Product Management Essentials

Every day mantra for product managers- See the big forest and have a feedback-loop system in place for product investment and the drivers to new feature functionality

From goodproductmanager.com: Besides coming up with an idea and implementing it, there are several steps product managers need to go through before engaging in product development:

1. Define the expected impact of the changes. Different products and different changes will have different impacts, though some popular measures are
   • increased usage
   • increased revenue from existing customers
   • new customer acquisition
   • improved customer retention rate
   • improved customer satisfaction
   • increased market share
   • references to change in blogs, media coverage, or analyst reports
2. Establish goals for the changes. Once you have defined the specific measures, the next step is to explicitly state what you hope this change will achieve. Good goals are SMART goals (or MT goals, if you prefer), making it clear whether the goal was met or not.
3. Determine how you will measure the impact. Though you may know the impact you expect or hope to see and have a specific quantitative goal in mind, you must be able to measure it to evaluate its success. For example, if you are considering adding a new feature to your web site, and your goal is to have 10% of your customers using the feature of the website within 30 days of it being released, you need to have web analytics in place to measure whether the goal is met or not. Though this seems obvious, often times work required to measure the impact of a change is not considered until too late in the development process for measurements to be put in place, or, even worse, after the change has already been implemented.
4. Measure the impact and objectively evaluate. After the change is implemented, compare your actual results to your expected results. Were the results achieved? Why or why not? What could have caused the results? Are there additional changes which are needed? What was done well that should be replicated for future product changes? What did you learn which could improve your success in the future?

Technorati Tags: product management, best practices of product management