ALL the Product Managers

Of course, I’ve rather over-simplified to say there are only two realities when, in fact, there are quite a few other flavors of Product Managers in enterprise organizations. If a product is big enough, and the team large enough, you might well find yourself as the Product Manager for just one area of one product.

For example, you might have a Product Manager responsible for growing a particular product, while another could be honing the strategy and delivery for an API, while a third oversees the entire product line and all of the other PMs working on it.

In short, you’re likely to be one of many Product Managers when it comes to enterprise product management.

How does enterprise product management differ from standard product management?

Whether you are one of those Product Managers looking after a single area of a product, a single product, or a whole portfolio, there are a number of consistent differences you’ll experience doing any sort of product management within an enterprise organization. 

Here’s the lowdown on what changes when moving into enterprise product management:

First up, everything’s on a grander scale. You’re dealing with longer timeframes and more complex product cycles. Why? Because integrating with existing systems and processes in a big organization is like trying to change the tires on a moving bus. You need to be extra careful not to disrupt anything that’s already in motion.

Then, there’s the people aspect. Your job can’t just be about the products anymore. You’ve got a whole crowd of stakeholders to charm and a diverse bunch of customers to understand. Managing these relationships and aligning everyone’s vision can easily become a huge part of your day. Sure, you were involved with stakeholder management before, but, just as the scale of the business grows, so does the number of people you have to keep happy to get your job done.

And let’s not forget the red tape. In a large enterprise, you often find yourself navigating a maze of compliance and security, especially in sectors like healthcare, finance, and government. It’s a whole different ball game where every move needs to be calculated and justified.

Product management in a large enterprise involves quite a few unique considerations, whether you’re managing a single product or in charge of multiple products. The scale of operations, stakeholder complexity, and strategic objectives differ significantly from those in smaller organizations.

Managing a single product in an enterprise

Let’s talk about what it’s like to manage just one product in a huge company. It’s a bit different from handling a product in a smaller setup. Here, we’ll take a look at the kind of tasks and obstacles you might face, and how your job involves thinking about the bigger company picture while focusing on your product.

Responsibilities

Managing a single product in an enterprise might sound straightforward, but it’s packed with responsibilities that are unique to a large company environment. It’s about aligning your product with some pretty big business goals and getting different parts of a large organization to work together.

Let’s break down what you’d typically be responsible for in this role, from strategic planning to ensuring your product hits all the right notes with customers.

• Strategic planning: Developing and aligning the product strategy with the enterprise’s broader goals, ensuring that the product contributes significantly to the overall business objectives.
• Resource management: Handling more resources and justifying their usage, making decisions on allocation and prioritization that impact the product’s success and the company’s bottom line.
• Cross-departmental collaboration: Working closely with various departments such as Marketing, Sales, and R&D, ensuring that all aspects of the product are harmonized and working towards common goals.
• Customer insight and feedback integration: Deeply understanding customer needs and feedback, integrating these insights into the product strategy and process to ensure the product meets market demands.
• Performance monitoring and reporting: Regularly tracking and reporting on the product’s performance against key metrics, providing insights to leadership, and adjusting strategies as needed.

Challenges

Even when you’re just focusing on one product in a massive company, the challenges can still be daunting. You’re dealing with complex structures, meeting the needs of diverse stakeholders, and making sure your product stays relevant to the portfolio as a whole.

Here’s a closer look at the hurdles you might face and how they differ from managing products in smaller settings:

