2. How is a product managed?

Yesterday, I spent some time thinking what is product management? Today, let me put some thought on how to actually manage a product. Much of stream below is residue of discussions I had with Ian and Dave Wilby, and some other things I grasped along the way.

Every iteration in a product delivery starts from inception/feedback and gets exposed with a release. During these stage, a product manager must

• Inception: Understand the demand (need for a particular system/feature/bug fix) and perform a triage, thereby recognizing business value of demand. A demand can come from various sources (sales engineering, marketing need, from a consultant/user, tech support etc)
• Analysis: For every accepted demand (business value, irrespective of any estimates of resource consumption), conduct a research on current state of market (competition, similar products, or updates to current product) and evaluate it against business value for the company. If demand is considered large, understanding of target market segment will be important.
• Specification: using various techniques to interact with users (and developers), specify how system/feature should be used by breaking demand into smaller entities (writing/updating FURPS requirements/user stories). *what is a good user story/requirements*
• Prioritization: Prioritize requirements according to maturity of specification and value it delivers.

Above 4 steps are considered funnelling activity for a product manager, and ideally product managers should spend at least 40% of their time in above activity (excluding housekeeping like travelling).

Next activity is build activity, and PM should invest minimum required time (less than 10%) in this activity.

• Implement: in small iterations, get commitment from developers to develop top n mature user stories (sprint planning), supervise the development by having regular interaction with developers (stand ups and sprint reviews).

While is feature is in construction, a product manager has to prepare for its deployment from the very beginning of implementation activity (see above), and gear up all stakeholders. This eats up to 20% of PM activity time.

• Release planning: Synchronize regularly with stakeholders to keep them updated about development status and delivery expectations. At the same time, it is also a good idea to work regularly on preparing material to highlight features and correct usage scenarios for stakeholders (including sales, support, and consulting apart from interested customers). [Hint: A video presentation of sprint review session will help bridge gap between distant stakeholders and developers]

Almost, as soon as a release goes out to actual users, feedback will start coming in from various channels (most importantly from technical support). It is important to gather all the feedback in a single input funnel and start from the inception cycle all over all.