next-Later Roadmap appeared first on ProdPad.

What does a product manager do?

Product managers spend their days asking two key questions:

• What problem are we trying to solve?
• How can we best solve it?

In practice, that means bridging the gap between various teams in order to get a product designed, developed, shipped, and then improved. That makes them multidisciplinary masters that straddle the gaps between UX, tech, and business.

They’ll be in charge of the product roadmap, the teams responsible for hitting your goals, the business-level buy-in, and the overarching product vision. Crucially, that means being great with people. As a product manager, you’ll need to work across teams and ensure that everyone’s moving in the same direction, and marching to the beat of the same drum: ideally, yours.

A product manager will be heading up a meeting with investors one minute, discussing the minutiae of UI and UX design the next, and reading through user feedback straight after. It’s a busy job, then – but a super rewarding one.

If that’s something you want to get into but you’re new to the world of product, fret not: we’ve actually got a whole guide on how to crack into the industry without a drop of prior experience:

• How To Become a Product Manager With No Experience

What are the most desired skills a product manager needs?

Product managers work across teams and disciplines, which means they need to be pretty great at a whole range of jobs and they need to be imbued with a bunch of sought-after skills.

Product managers need to be…

Strategic

You need to have an excellent long-term view of where your product needs to go, and have a rock-solid product strategy for how to get there. Balancing the macro and the micro can be a tall order – it requires being able to master the Now, Next, and Later of product development.

Business-minded

Product managers often need to unplug from the day-to-day of product development and put their business hats on to deal with investors and the other key stakeholders that help keep the product ticking over. That means having a keen understanding of the financial side of product-led growth, as well as being able to balance the fun stuff with the need to drive revenue.

Great communicators

You’ll be dealing with lots of people across lots of teams who, naturally, all have different ways of working, communicating, and feeling motivated. So you’ll need to be able to figure out what kind of candor each team member responds to best and adapt your way of working to match. Your communication skills need to be able to seamlessly switch from the technical questions needed to understand your developer’s needs but also asking the type of behavioral questions that get to the crux of your customer’s needs.

Detail-driven

While you’ll be spending a fair amount of your time on the big picture stuff, it’s also key that you know how to dive into the nuts and bolts of UI, UX, and user behavior. Great product managers are as obsessed with the finer details as they are with the product’s overall direction of travel.

Tech-savvy

You might not need a software engineering degree to be a great product manager, but you do need at least a basic understanding of the tech going on behind the scenes, as well as the tech you can use internally to enable a more robust and curated roadmap. In short? Your team of software developers will want to know that you actually understand and can empathize with their workload.

Expert prioritizers

Every product is a living, breathing organism with a raft of different needs – some are urgent, and some are long-term. It’s up to the product manager to be able to figure out which is which and prioritize accordingly. That means effectively managing a roadmap with a keen understanding of what should be tackled Now-Next-Later.

The 12 important product manager interview questions

Now there isn’t a hard and fast script for the sorts of product manager interview questions you might be asked, but I’d put money on you being asked some combination of the below.

1. What does a product manager do?

Lucky for you, we covered this pretty comprehensively at the top of this post! They’ll want to be sure you understand the full ins and outs of the role, but also where your responsibilities stop. So give an overview of the many hats you’ll have to wear, but be sure to clarify that you’re not a micro-manager – you need to be great at conducting, coordinating, and delegating confidently to a talented set of colleagues.

2. What’s your process for developing a product roadmap?

Or, in other words: how well do you prioritize? You should start by saying that you understand products have different needs at different stages of their lifecycles. Next, we’d recommend that you don’t get bogged down in timeframes. Instead, you’ll want to work with each team, collate user feedback, and collaboratively shape the roadmap into priorities that need to happen right now, next, and later. The right roadmapping software is your best friend, here.

3. How would you go about keeping different teams aligned?

Whilst you’re part of the product team, for you to be successful in your role you’ll be moving between a bunch of teams – from marketing to development and everyone in between perhaps cross-functional teams too – who all have different goals, KPIs, and priorities. It’s your job to steer the ship in a common direction, so the answer here lies in how you can get the best out of people, working with them, building on their strengths, and ensuring that when you disagree with them, they never leave a meeting feeling resentful about it.

But this is also about how you handle conflict between product and business goals; you’ll want to demonstrate that you understand the needs of investors as much as users.

4. How do you prioritize competing features?

You’ll always have a backlog of features and updates to sift through. The question is: how? You’ll want to gather insight from a range of places – product analytics suites, user feedback, focus groups, reviews, internally-known issues, and revenue drivers. You’ll use your judgment and team input to weigh up the importance of these, and then divide them into two lists: quick wins, and time sinks.

Using a priority chart is a good way to visualize the two, and from there you can start to organize your roadmap. Just know that roadmaps are designed to change and evolve – nothing’s ever set in stone.

5. How do you figure out what users want most?

You ask them! You can either run focus groups or conduct regular surveys to solicit feedback, as well as keep an eye on social media posts and third-party review sites. Competitor research can help too – if you’ve got a close rival that’s doing well off the back of a core feature, it’s worth thinking about how you can stay true to the value statement of your product while also servicing that need. Lastly, you can use product analytics suites, heat-mapping tools, and A/B testing to find user behaviors that scream “I need this feature.”

6. How do you approach product lifecycle management?

The interviewers want to know that you understand the four product lifecycle phases: introduction, growth, maturity, and decline. They each need different approaches because they each have different priorities. In the introduction phase, for example, all hands are on deck to build something that closely adheres to your goals – and you’ll be responsible for shipping something awesome. In the maturity phase, you’ll need to find ways to innovate without becoming a feature factory just for the sake of it.