• Organizational complexity: In large companies, product managers have to navigate intricate organizational structures. This often involves dealing with multiple layers of management, inter-departmental dependencies, and complex decision-making processes. Unlike smaller organizations where decisions might be more direct and streamlined, in large enterprises, gaining consensus and moving your projects forward can require some pretty extensive coordination and negotiation.
• Stakeholder management: Balancing the needs and expectations of a diverse group of stakeholders is more challenging in a large enterprise setting. You’re not just catering to your immediate team and customers but also to various internal departments and product teams, external partners, and possibly global markets. This differs from smaller organizations where stakeholder groups are usually more limited and homogeneous, making it easier to align interests and goals.
• Maintaining market responsiveness: Staying agile and responsive in a large organization is a complex task. Adapting to market changes, consumer trends, and technological advancements while ensuring the product remains relevant requires a delicate balance. In smaller organizations, changes can often be implemented more swiftly due to less bureaucratic inertia and simpler operational frameworks.
• Rapid technological adaptation: Staying ahead in technology integration and innovation is crucial in large enterprises. You need to ensure that your product not only adopts the latest technological advancements but also integrates seamlessly with existing corporate systems and standards. This challenge is generally less daunting in smaller organizations, where product and technology frameworks might be more flexible and adaptable, and so quicker to keep up with changes.
• Change management: Effectively managing changes within the product’s scope in a large enterprise involves comprehensive planning and coordination. You need to carefully consider various factors to ensure smooth transitions and minimal disruption, like legacy systems, ongoing operations, and stakeholder expectations. Meanwhile, smaller organizations often have the advantage of quicker implementation and less complex operational impacts when introducing changes.

Differences from standard product management

Managing a single product in a big company is not the same as doing it in a smaller setting. Think bigger scale, more intricate dependencies, and how your product fits into the grand scheme of the company’s strategy.

• Scale of impact: Decisions and strategies have broader implications, affecting various parts of the organization, its customer base, and potentially its stock price.
• Broader strategic alignment: Greater focus on aligning with long-term corporate strategies, beyond immediate product performance, as well as ensuring it aligns with the portfolio strategy. Does the direction they want to take the product make sense when considered as part of a cohesive portfolio? Will it give the wider business the level of synergy or the mix they are looking for from their business as a whole?
• Increased resource handling: Responsible for managing larger budgets and teams, requiring more sophisticated financial and people management skills.
• Risk management: In an enterprise setting, product decisions often involve higher financial stakes and broader market implications. Effective risk assessment and management become critical, requiring a more cautious approach compared to standard product management, where risks might be more contained.
• Integration with corporate ecosystem: Enterprise product managers must ensure that their product integrates seamlessly with the company’s broader ecosystem, including technology platforms, operational processes, and corporate culture.

Managing multiple products in an enterprise

Switching from managing a single product to juggling a product portfolio in an enterprise environment is like upgrading from a solo backpacking trip to leading a full-blown expedition. 

Handling several products at once? In many ways, it’s the same job, just with a lot more bells and whistles. You’ll still be responsible in your day-to-day for the same sort of things you have to deal with as a single-product PM, but the scope is bigger and there are many more considerations.

But weirdly, it can sometimes be smaller too, as you’ll have more resources to work with and draw on, meaning you can delegate aspects like discovery to people whose job it is to go out and do that for you. Then the challenge is finding the best way for you to get your head around the knowledge that they’ve gathered.

And sometimes, it’s about fine-tuning and optimizing what’s already there, especially in big companies where small changes can have big impacts. Think of companies like Microsoft, where a small but effective feature release that improves their stock price by less than 1% can result in millions of dollars of revenue.

Responsibilities

Stepping up to manage multiple products in a large company? Get ready for a role that’s all about juggling different balls while keeping your eye on the big picture. Here, you’re the mastermind behind a whole suite of products, making sure each one fits perfectly into the company’s overall strategy.

Let’s explore some of the key responsibilities that come with this job, from overseeing a product portfolio to ensuring all your products play nice together:

• Portfolio strategy and analysis: Developing and managing a cohesive strategy for a portfolio of products, ensuring that each product aligns with and contributes to the enterprise’s overall strategy and objectives.
• Resource prioritization: Making critical decisions about resource distribution, and balancing the needs of multiple products to optimize overall portfolio performance.
• Synergy and conflict management: Identifying synergies between products to leverage shared opportunities, and managing potential conflicts or overlaps within the portfolio.
• Market analysis and positioning: Conducting thorough market analysis for each product, positioning them effectively within their respective markets and against competitors.
• Long-term lifecycle planning: Planning and managing the long-term lifecycle of each product in the portfolio, including growth, maturity, and potential phase-out strategies.

