Product Management, Six Sigma style!
The Six Sigma methodology DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) offers a structured and disciplined process for solving business problems and facilitating a successful product management system. Successful professional product management practice must consider the following points:
1- Understand your customer: Who are our customers? What are their pain points? Who is going to use this? What roles do they play? Why are they going to use it?
2- Qualitative/Quantitative Research: Gather and review surveys, interviews, segmentation studies, personas, and behavior-based research. Analyze the results and look for patterns.
3- Personas: Develop a portrait of each type of customer we target — what matters to them?
4- Competitive Analysis: Examine competing products and messaging. Look at the market for opportunities to differentiate.
5- Objectives: Set goals based on the customer's pain points and needs. What are our customer's goals? Let's create KPIs around that.
6- Anticipate Challenges: Brainstorm some hypotheses around how things could go wrong.
Product Roadmap
Features do not make great products, but we must know what we build. The product roadmap paints a clear and compelling picture of where we are going together.
It helps inspire the team
It holds us accountable
It helps engineers build the product
It helps the sales, support & marketing teams understand and communicate the vision of the product to customers
Prototyping
Essential prototyping will enable us to present our idea to internal groups or customers, get feedback, and validate our assumptions. Prototyping tools include post-it notes, basic sketches, InDesign, Proto.io, and Balsalmiq. These tools help us create a skeleton to revise and improve as we learn more.
Usability Testing
Let's start testing the usability of our new product by asking the right questions and validating assumptions. Do our users understand how to use our product? Is it solving their problem? If not, why not?
Here's how we will do it:
1- Comparison: We may have two choices we want to decide between. Let's let data drive our decision and test both options with an A/B testing tool like Optimizely.
2- View usage: The best way to measure usability is to observe when and how users use our product. There are great tools out there that can help us achieve this.
Measuring Success
If solving problems is the goal of new product development, gathering feedback and measuring success is the most critical component of product management. How are we going to do this? Let's check in with key stakeholders to make sure we are doing what we set out to do. We might use Google Analytics, Mixpanel, or good old-fashioned emails, phone calls, and interviews.
Checkpoints: Day 1, day 7, week 4, month 3, month 6.
Example metrics: How many/what % have used different product features?
Key Questions:
Has this product improved x,y,z for you?
What do you like about this product?
What do you not like about this product?
Finally
Great people make great products, and excellent products solve real problems. It is essential to tell a clear and compelling story about what we are building. Not everyone has to be excited, but everyone does need to know what we are making and why it is essential. Great product managers identify problems, think creatively, communicate, persevere, and learn how to rally people around a shared vision. Building amazing products is hard work, but there's nothing better than seeing your job make a difference in your customers' lives.