7. How do you measure the success of a product?

Demonstrate that you’re familiar with setting and meeting OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). You need to be able to outline what you’re shooting for and explain how to get there. Success varies depending on the kind of product and where it is in its lifecycle, but what’s key is having targets. If and when you miss those targets, show that you’re keen to learn from the experience. We’ve got a guide to setting and tracking OKRs here.

8. Can you give an example of how you overcame a failure?

Ah, the old ‘give us an example’ question. Thankfully, everyone’s failed at something, and everyone’s made it through. Don’t worry too much about the specifics here, or even how closely it relates to product management. The role is as much about people as it is about the product, so give an example of when you were able to turn a team-related failure into a success – and what you learned along the way. That’ll show growth, maturity, and the ability to take things on the chin.

9. How would you improve our product?

Tread carefully here. You want to show that you’re deeply familiar with the product you’re applying to work on, without upsetting the people directly responsible for it. If they have a publicly available roadmap, you could lean on that by picking an upcoming feature and elaborating on the need for it.

If you come up with something fresh, try tying it to a business objective like expansion toward a new demographic, or an insight into user behavior. Just don’t make out like the product is seriously lacking in its current shape.

10. What’s the best book on product management you’ve read?

The interviewers want to know that you’re not just applying for this job on a whim; they’re looking for a love of the industry, and of innovation. In truth, it doesn’t need to be a book on product management specifically; it could just be something that gave you some great insight and changed your way of thinking.

Pick one book, and remember one segment that you can point to as being a game-changer. You may also be asked about news sites and industry publications; so get entrenched in a few and be ready to reference a recent article.

11. What would your first six months here look like?

This a classic question for any industry. An impressive answer doesn’t need to be granular to the point of boring people. Instead, paint a picture of your processes. You’ll want to audit everything that’s currently happening, meet the team and get to know their strengths, and then start to overlay the techniques and skills that make you uniquely qualified to kick the product up a gear.

Maybe you want to change the company’s tech stack, for example. Maybe you want to lean into data-driven insights? Again, a lot will depend on the product’s maturity, but you needn’t go in and rip up the rule book. Just hit a few key notes that suggest you’re not flying by the seat of your pants. Explain that going to give yourself – and the product – some clear OKRs, and then you’re going to work towards them methodically.

12. What tools would be in your tech stack?

They want to see that you know your way around the tools of the trade – the software that you’ll be living in day-to-day as a product manager. We’ve already mentioned things like product analytics suites, but you’ll also want to talk about product roadmapping tools that can help you align teams, track OKRs, and prioritize your feature updates in a way that drives innovation. 

Might we suggest ProdPad?

And 20 more common product manager interview questions to think about…

1. What are the most important qualities a successful product manager needs?
2. What motivated you to become a product manager?
3. How do you evaluate market opportunities?
4. How do you keep your teams motivated?
5. How do you ensure that your product is competitive in the market?
6. How do you manage product roadmaps?
7. What is your process for creating a go-to-market strategy?
8. How do you handle product launch failures?
9. What is your experience with agile development methodologies?
10. How do you collaborate with engineering teams?
11. What is your experience with user experience design?
12. What is your experience with data analysis and market research?
13. What is your experience with product pricing and monetization strategies?
14. What is your experience with product analytics tools?
15. How do you incorporate customer feedback into product development?
16. What is your experience with A/B testing and experimentation?
17. How do you manage risks and uncertainties?
18. What is your approach to innovation and product differentiation?
19. What is your experience with international product launches?
20. How do you stay up-to-date with industry trends and best practices?

The truth is, there is no wrong answer to product manager interview questions…

Don’t panic; you’re gonna ace it. The fact that you’re here reading this means you’re doing great research to ace the interview process – that’s half the battle.

Just do the prep, have some solid answers locked in place, and remember that your interviewers are human beings. Our advice? Answer each one of your product manager interview questions with a clear point and then wait for the interviewers to ask another; don’t ramble on.

A crucial thing some people forget in interviews is that it’s always a two-way street. Answering questions succinctly and comprehensively is a great skill, but it pays to come armed with a bunch of questions for them, too.

Poke and prod, ask everything from ‘what do and don’t you like about working here?’ to ‘what do you think are the product’s biggest challenges?’ – asking questions shows that you have an inquiring mind and that you’re choosy about where you work.

And, if all else fails, just do this.

The post 12 Product Manager Interview Questions and How to Answer Them appeared first on ProdPad.

In this article, we’ll be covering the following topics:

• What is product adoption?
• Why measure product adoption?
• How do you track product adoption?
• 9 essential product adoption metrics to track
• What to do with all that insight?

What is product adoption?

Imagine a customer downloads your product, installs it, creates an account, and then… Never touches it again. On paper, that’s still a conversion – a tick in the box for user acquisition. If they’ve agreed to pay a monthly subscription, it’s even a sales acquisition.

But if they don’t use what you’ve made, you can’t class it as product adoption.

Product adoption, then, is when people put your product to use. Often, people pass the adoption threshold when they’ve completed the onboarding flow, completed a series of key user actions, or continue to use the core features after the initial novelty period wears off.

For a tool like WeTransfer, that might be when they first upload a document to share. For Slack, it might be when they make their first channel and send their first message. For us at ProdPad, it could be when a team member fills out the Now, Next, Later sections on their roadmap.

Whatever the case, product adoption is usually defined as the moment when your users realize the value proposition you’ve created for them. It’s when their behavior indicates that the product is proving useful.

When you’re tracking product adoption, you’re really seeking actionable insights and answers to a few key questions:

• Is our product actually solving the problem we set out to solve?
• Are our users using our features as we want them to?
• Could the user experience be improved?
• Was the last version rollout successful?
• When and why do our users churn?

Why is measuring product adoption metrics important?

Product adoption metrics provide richer insight than the comparatively bottom-line stuff around signups and revenue.