Challenges

When you’re at the helm of multiple products in a large enterprise, expect to face a unique set of challenges. Balancing resources, maintaining a unified vision, and managing the intricate relationships between your products are just a few of the tasks on your plate.

So, let’s dive into what makes these challenges different from those in standard product management roles:

• Complex stakeholder management: One of the main challenges is managing a diverse array of stakeholders, including executives, team members, and clients. Effective communication and strategic alignment are crucial in this complex landscape. Keeping everyone informed and on the same page requires a combination of regular updates and the use of collaborative tools like ProdPad to maintain transparency.
• Balancing innovation with stability: Enterprises face the challenge of driving innovation while maintaining the stability of their existing products or services. Fostering a culture that values both innovation and stability helps in this regard. Encouraging controlled, small-scale experiments that can be scaled if successful allows enterprises to innovate without risking core operations.
• Standardizing work processes: Every organization works and grows differently, but often if there are multiple product teams, each will have developed its own way of doing things. A common issue in enterprise product management is finding a way to encourage your teams to standardize how they are working, to increase efficiency and understanding across the line.
• Navigating bureaucracy: Bureaucratic hurdles in large organizations can get in the way of decision-making and innovation. Understanding and navigating this landscape is key. Building relationships with decision-makers and efficiently working within these constraints can help streamline processes for more effective product management. It’s all about securing that elusive executive “buy-in”.
• Diverse product portfolio management: Managing a portfolio of multiple products, each at different life cycle stages and with varying market demands, is a significant challenge. Using portfolio management tools, such as ProdPad’s portfolio roadmap, helps track and adjust the portfolio in line with strategic goals, ensuring balance and focus.
• Adapting to rapid market changes: The fast-paced nature of market changes presents a challenge in managing large-scale products. Adopting agile methodologies and maintaining a flexible approach are essential. Staying informed about market trends and customer feedback allows for quick adaptation of strategies.
• Efficient resource allocation: Allocating limited resources among competing projects and initiatives is a complex task. Understanding strategic priorities and employing a data-driven approach is key to efficient and impactful resource allocation.
• Maintaining quality at scale: As the product portfolio expands, ensuring consistent quality across all offerings truly tests an enterprise Product Manager’s mettle. High standards, robust quality assurance processes, and regular customer feedback are essential in maintaining product excellence.

Differences from standard product management:

When you’re in charge of multiple products in a big enterprise, things get even more interesting. You need to think about balancing multiple product strategies, making big decisions about resources, and how you interact with the higher-ups. 

• Holistic viewpoint: Requires a broader perspective, understanding how individual products fit into and impact the overall portfolio.
• Advanced strategic skills: Involves more sophisticated skills in strategic planning and portfolio management.
• Wider stakeholder network: Entails engaging with a larger and more diverse group of stakeholders, often at higher levels within the organization.
• Strategic resource reallocation: In managing multiple products, enterprise PMs often face the challenge of reallocating resources dynamically across the product portfolio based on shifting priorities and market conditions. This strategic reallocation is a more complex task compared to standard Product Manager roles, where resources are generally focused on a single product.
• Executive-level influence and interaction: Senior enterprise Product Managers typically have more frequent interaction with and direct influence on executive-level decision-making. Their role often requires them to present and justify product strategies to C-suite executives.

In both single-product and multi-product management scenarios within an enterprise, the role of a Product Manager is characterized by a higher degree of strategic involvement, complex stakeholder dynamics, and a focus on aligning with overarching business objectives.

These roles demand a robust understanding of both the big and little pictures of product management, setting them apart from more traditional, smaller-scale product management roles.

Basically, it’s about making the right things happen, at the right time, for the right reasons. And in an enterprise, that’s a tall order.

What makes a great enterprise product manager?

Navigating the waters of enterprise product management requires a special set of sails. Here’s what sets apart a great enterprise product manager:

• Adaptability: The only constant in the enterprise world is change. A great product manager is like a chameleon, adapting quickly to new challenges, shifting priorities, and evolving market conditions.
• Visionary thinking: You need to be the person who can see the forest for the trees. It’s about having a strategic mindset that can connect the dots between today’s actions and tomorrow’s goals.
• Exceptional communication skills: You’re the link between different worlds – developers, marketers, executives, customers. Being able to communicate effectively across these groups is crucial. It’s like being a translator who speaks multiple business languages.
• Strong analytical skills: Data is your compass in the sea of enterprise product management. You need to be able to analyze market trends, user feedback, and performance metrics to make informed decisions.
• Leadership and influence: A great enterprise product manager doesn’t just manage; they lead. It’s about inspiring teams, influencing stakeholders, and driving collective efforts towards a common goal.
• Customer-centric approach: At the end of the day, it’s all about the customer. Understanding their needs, solving their problems, and delivering value is what will make your product stand out.
• Resilience and patience: Dealing with complex systems and navigating bureaucratic waters requires a cool head and a steady hand. Patience isn’t just a virtue; it’s a necessity.
• Expertise in compliance and risk management: Especially in regulated industries, understanding the nuances of compliance, and being adept at risk management can make or break a product.

Being a great enterprise product manager is part art, part science. It’s about blending creativity with analytics, empathy with decisiveness, and vision with execution.

What tools do you need for enterprise product management?

In the toolkit of any effective enterprise Product Manager, you’ll find a mix of strategic frameworks and practical tools. Here’s what you should have at your disposal:

Product portfolio management tools

These tools help you oversee your entire product portfolio, ensuring alignment with business objectives and market needs.

Examples: ProdPad for its product portfolio roadmap features.

Roadmapping software

Essential for visualizing the direction of your products and communicating the roadmap to stakeholders. ProdPad, for example, offers a sleek way to manage your product lines and roadmaps, providing a high-level view that’s easy to share and update.

Examples: ProdPad for its intuitive roadmap visualization.

Analytics and data analysis tools

To keep track of market trends, user behavior, and product performance metrics.

Examples: Google Analytics for web traffic analysis, Mixpanel for user interaction tracking, and Tableau for advanced data visualization.

Collaboration platforms

These are very useful for maintaining smooth collaboration across different teams and departments.

Examples: Whiteboard tools like Miro and Figjam can help easily share ideas in a shared visual space.

Customer feedback tools

To gather and analyze customer insights, helping you stay tuned to their needs and preferences.

Examples: ProdPad for collecting and linking customer feedback to initiatives, SurveyMonkey for conducting surveys, and Dovetail for sorting user research outputs.

Incorporating these tools into your workflow streamlines your processes and helps ensure that you’re making data-driven, customer-focused decisions.

ProdPad, as mentioned above, is a great tool for enterprise product management, covering a number of the bases in one place – it provides your teams with a single source of truth, a standardized way of working, transparent communication both internally and externally, and a seamless way to prioritize and manage your product portfolio.

Don’t just take our word for it though. Get in touch with our team, and let us demonstrate to you exactly how ProdPad can take the weight off your shoulders so you can be the best damn enterprise product manager out there.

What does an enterprise product team look like?

One of the big differences between an enterprise product management organization and, say, a product team in a tech startup is the pretty hefty structure and hierarchy. You’re not just in a product team now, you’re part of an enterprise product management DEPARTMENT. The career path from a Product Manager (PM) to a Chief Product Officer (CPO) is a many-runged ladder, each with increasing responsibility and scope.

Junior and Mid-Level Product Managers

First, you’ll generally find Junior or Mid-Level Product Managers. These folks typically manage specific aspects or features of a product. They are hands-on with day-to-day management tasks like gathering requirements, working with cross-functional teams, and ensuring that their area of the product aligns with the overall product vision and strategy.