If a million people create an account for your product, download it, open it, and then bounce right off it, you’ll only know that if you’re tracking product adoption data. And that’s powerful because if you know what’s really happening at the user level, you can learn where the experience gaps are and think about how best to close them. 

On the flip side, without that vital layer of information, you might be lulled into a false sense of security. A million signups – even paid ones – might seem great, but if those users don’t make it to that ‘value realization’ stage, you can be sure they won’t renew their subscription when the next payment cycle comes around.

Put simply? Product adoption metrics are behavioral in nature, which makes them great at figuring out pain points and validating assumptions about what people love or don’t love about what you have to offer.

In turn, that insight can help inform your product roadmap – uniting product teams and customer success teams around known issues and user bottlenecks. 

Lastly, product adoption metrics can also make for incredibly persuasive tools when you’re pitching to potential investors.

While product acquisition is a strong indicator that your marketing or sales efforts are firing on all cylinders, product adoption data shows investors that people actually love to use what you’ve made – and that they plan on continuing to do so long into the future. Which, ultimately, is an indicator of sustainable revenue and an attractive proposition.

How do you track product adoption?

Tracking product adoption is done using product analytics tools. These are software platforms that nestle in under the skin of your product and keep a keen eye on various parameters to do with user behavior.

Product analytics tools can generate trends across your whole user base, as well as drill down to individual users. In either case, they’ll present you with a bunch of stats and key behavioral trends that your resident data scientist can analyze to report on how things are going.

Product analytics tools are at their best when they’re easy to use but rich in features, with customizable fields that let you tailor dashboards and reporting to be relevant to your product.

Our recommended product analytics suites are:

• Mixpanel
• Amplitude
• Pendo
• Fullstory
• Heap
• Gainsight PX
• Google Analytics

At ProdPad, we use Mixpanel for its fancy customization options and robust reporting, but if you want to learn what each tool does – and what makes them worthwhile – we’ve got a full rundown of each one here:

9 essential product adoption metrics to track

1. Product adoption rate

This is really the big catch-all metric in the product adoption space: are people actually using your product? Product adoption rate sorts signups from active users over a given timeframe to determine how many people go beyond simply creating an account.

People who’ve signed up but don’t use your app are a danger because they’ve yet to discover the value in your offering, so having a low product adoption rate is a dangerous place to be.

Questions to ask yourself when setting this up: What are the user adoption metrics you need to be tracking? Do you have a feature adoption strategy in place? Where is the sweet spot on the product adoption curve and how do you help your users get there faster?

2. Active users

Daily active users (DAU) and monthly active users (MAU) are metrics that show how sticky your product is. If you have a high number of daily users logging in and hitting those adoption goals or taking meaningful action every day, then you know that what you’re doing is working.

Obviously, every product will have a different idea of what success looks like, here. For a business messaging product like Slack, for example, you’d want users to be signing in and using the product throughout every working day. If it’s something that only needs to be used every now and again, though – perhaps a personal accountancy tool – you wouldn’t expect people to be logging in just for the sake of it.

Either way, a lower-than-expected active user count can be a hint that you can make the product work a bit harder. Maybe you can incentivize or gamify daily logins? Duolingo is a great example here. Or maybe you can add features that help with a different part of your users’ day? For example, the transcription service Otter.ai connects to Outlook calendars to make keeping on top of meetings a breeze.

3. Feature usage frequency

Similarly, keeping an eye on how often each individual user is actively using the product can clue you into broader trends. If users are relentless in their use early on but soon drop away, it might be because they’ve found a competitor that does what you’re doing for a better price. Or it might be that their problem has been permanently solved.

The reverse is also true: if users slowly increase their product usage frequency over time, it suggests that they’re gradually understanding just how valuable your product is. That’ll help you find the length of the learning curve as well as time-to-value, which we’ll come onto shortly.

4. Onboarding completion rate

Divide the number of users who completed the onboarding process by the total of users who started, and you’ll have your onboarding completion rate. It’s an important stat to keep an eye on because it can point to a number of issues.|

Low onboarding completion might, for example, suggest that you’re boring or scaring people away with the signup and introductory process. Or it might mean that, during that process, you’re not making a strong enough case for the product’s feature suite.

Remember you can and should keep onboarding simple, sometimes an amazing onboarding experience is a lot less involved than you might think – start with emails or in-app messages to guide your users to the most valuable features first.

5. Feature adoption rate

Let’s say you’ve just shipped a new version of your product. It’s the big 2.0 rollout that adds an incredible new product feature: users can now send each other cat GIFs. Feature adoption rate is the metric that’ll tell you how it lands.

To track this, you’ll need to specify a given feature to monitor within your product analytics suite, and then see how its usage figures compare to the total volume of users. Sometimes new features can take a while to catch on, but a low feature adoption rate over a prolonged period usually means that the feature in question isn’t resonating with your user base. That means it either needs to be killed or retooled.

6. Time-to-first action and time-to-value

Time-to-first-action is about tracking how long it takes for a user to complete a specific task. It’s a great way to hone in on the more granular aspects of your product’s capabilities. Taking the silly example above, you might want to see the average time it takes for a user to send their first cat GIF to a colleague.

If you determine that taking that specific action is when users find value in the product, that’s also how you’ll calculate time-to-value. Sometimes time-to-value doesn’t need to be tied to a feature or action, though; it can be anything. You might choose to determine that users have found the value in your product over time, after 30 days of consecutive use, for example.

7. Customer lifetime value (CLV) and customer acquisition cost (CAC)

In order to figure out your customer lifetime value, you need to know your customer acquisition cost (CAC). The former is the value you’ve garnered from your customers after you subtract the latter – which is how much it cost you to get them through the door.

Happy customers who renew their subscriptions on an annual basis will make for high customer lifetime value, so long as the costs associated with attracting each customer (including all your operational costs) don’t outweigh what they’re paying.