Senior Product Managers

As PMs gain experience, they advance to Senior Product Managers. A Senior PM usually takes on the responsibility of managing an entire product. This role involves a deeper strategic involvement, where they oversee the product’s end-to-end lifecycle, make key decisions on product development, and coordinate with various teams to bring the product vision to fruition.

Lead Product Managers or Product Leads

In some organizations, there might be newer roles like Lead Product Managers or Product Leads, especially in companies that follow Agile methodologies. These roles often have similar responsibilities to a Senior PM but with a stronger focus on aligning product development with customer needs and business objectives.

Head of Product or Group Product Manager

A step above is the Head of Product or Group Product Manager. This role involves overseeing a product category or a group of related products. They coordinate with individual product managers, ensuring that each product contributes effectively to the broader product line strategy. They also play a crucial role in aligning product strategies with market trends and business goals.

Product Director

Further up the hierarchy is the Product Director. This role typically involves managing a product line or a significant segment of the product portfolio. A Product Director’s responsibilities include strategic planning for the product line, overseeing product development across multiple products, and ensuring that the product line aligns with the company’s strategic direction.

Vice President (VP) of Product

The VP of Product is a senior executive role, often overseeing multiple product lines or a significant portion of the company’s entire product portfolio. They are responsible for high-level strategic decisions and have a considerable influence on the company’s product direction. The VP of Product works closely with other executives to ensure that the product strategy supports the overall business objectives.

Chief Product Officer (CPO)

At the pinnacle of the product management career path is the Chief Product Officer. The CPO is responsible for the entire product portfolio of the company. This executive role involves setting the overall product strategy, coordinating with other C-level executives, and ensuring that the product portfolio contributes to the company’s long-term success. The CPO plays a critical role in driving innovation, product vision, and business growth.

Collaboration and Reporting Structures

In this hierarchy, Junior and Mid-Level PMs typically report to a Senior PM or a Head of Product. The Head of Product, in turn, reports to the Product Director or VP of Product. Ultimately, these roles align under the direction of the CPO, who ensures that the product strategy is cohesive and aligned with the company’s overarching goals.

Charting your course to product mastery

Enterprise product management is a thrilling ride, filled with challenges and opportunities. It’s about steering your fleet of products toward success, balancing innovation with stability, and aligning a huge and diverse array of stakeholders with your vision. With the right skills, tools, and mindset, you can navigate this stormy ocean and lead your products to safer and more lucrative seas.

Remember, at its heart, enterprise product management is about making impactful decisions that resonate both with your customers and the organization as a whole. And with tools like ProdPad in your arsenal, you’re well-equipped to avoid the sea mines, dodge the reefs, and shake your fist in Davey Jones’ stupid squid face as your product fleet sails merrily off into the sunset.

The post Enterprise Product Management: How to Run Product in Large Organizations appeared first on ProdPad.

Definition of a product backlog

The product backlog is the grand strategy for the product development war. It’s an ever-evolving list of features, user stories, enhancements, and bug fixes that represent the collective vision and direction of your product.

This list isn’t etched in stone; rather, it needs to be dynamic and you have to adapt it over time as the product evolves. After all, no plan survives contact with the enemy! It’s a list of what your team could work on to make your product better. The Product Owner is typically the guardian of this backlog, prioritizing items based on their strategic, business, and user value.

The key to a successful product backlog is clarity. You should describe each item in a way that anyone, regardless of their technical expertise, can get their head around. These items can be anything from high-level epics (or Ideas in ProdPad), which represent significant product features, to detailed user stories, which break down epics into smaller, more manageable pieces.

Definition of a sprint backlog

If the product backlog is the grand plan for the whole Product team platoon, then the sprint backlog is the battle plan for your crack dev squad on the front lines of each sprint. It’s a tactical to-do list that emerges from the product backlog. It outlines the specific tasks and activities that the dev team is planning to execute during the next sprint, which typically lasts between one to four weeks.