8. NPS and CSAT

Net Promoter Score is determined by asking your users a pretty simple question:

On a scale of 1-10, how likely would you recommend [product or brand] to a friend or colleague?

It’s an industry-standard metric that denotes how satisfied customers are with what you’re doing. After all, nobody would recommend something to their peers unless they really liked it.

Similarly, CSAT (customer satisfaction) surveys ask:

How would you rate your overall satisfaction with [product]?

Here, respondents use a 1-to-5 scale from ‘very unsatisfied’ to ‘very satisfied’. Again, satisfaction points to loyalty and a positive user experience. What’s more, if customers are willing to fill out CSAT and NPS surveys, they’re often also willing to provide qualitative responses to more in-depth questions, where they can explicitly tell you what they do and don’t like.

In-app pop-ups are a great way to solicit this kind of feedback, so long as you’re not bothering your users with them too often.

9. Customer churn and retention

Customer churn and retention are two sides of the same coin, really. In a given timeframe, churn is the number of customers you lose, and retention describes the number that sticks around. Obviously, the higher your retention rate (and the lower your churn rate), the better you’re doing. But be aware that no company has a 100% retention rate.

The thing is, just generating these two numbers for a report is kinda useless unless you use the rest of the metrics in this list to understand why churn and retention are the way they are.

And that brings us nicely to our final point…

What to do with all that insight?

Tracking various bar charts, statistics, and retention rates is a waste of time if all you’re going to do is parrot the figures up and down the line to various teams. No one will really care about a bunch of meaningless statistics.

Or, in other words, data is pretty useless if you don’t put it to work.

Product analytics tools are fantastic resources when they’re in the right hands, but not everyone is naturally attuned to decoding the meaning behind the numbers. To that end, we’d recommend leaning on a data scientist to dig into the stats and pull out the story of the customer journey.

Buried in those product adoption metrics will be your next steps. It might be that people can’t understand how to complete a core action, or maybe they’re bamboozled by hand-holdy tutorial screens and run a mile? Maybe they’re using the tool perfectly, every single day, but ditch it the second their free trial ends? Or perhaps there’s a really cool unused feature that 90% of your users never even touch?

All of these little data-based stories will tell you what your next product update should look like, and that will define your product adoption strategy on your roadmap. It might be that you were prioritizing a feature that – on closer inspection – is much less important than that one big change that’ll massively boost your onboarding completion rate, retention, or customer lifetime value.

Whatever the case, product adoption metrics should form an integral part of your continuous discovery process. Dig into the data, and it’ll show you what needs to happen now, next, and later.

The post 9 Product Adoption Metrics You Should Be Tracking appeared first on ProdPad.

In fact, in a way, they’re kind of like the first OKR tool you interact with. The objective? Grow (preferably in a way that somehow outpaces your siblings). Key result? Higher and higher marks on that chart. Initiatives? Keep eating those greens, kid.

But if you’re reading this, then we’re assuming – unless you’re some kind of child genius product manager – that you’re not 9 years old. This probably means your OKRs are a bit different these days. And that, in turn, means that wall charts and marks on a wall no longer cut the mustard when it comes to tracking and reporting on your progress.

All of which is a pretty roundabout way of saying: welcome to an article all about the best OKR software tools.

In this article, we’ll be working our way through the following:

• What is an OKR anyway?
• OKRs vs KPIs
• Why are OKRs important?
• What to look for in an OKR tool
• The 5 best OKR software tools

What is an OKR anyway?

An OKR, which stands for ‘Objectives and Key Results’, is an important kind of goal-setting framework for business leaders. Using OKRs, product managers, department heads, and managers can set clear aims for the future of the business and outline how they’ll get there.

Even though the acronym only defines two principle ingredients, there are often said to be three parts to the OKR framework: objectives, key results, and initiatives. So let’s look at each one in turn:

Objectives

What is it you’re trying to achieve? Is it to become the number-one product in your category? Or maybe it’s a more granular goal, like driving more people to your product page. You’ll likely have several business objectives at any one time – attainable and ambitious – and OKRs are how you formalize them.

Key results

These are the measurable data points you track to determine whether or not you’ve hit your goals. So if your goal is to become the number one product in your category, your key results might include things like ‘achieve 10,000 downloads per month’, ‘reach a top-10 app store chart position’, and ‘net 50 customer referrals per month’. 

Initiatives

This is the methodology that’ll help you tick off those key results and, in turn, achieve your objectives. If your goal is to drive people to your product page, for example, your initiatives would probably involve a mix of ad campaigns, email and content marketing, and organic social activity. 

OKRs vs KPIs

At their simplest, KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and OKRs are both methods businesses can use to keep track of performance. But what can makes OKRs a more appealing prospect is that they wrap performance monitoring up in a bit of much-needed context, and provide a way to ladder achievements up towards a goal. 

So, while KPIs can tell you how a certain metric is performing, they don’t really tell you what that means, or what you should do next. OKRs, on the other hand, align teams on a clear direction of travel. 

What’s important is to understand how one fits into the other: KPIs are metrics, while OKRs are a framework that uses those metrics to determine success. Or, in other words: KPIs are one of the building blocks of OKRs.

To take an earlier example: if your OKR is to become the number one software product in your category, and one of your key results is to achieve 10,000 downloads per month, then you’ll be monitoring a KPI (downloads) to know if you’ve hit that goal. 

Without the OKR in place, your KPI is just tracking how download figures go up and down month-to-month or quarter-to-quarter, without rhyme or reason.

Why are OKRs important?

It’s pretty hard to incentivize change if you don’t clearly lay out your goals – and even harder if you don’t figure out how to achieve them. OKRs are ambition drivers; the framework gives teams something to shoot for. 

Here are three reasons why the OKR framework matters: 

1. OKRs galvanize teams

Setting a clear set of objectives is a great way to align teams on a common purpose. Without that vision, people end up just ticking along – often in siloes – plugging away at nothing in particular. 

2. OKRs provide focus

Those objectives also provide much-needed focus. It’s all too easy to cast the net too wide in terms of what success looks like, and that often results in scattershot strategies aimed at solving too many problems at once. OKRs help you shoot towards a few clear-cut aims.

3. OKRs push growth

The OKR framework is all about plotting a course to a better version of your business, which means they’re a great way to stop teams and companies from treading water. At least one of your OKRs should be as lofty as you can make it.

What to look for to find the best OKR software tool

Looking for your dream OKR-enabler? Keep an eye out for software with these three key facets:

1. Easy to update

No matter how smart or flashy, OKR tools can’t inherently know the progress of any of your goals, so you’ll want to choose something that people don’t hate updating. The simpler it is to add progress updates and data sources, the better.

2. Relevant data

Think about how much data you need to track. For most key results, some kind of data will naturally form the basis of how you determine success – so data visualization that tells a story is always a plus. But don’t get wowed by an overflow of data. Sometimes less is more; especially if you don’t want to end up having to work hard to sort the signal from the noise. 

3. Outcomes, not output

Remember that a KPI is an output; it’s a blank bit of data that speaks to a larger purpose. OKRs, on the other hand, are all about outcomes – so we’d advise looking for an OKR software solution that’ll help you learn from successes and failures instead of just posting rising or falling statistics. 

The 5 best OKR software tools

1. Perdoo

In a nutshell:

Perdoo is a lightweight but focused tool that brings KPIs and OKRs into one place and helps keep teams on track with reminders and check-ins on a regular basis. One cool feature here is that integrations with Slack and Teams let managers share progress and wins as and when OKR inroads are made. That’s alongside coaching options from the Perdoo team that can help businesses of all sizes get up and running with the OKR framework. 

From the site:

“Align everyone with the strategy. Focus teams on what matters. Engage employees to achieve goals and feel their best.”

Pricing:

Four tiers, from free up to $17 per user, per month 

2. Mirro

In a nutshell:

Billed as ‘performance management software for agile teams’, Mirro is part HR suite and part OKR platform that makes it easy to set up OKRs at an organizational, team, or individual level, and assign staff members for each one. It’s simple to update progress on each task, and that progress feeds into customizable dashboards that shine a light on progress by goal, with live leaderboards that can help teams and departments enjoy a bit of light competition.

From the site:

“High-growth companies may struggle with keeping their teams aligned with both collective and individual goals. Mirro simplifies this process by empowering people to take ownership, be autonomous, and be open about sharing their progress.”

Pricing:

$7-$9 per user, per month

3. Unlock:OKR

In a nutshell:

The Unlock:OKR team boasts 25 years of experience in the biz, and has used that know-how to create a software platform that’s incredibly focussed on that goal. The suite here is “designed to improve adoption of OKR, nothing more and nothing less,” which means an incredibly tight, lightweight tool that aligns teams and stakeholders on OKRs from both a bottom-up and top-down approach. That means egalitarian OKR input and reporting, with clear alignment. As with some of the other providers in this list, Unlock:OKR also offers coaching services to help teams adopt OKR best practices.

From the site:

“We believe OKR software should be light, almost invisible, enabling you to embrace the OKR framework in the flow of work.”

Pricing:

$6 per user, per month

4. Quantive Results

In a nutshell:

Previously known as Koan (before it was wrapped into the Quantive branding), this is a robust OKR offering that makes it easy to create and stick to OKRs as a team, while also reporting on live progress in a streamlined, visual way. Okrs can be set up using a variety of templates, but there are also custom fields for inputting the vectors and requirements that work best for your teams. Quantive Results boasts Adobe, Ubisoft, and TomTom among some of its big-hitter users. 

From the site:

“Quantive Results enables companies to improve what matters and stay ahead of the competition by connecting your organization’s data and people to a shared mission with a strategy execution platform.”

Pricing:

$18 per user, per month, with enterprise pricing on request

5. ProdPad

We’d obviously be remiss if we didn’t talk about ProdPad here. But not just because we’re extremely biased: moreover, ProdPad is the only OKR software package designed specifically for product managers. Product management is at the heart of every feature and tool we make, so our OKR integration has been built to keep things clean and efficient, without losing any core functionality.

OKRs in ProdPad can be designed at the product level or the product portfolio level – it’s up to you. Whatever the case, they’re built into your home page, with their own tab and easy management.

Setting up new objectives is easy, and – because we’re huge fans of labeling things in threes – you’ll always be able to see at a glance whether things are on track, behind, or at risk.

At its core, Prodpad is a product roadmapping platform, so we’ve ensured that OKRs can be assigned directly to roadmap initiatives and that they pull through dynamically to the Now-Next-Later sections of your roadmap (hello again, threes).

Importantly, we think it’s vital to track success through the lens of outcomes, rather than outputs. That means that instead of ditching all your data the second a target’s been hit, you can use ProdPad’s ‘Completed’ OKR section to track the success or failure of a particular initiative – and use that as a learning tool. There’s a space there for logging what worked, what didn’t, and the overall outcome for each OKR.

All told, we think the OKR integration built into ProdPad is pretty slick. But then we would, wouldn’t we?

Pricing:

Try for free, then plans from $24 per editor, per month

Honorable mention: Google Docs

If you’re just getting started and need something a bit more no-frills, maybe Google can get you off the ground.

Author John Doerr and the experts over at Measure What Matters have great little templates for both Google Docs and Google Sheets, which can help you map out your OKRs in a no-nonsense, completely free way.