The sprint backlog serves as a plan of action for the upcoming sprint, guiding the team’s efforts and defining what “done” means for each task.

During sprint planning, the Development Team collaboratively selects a set of user stories or backlog items from the product backlog to work on during the sprint. They break these items down into tasks and estimate the work involved. This detailed planning ensures that everyone understands what needs to be done, helping to avoid confusion and keeping the team on track.

What are the key differences between product backlogs vs sprint backlogs?

To put it simply, the product backlog’s focus is to “build the right thing”, while the sprint backlog’s focus is to “build the thing right”.

The product backlog is the Product team’s space. This is where the Product Manager, the Product Owner, the Development team, the Design team, and the UX team do their discovery and validation to figure out which of these things are the right things to build.

Then the sprint backlog is more about execution and delivery than discovery. This is the Development team’s domain. So you’re going to have either a Lead Developer, a Scrum Master, or even a self-led Dev team owning this space.

What is the purpose of a product backlog?

Firstly, your product backlog provides a clear product vision. The main purpose of this backlog is to provide a clear direction for the product’s development and ensure that the team is working on the most valuable features at any given time.

Practically speaking, it’s a repository of ideas, requirements, and feedback from stakeholders and customers, making sure everyone’s on the same page regarding the product’s long-term goals.

It helps to encourage transparency by making your product’s priorities and development direction visible to the entire team. It also should work as a flexible tool that allows you to continuously refine and adapt your approach, ensuring your product stays on target as market conditions and user needs change.

Ultimately, the product backlog is there to support better decision-making by helping the Product Owner to make informed choices about what to build next.

As it’s so important, you want to keep your backlog tidy and well-optimized with good, relevant ideas. This is done through backlog grooming, which you can do effectively in a backlog refinement meeting.

What is the purpose of a sprint backlog?

The sprint backlog is all about the nitty-gritty details of the development process. Its primary purpose is to guide the Development team during the sprint, ensuring they have a clear plan and know precisely what tasks to tackle.

It provides a sense of focus and direction for the team’s efforts, helping them make progress incrementally. The sprint backlog also promotes collaboration and self-organization within the Dev team, as they collectively decide how to achieve the sprint goal. It’s a commitment to completing specific work within a set timeframe, and it helps measure progress during the sprint, making it evident whether the team is on track to meet its goals.

Who creates them?

Product: The product backlog is typically owned and managed by the Product Owner. They work closely with stakeholders and customers to gather input and prioritize items. It’s the Product Owner’s responsibility to keep the product backlog in good shape, ensuring it aligns with the product vision and market needs.

Sprint: The sprint backlog is often collaboratively created by the Development team during sprint planning. The Development team, often guided by the Scrum Master, selects items from the product backlog and breaks them down into tasks. They estimate the work and determine how much they can commit to for the upcoming sprint.

When are they created?

Product: The product backlog is a living artifact that evolves over time as your product develops. It’s continuously refined and reprioritized to accommodate changes in market conditions, user feedback, and business goals. It is usually created before the first sprint takes place, and items selected from this original product backlog will be selected for that initial sprint.

Sprint: The sprint backlog is created at the beginning of each sprint during the sprint planning meeting. Once defined, it generally remains relatively static throughout the sprint. This ensures that the team remains focused on the sprint goal and doesn’t get distracted by new requests or changing priorities in the short term (unless, of course, they are incredibly urgent life-or-death problems).

What types of tasks are included?

Product: The product backlog contains high-level Ideas and user stories, focusing on the overarching goals and features of the product. It emphasizes the strategic value of each backlog item and their alignment with the product vision.

Sprint: The sprint backlog is made up of granular tasks and activities, breaking down selected user stories from the product backlog into actionable steps. It emphasizes the tactical importance of each task for the successful completion of the sprint goal.

What is the scope and priority level of each?

Product: The product backlog has a broad scope, encompassing the entire product vision and long-term objectives. It prioritizes items based on their strategic importance and potential value to the product.