Obviously, you’ll lose the interconnectivity and roadmap integrations that you get with dedicated software solutions like ProdPad, but for smaller businesses and people brand new to the world of OKRs, you could do far worse.

Learn the basics with a free OKR E-Course

We’ve got a brilliant little E-Course on OKRs if you’re interested?

With five lessons sent straight to your inbox over the span of five days, you can imbibe everything you need to know about OKRs at a pace that suits you. 

Across those five lessons you’ll learn:

1. The fundamentals of OKRs, how they work with roadmaps, and how they compare to KPIs
2. How to set OKRs, manage execution, and understand how often they should be reviewed
3. How to communicate OKRs, manage their visibility, and create an OKRs Champion
4. How to manage OKRs in larger organizations, consider company and team level OKRs, and best practices around measuring success
5. What makes a good OKR (and a bad one!) – and how to avoid the common pitfalls

It’s totally free and will arm you with the tools you’ll need to design OKRs that will actually impact your product’s future. Click here to get started.

The post The 5 Best OKR Software Options on the Market Right Now appeared first on ProdPad.

Product value proposition vs product vision statement vs slogan

Oof. I won’t lie: there’s overlap here. In fact, so much overlap that the frameworks, models, and results often seem quite similar. A slogan and a vision statement can both share elements ripped straight from a product value proposition statement for example. And, for all three, the resulting, written-down crux of your product can all sometimes form external, customer-facing copy.

And that kind of makes sense, because all of them suggest great things about your product in a way that’s easy to understand. But here’s how to look at it in simple terms:

Product value proposition 

As Janna has said before, “product value is the qualitative benefit that a user gets from a particular product in satisfying needs, solving problems, and achieving goals.”

Product vision statement 

Where you want your product to be, what you want to it achieve, and how that will change the market as a whole. This is your future vision for the product, essentially.  

Slogan

The sexy stuff. The bit people remember. Billboard fodder. Your slogan is external, ad-style copy – usually no more than around 3-8 words.

6 killer product value proposition models

Ok, so how do you actually go about forming your product value proposition? The six models and templates we’ll cover are all fantastic exercises that will help you clarify exactly what you have to offer.
To help demonstrate things, we’re going to give an example for each value proposition model, based on a fictitious product.

Introducing the world’s most incredible new tech product: YouStop: an enterprise-level desktop app that makes an annoying noise whenever employees have spent too long procrastinating on YouTube. The free tier has one noise, with paid tiers offering various sounds and dynamic reporting for managers and CTOs. Its (imagined) big rival in the space is YouTube Alarm. And, yeah, it sounds a bit draconian but let’s run with it for now*.

We’ll fill out each model as though we’re trying to drill down into YouStop’s value proposition, to give you a better idea of what’s involved. 

*This article is brought to you by… Lots of YouTube procrastination.

1. Crossing the Chasm’s six steps

Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm has sold well over a million copies, so you might already be familiar with the six steps for crafting a value proposition cited in the book. It’s an oft-repeated model for good reason: while you won’t end up with anything particularly streamlined at the end of the process, you will have articulated your product’s value in no uncertain terms.

For those unfamiliar, it involves filling out the information in a six-part statement with the following prompts:

With our imagined product, that might look a little something like this:

‘For managers who are tired of their staff procrastinating, YouStop is a productivity tool that shocks staff into closing YouTube. Unlike YouTube Alarm, YouStop offers teams the ability to track app usage and generate reports about your employees’ video-watching habits.’ 

This actually helped form the basis for the way ProdPad creates product visions and we have a free interactive template that will help you write your own product vision here.

2. Value proposition canvas

Created by Dr. Alexander Osterwalder, the value proposition canvas is a two-pronged visualization tool designed to help you find a market fit for your product, based on what customers need. 

The canvas is a super visual framework divided into two sides: Customer Profile (or segment) and Value Proposition. Each side has three sections that complement each other, where the aim is to fill out the customer side first and then find strong links between their needs and your offering. 

The best way to do this is on a wall with a ton of Post-It notes for each section, but – all the same – let’s work through a basic version of the list in the diagram above based on our imagined YouStop tool:

Customer Profile

• Customer jobs (what they need to do)

Ensure that employees are efficient and working without distractions.

• Customer pains (what gets in the way)

Employees are watching too much YouTube on the job.

• Customer gains (what they want from a solution)

More efficient workers and a way to see who’s pulling their weight.

Value Proposition

• Products and services (what you offer)

YouStop!

• Pain relievers (how your product can help)

Shock employees into getting off of YouTube

• Gain creators (the benefit your product offers)

Track YouTubing downtime with customer reports.

3. The lean canvas

The lean canvas is part product value proposition model, and part entire business plan-on-a-page – and it’s a fantastic way of getting a whole bunch of thoughts about your product down in a way that can help you sum up its market fit and overall appeal. Developed by Ash Maurya, author of Running Lean, it’s an adaptation of the value proposition canvas described above. 

Here’s how it looks:

Again, this is a great one to put up on the wall and collaboratively fill with Post-Its, but let’s fill it out digitally here with our YouStop example to help you understand how it might look:

4. The ‘essential question’ triangle

Harvard Business School has taken the key parts of the value proposition and, like a good creative writing teacher, distilled things down into just a few prompts to help you put pen to paper. As they put it: “The value proposition is the element of strategy that looks outward at customers – at the demand side of the business.”

The three questions are interoperable, insomuch as they should feed into and affect one another:

• Who are your customers?
• Which needs will you meet?
• What price will provide value and profitability for you and the customer?

Worth noting: The price-point question comes into play once you have a good idea of the competition and how your offering can be competitive within the space. 

Let’s fill them out with our example to see what this might look like:

• Which customers are you going to serve?

Managers and CTOs.

• Which needs are you going to meet?

Ensuring staff efficiency and providing transparency over YouTube habits.

• What price will provide value and profitability for you and the customer?

$XX per month, for X number of team members.

5. Help [X], to [X], by [Z}

Startup guru Steve Blank suggests that the value proposition conundrum can be easily solved by posing your product’s strengths in the form of an incredibly simple statement:

• ‘We help [X] to [Y] by [Z]’

It doesn’t get much simpler, but then that’s kind of the point. Steve also says it’s important to run this by people and play around with things until you really nail the sentiment:

“If you can’t easily explain why you exist, none of the subsequent steps matter,” he says. “Once you have a statement in that format, find a few other people (it doesn’t matter if they’re your target market) and ask them if it makes sense. If not, give them a longer explanation and ask them to summarize that back to you. Other people are often better than you at crafting an understandable value proposition.”

For our fictitious product, that statement might go something like this:

• ‘We help managers to ensure productivity by tracking and stopping YouTube overindulgence at work.’

6. Customer, Problem, Solution

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development by Vlaskovits & Cooper cites three prompts that define your product’s place in the world – and its inherent value. Or, you know, potential lack thereof…

• Customer [who is your target customer?]
• Problem [what problem are they facing?]
• Solution [how will you solve the problem?]

As with others, this value proposition model puts the customer and their problem before your solution. The reason is simple: you can’t come up with a product and then retrofit it to a pain point. You need to identify the pain point first, and then work to solve it.

Ok, one last time, let’s run YouStop through that particular propositional mangle: 

• Customer [who is your target customer?]

Managers and CTOs.

• Problem [what problem is the customer currently facing?]

YouTube is a blocker to staff productivity. 

• Solution [how will you solve the problem?]

A tool that stops people procrastinating on YouTube, with reports on usage.

3 examples of amazing product value propositions

The value proposition models above are all frameworks for getting your product’s strengths and market fit down on paper, but they’re not necessarily the final form your statement will take. Many companies take these templates and use them to sculpt the resulting words into something a bit more palatable, sellable, and fun.

And, as Peter Sandeen puts it, often you’ll “have more than one value proposition.” 

Think of it like this: everything you put out into the wild should be working to position your product’s value. This means that while having one catch-all sentence that sums things up is great, there’s less pressure on carving that into stone than there is on being able to convey that value every time you talk about your product.

To show what we mean, let’s take a look at the different ways some of the world’s leading companies have taken the proposition value idea and put their own spin on it.

Airbnb

Airbnb exists to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere, providing healthy travel that is local, authentic, diverse, inclusive, and sustainable.

Airbnb’s value proposition here is a version of the ‘help [x], to [y], by [z]’ template. It’s stating that it can help ‘anyone’ to ‘belong anywhere’ by ‘providing healthy travel that is local, authentic, diverse, inclusive and sustainable.’ And while we’d probably say there are two too many things in that list (because people love things in threes), it works by being all-encompassing.

Slack 

Making work simpler, more pleasant, and more productive.

Slack actually has a bunch of different phrases that work interoperably as slogans and value props. For example, “be less busy,” and “Slack makes it downright pleasant to work together” – both promoting similar ideas in different ways, and both capable of acting as internal and external messaging.

Stripe

Payments infrastructure for the internet.

Stripe’s proposition statement is, on the surface, a bit dull. But what it’s managed to do here is say a lot with a little. The ‘customer’ here is the whole internet, while their unique solution isn’t a niche sub-area; the company is positioning itself as infrastructural and therefore integral. Like, it is to payments what roads are to cars. Word of warning: If you’re gonna be this bold, you’d better be really good at what you do.

The post 6 Product Value Proposition Models for Product Managers appeared first on ProdPad.

In this article we’ll cover:

• What types of product discovery questions should you ask?
• The 12 most important product discovery questions
• 25 categorized product discovery questions 
• Product discovery questions: Methods
• Product discovery questions: What to do next?

What types of product discovery questions should you ask?

There are oodles of differing ideas on methodologies and ways of conducting product discovery research – some with super elaborate diagrams designed to impress and bamboozle – but let’s take a step back for a second and think about what product discovery is at its core, and what that means.

In its simplest form, product discovery is about asking questions and finding answers. 

With that in mind, job one is to think about who’s going to be answering your questions. And with product discovery, that really leaves us with two outcomes:

Product discovery questions to ask product managers

Maybe this is you? They say the customer’s always right, but there are a bunch of questions that you as a product manager can astutely answer without any external input. Often these questions – around the positioning of your product and its reason for being – can be answered with a spot of good old-fashioned competitor research or SWOT analysis.

Product discovery questions to ask customers

You can’t address customer needs if you don’t know what it is they want. Any successful product is one that’s custom-made to fill a gap, solve an issue, and smooth over a customer pain point, so it’s really crucial to gather feedback from customers on this stuff. And to do so regularly. 

The 12 most important product discovery questions 

Ok; here we’ve compiled a list of the six most important product discovery questions for each audience – product managers and customers – along with a list of supplementary ones that can help you further hone in on your product’s USP. 

Six important product discovery questions for product managers

Let’s take a look at some of the questions you can ask yourself internally to help discern a place for your product…

Three product discovery questions to ask when you are building a new product

1. What problem will this product solve?
The big one. No product really has a place in the market if it doesn’t demonstrably address an existing issue – or solve a problem people didn’t even realize they had.

2. How will this product solve that issue?
The nuts and bolts. How will customer lives be made easier by what you’ve got to offer? This is elevator pitch stuff; as a product manager, you should be able to espouse an answer pretty enthusiastically here.

3. Does anything similar exist, and if so, how does it compare?
Will you be a true disruptor or a new and improved version of something that already exists? Be honest about your competition, because they won’t pull any punches.