Sprint: The sprint backlog has a much narrower scope, concentrating on the immediate goals and objectives for the current sprint. It prioritizes tasks that are essential for achieving the sprint goal.

How do you estimate the work to be done?

Product: Estimation in the product backlog focuses on high-level estimates, considering the complexity and strategic value of each backlog item. These estimates provide a rough understanding of the work involved.

Sprint: Your sprint backlog demands more detailed estimates, as the team breaks down user stories into tasks. These estimates help the team understand the work involved more precisely and plan the sprint and its associated tasks accordingly.

How is progress measured?

Product: The progress of the product backlog is measured in terms of overall product development and value delivery to the end-users. It tracks how the product evolves over time, how well it aligns with the market’s needs, and how effectively it achieves the product vision.

Sprint: The progress of the sprint backlog is measured within the sprint’s timeframe. It tracks the completion of tasks and the delivery of committed user stories at the end of the sprint. This ensures the team stays on course to meet their sprint goal and commitments.

How do you effectively use a product backlog and sprint backlog together?

The best thing that you can do is to keep them separate, and integrate them together using a tool like Propad. This way, you can have your backlog in a place where the rest of the team can see it and benefit from it.

Your Developers can see what’s coming up the pipeline. You can push things to development when they are approved and ready, and you’re not clogging up your product backlog with stuff that isn’t ready.

One of the things that ProdPad does so well is taking the weight off of project management tools like Jira and Azure. Jira, for example, is a great tool that gets weighed down when it’s filled with a whole bunch of stuff that it’s not good at handling.

ProdPad helps by separating them out, allowing Jira to be good at what it’s good at – task management. That gives your Devs a space where they can relatively autonomously pick through that list of 20 or 50 items in their backlog, and they can work through it as quickly as possible.

The product backlog also often includes things that have moved their way through development, but need to be validated after the Devs have done their work. You need to check that the target outcomes that were outlined in the specs meet the actual outcomes.

This is another way that ProdPad can help to smooth the process – it sits both upstream and downstream from tools like Jira, pushing tasks to development and then collecting feedback and outcomes once the Devs have done their thing. Then you can keep iterating on your work until it’s ticking all the right boxes.

Benefits of using both backlogs together

Together, a well-maintained product backlog and an intelligently managed sprint backlog provide a structured yet flexible approach to product development.

The benefits of having separate backlogs and using them together include:

• Strategic and tactical alignment: The product backlog ensures strategic alignment with long-term product vision, while the sprint backlog keeps the team tactically focused on immediate sprint goals.
• Adaptability: The product backlog allows for continuous refinement based on changing market conditions and customer feedback, while the sprint backlog enables quick adjustments and course corrections during the sprint.
• Efficient communication: The product backlog fosters open communication among stakeholders, the Product Owner, and the Development team, while the sprint backlog encourages collaboration and shared understanding within the development team during the sprint.
• Transparency and accountability: The product backlog promotes transparency regarding the product vision and priorities, encouraging informed decision-making, while the sprint backlog nurtures a culture of accountability and ownership within the development team.
• Holistic approach: Integration of both backlogs creates a balanced approach, combining long-term strategic objectives with short-term tactical execution.
• Quality assurance: The combined insights from both backlogs ensure that the team delivers high-quality products that both meet customer expectations and adapt to evolving market demands, promoting customer satisfaction and retention.
• Efficient resource allocation: Using both backlogs together optimizes your resource utilization by helping you to focus on high-value product features that have been properly validated and spec’d out before the Devs start to work on them.

Product backlog vs sprint backlog – Divide and conquer!

Hopefully, you’re now persuaded that the smart approach to your backlog is to split it up into more manageable chunks. It’s the best way to avoid the dreaded ‘graveyard of ideas’ and to keep your processes flexible in the face of an ever-shifting market.

ProdPad is a really effective way to manage your product backlog, both before and after you send items to the Devs to work on. It keeps things tidy, manageable, transparent, and most importantly, understandable. It can help you collect all of your feedback and related ideas and attach them to the initiatives in your backlog, to help you choose what to work on and when.