Three product discovery questions to ask for existing products

1. Is the product performing as it should?
Your team built this thing to solve a need. Does it do that? You should already have an idea of how things are looking based on your original goals.

2. What are its strengths and weaknesses?
Where can you improve? What facets of the product are absolute game-changers? And how do those strengths and weaknesses manifest as threats and opportunities?

3. How does the product stack up against your product vision statement?
Where did you want this product to be, ultimately? A market leader? A revolutionary service? It’s time to ask yourself where you are along that journey.

Other internal discovery questions to consider…

• Who is the target customer for the product?
• What are the key features and benefits of the product?
• What is the pricing strategy for the product?
• How does the product fit into the overall company roadmap?
• What are the key metrics that will be used to measure success?
• How will you gather customer feedback on the product?

Six important product discovery questions for customers

It’s time to get your customers (and potential customers) involved. Here’s a selection of customer feedback and survey questions to have on your list…

Three product discovery questions to ask when you are building a new product

1. What are your current pain points or needs in this product category?
It’s crucial that you conduct customer research or hold focus group sessions that can help you pinpoint where their issues lie. Maybe one area of their work slows them down every day, for example. Or perhaps the software they use currently is too clunky or unintuitive.

2. How do you currently solve these pain points or needs?
It’s unlikely that customers are just sitting around waiting for a solution. Normally they’ll have found workarounds or piecemeal solutions that probably aren’t ideal. Either way, you need to know what their current user habits look like before you can design the answer to their prayers.

3. What features are most important to you in a product like this?
Asking people to hone in on one or two core features is a fantastic way to gain focus. After all, feature creep can be crippling, so it’s often smarter to start out nailing a couple of the core use cases people cite, and build anything extra into your ongoing roadmap.

Three product discovery questions to ask for existing products

1. How have you been using this product?
You’ll be amazed at how customers adapt, bend, and even break your carefully-curated user experience. Understanding the way people are actually interacting with your product can help you see the wood for the trees when it comes to UI and UX.

2. Are there any features or capabilities that you wish this product had?
This line of questioning can essentially build your product roadmap out for you. You may have great ideas of where to go next, but if they don’t align with customer needs, why should they care about any potential new features? 

3. Would you recommend this product to others? If so, why?
Classic CSAT and NPS Score stuff. If people wouldn’t happily recommend your product to a colleague, friend, or family member, something’s going wrong and you need to prioritize finding out what. 

Other external discovery questions to consider…

• How do you, as a customer, measure the success of a product in this category?
• What is your budget for products in this category?
• Have you ever used a product like this before? If so, what did you like or dislike about it?
• How do you envision using this product in your day-to-day life?
• Are there any features or capabilities that you find particularly useful?
• How does this product compare to similar products that you’ve used in the past?

25 categorized product discovery questions

Need even more? No problem! Here’s a bumper list of product discovery questions that can be used or adapted based on whether you’re asking an internal (stakeholder) or external (customer) audience…

Market fit product discovery questions:

• Who is your target customer?
• What are their pain points and needs?
• What are the existing solutions in the market?
• How does your product differentiate from these solutions?
• What is the size of the market opportunity for your product?

Customer reach and use product discovery questions:

• How do customers currently solve this problem?
• How do customers currently find and select solutions?
• How do customers currently evaluate the success of a solution?
• What do customers value most in a solution?
• What are customers willing to pay for a solution?

Product discovery questions around value:

• What are the key features and benefits of your product?
• How does your product add value for the customer?
• What quantifiable results can customers expect from using your product?
• How does your product help customers achieve their goals?
• How does your product improve the customer’s overall experience?

Problem-solving product discovery questions:

• What problem does your product solve?
• How does your product solve the problem?
• How does your product address the root cause of the problem?
• How does your product compare to alternative solutions?
• How does your product improve upon those existing solutions?

User testing product discovery questions:

• How can you validate your solution with potential users?
• How will you measure the user’s satisfaction with the product?
• How will you iterate based on user feedback?
• How will you measure the success of user testing?
• How will you measure and track user engagement?

As with any market research-related activity, the sky’s the limit, and the more information you can gather, the better. 

Your aim should always be to ask as many questions as people are willing to answer, as often as you can, and to pool all that data into an easy-to-understand bank of solid gold insight.

Product discovery questions: Methods 

Product discovery questions can be answered in a bunch of different ways based on who they’re aimed at and how you think you’ll get the most reliable, objective, or useful information. 

There are six key ways you can undertake this quest for knowledge:

1. Customer feedback
2. Customer interviews
3. User analytics
4. Competitor analysis
5. Business modeling
6. Internal discovery

If you want to know the ins and outs of how each one works, how to set yourself up for success, and which method to use for what questions, we’ve got a full rundown of each method right here.

Product discovery questions: What to do next?

Knowledge is power, right? You should end this process with a heap of answers to interesting questions, and those should point you in interesting new directions. Or, at the very least, confirm that you were heading in the right direction all along. 

That’s an outcome that can really help align teams and provide confidence that your product deserves to exist. Or, you know, that it will deserve to exist once you just make a few tweaks and tighten some screws. 

In a more practical sense, the outcome of product discovery can help you craft a compelling product vision statement – that thing you paint on the office wall in huge letters and look at every time you’re unsure what to do next. 

A product vision statement is your guiding light towards where you want your product to end up, so it’s worth putting some time into. You can check out our free product vision template here. 

Continuous discovery

Beyond all that, though, the main thing to do after you’ve completed a round of product discovery questioning is to adjust what needs adjusting and then… Do it all over again. 

Product discovery is a continuous, cyclical process; one where answers inform actions, and actions inform new questions.

Your customers’ needs, the market landscape, and your product’s rivals are all evolving at a rapid pace, so your product needs to as well. 

You can learn more about the thinking behind continuous product discovery here. 

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