However you do it, though, you need to look at separating your backlog. Really, it’s not so much about product backlog vs sprint backlog. They’re complimentary pieces of the same puzzle, the top-down and bottom-up views of the work to be done. Use them well together, and you’ll give everyone a space for their work to breathe.

The post Product Backlog vs Sprint Backlog – The Grand Strategy and the Battle Plan appeared first on ProdPad.

Flag up relevant ideas

Your product backlog should be an open and transparent environment where ideas go to flourish, not to die. However, not every prospective product spec is relevant for your entire team. ProdPad helps you to flag up ideas to the attention specific colleagues using idea following and @mentions. Daily and weekly email digests mean that your team can remain in the loop on what’s happening with the backlog and follow up should anything pique their interest.

Quick ballot collaboration

At any stage in the idea management process, voting can be a direct and simple way to collect the opinions of your team on whether an idea should be prioritized for development. ‘Yea’s or ‘nay’s should always be qualified by a reason to help product managers make collaborative but informed decisions. ProdPad attaches an easy-to-use voting mechanism to every idea canvas to provide an easy way for your team to give feedback on the product backlog.

Open, easy roadmapping

Once priorities have been set, it’s important that you can share your planned product direction with colleagues and customers alike. A roadmap should be reactive to change and continually up to date, but at the same time accessible to all. In ProdPad you can demonstrate the impact of changes to your roadmap with a drag and drop interface, and export the most recent version to PNG or PDF to send around. You can even embed private and public versions of your roadmaps into any live site. Giving users and team members an instant and dependable location to seek out the most up-to-date plans.

A complete feedback loop

If businesses are ever to coordinate on product changes, it’s important to register who has staked interest in different product ideas.  Tracking the progress of an idea is important all the way through to implementation and ProdPad helps product managers to do this in a number of different ways. Communication with customers is made easier via traceable links from idea canvases to pieces of user feedback, with fields for contact details. The feedback loop can even be automated via two-way integrations between statuses in ProdPad and other systems. With colleagues and customers kept comfortably in the loop, product managers can finally reduce the number of daily requests for new information.

Catch up on how ProdPad fits into building product specs here, and next week read about how ProdPad supports the transition to implementation. 

If you’d like to hear more about how ProdPad can help product managers to better collaborate with team members and customers, get in touch or sign up for a 14 day free trial here. 

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Prompts for best practice product specs

A ProdPad idea canvas comes complete with cues for all the information you need to determine whether a new idea is viable, and to transfer it to development for implementation. This helps to guide your team through idea management, to ensure that nothing is either missing or misleading. But building up complete product specs takes time and can’t be put together in one swoop. Automated prompts to revisit ideas that are missing detail help product managers to stay on top of triage without repeatedly trawling the backlog.

Open communication in one place

The diverse information needed to prepare a new idea for development often requires the input of several different people. ProdPad keeps your team updated on ideas that are in the works, allows them to comment directly onto an idea canvas, and to pull in others for help with @mentions. And communication via ProdPad comments can be done right from the email inbox, without even having to log in. All collaborative changes to an idea are logged in the ProdPad system, so product managers can stay on top.  No more lost documentation, forgotten conversations or untracked edits.

Centralization without disruption

Centralizing as much as possible into your product management system is the best way to coordinate the diverse information that goes into a good product spec. But not all processes can or should be readapted. ProdPad allows you to attach any external files to an idea canvas, from documents to design mockups, so that you can keep everything together without sacrificing the quality of information you collect.

If you’d like to find out more about how ProdPad fits in for building product specs, you can sign up for a free trial today.

If you missed it last week, catch up on How ProdPad Fits In: Capturing Ideas. And next week, read about how ProdPad works alongside your existing processes to share product ideas with colleagues and customers.

The post How ProdPad Fits In: Turning Ideas to Product Specs appeared first on ProdPad.