Product Management - 6 Phases to deliver excellent outcomes.

Whether you’re new to the role or starting to design a new or redesign an existing product, this post captures some key areas to cover in your process. I have also provided some examples and top tips to consider when building out your approach and product roadmaps.

I will walk you through my six-phased approach:

• Strategy

• Ideation

• Planning & Design

• Development

• Production

• Assessment

I will also lightly go over In-life and End-of-Life management of your product(s).

Strategy

You must link the corporate strategy and business strategies to your product strategy. Think about this in a waterfall context where each informs the next.

Why, How and What

The goal as a Product Manager is to create these threads and to land on a Product and Customer Strategy that will inform how you will realise the roadmap to deliver a product(s) that meet your business and customer needs. Your focus in this phase is to land on your;

• Why your product is aligned and supports the business's strategies,

• define how your product will drive value to the business and its customers.

Your product roadmap will build on what you will do to deliver this and when.

See my earlier post here on creating roadmaps. 

An example

This is a banking example for home loans, as it is a space I have previously supported to drive product and customer strategies.

Corporate Strategy

“We are committed to ensuring communities prosper and empowering our customers to build a prosperous financial future, thereby creating a thriving and sustainable society.”

Retail Banking Strategy

"At our core, we exist to help our customers achieve their financial dreams effortlessly and securely. We will do this by providing easy-to-use digital tools, offering informal and personalised financial advice, and ensuring the highest standards of safety and security in their banking experience that fit into their lives."

Home Loan Product Strategy

Our home loan product strategy is designed to simplify the path to homeownership for our customers. We will provide transparent information and step-by-step guidance to make purchasing their first or next home a straightforward and informed process.

Beyond just the purchase phase, we are committed to supporting our customers in managing their loans throughout the entire lifecycle. This includes providing resources and tools for effective financial management, offering flexible payment options, and personalised advice for refinancing or restructuring their loans as their needs evolve.

Moreover, we understand that life can bring unexpected challenges. During these times, our strategy extends to offer support and financial solutions that help our customers navigate these situations with confidence. We aim to make homeownership accessible, stress-free, and fulfilling for every customer during the purchase and throughout their entire homeownership journey.

Home Loan Vision Statement & Promise

At our core, we're dedicated to your financial well-being. Our home loan product strategy is designed to be your lifelong partner on your homeownership journey.

From your first step into homeownership to years down the line, we've got your back. When you're ready to take that important step towards buying your first or next home, we're here to simplify the process, offering clarity and guidance at every turn. We believe being informed is empowering, and we're committed to ensuring you're well-informed every step of the way.

But our support continues beyond purchase. We understand that managing a home loan is a long-term commitment. That's why we offer a range of services, tools, and advice to help you manage your finances, make your payments work for you, and adapt to life's changes.

Sometimes, life throws surprises your way, and that's where we truly shine. During challenging times, we're here to offer you solutions and support to help you stay on your homeownership path. Your financial journey is unique, and our goal is to be with you through every twist and turn, making homeownership accessible, manageable, and enjoyable at every stage."

Approach

• Corporate Strategy Alignment – Product Strategy

• Customer and Market Research and Analysis

• Define Strategy and Objectives with Performance Indicators.

• Customer Segmentation – know your customer.

• Market and Financial Analysis

• Budgets (assessment against slate envelope or requests) and resourcing, tribe capabilities

• Risk Assessment

• Approvals

Ideation

This step is essential even if managing an existing product portfolio or creating new products. You aim to work with your team, the business, and customers to bring your strategy to life.  

If you are working on a customer-facing outcome, It is important to engage with your customers in this phase. I have seen products fail due to not doing so, and you can do it leading into the phase to guide your efforts or present conceptually where you and the team are going as you get further along in the phase.

Your goal is to generate ideas to support your strategy and create breakthrough thinking on how to adapt or bring products to market that meet your product and customer strategies.  

For me, this is one of the most exciting phases, as it builds out on aligning the business and the team with what they will come to deliver and provides them the guardrails for their success.  This phase is also where you see innovation.

Approach

I do this in two stages:

• The first stage is wholistic of the end-to-end experience, and the output should be high-level prioritisation that will feed into the next stage. It also gets everyone on the same page. This can be as simple as working from an end-to-end map, as discussed in my blog post. Link here.

• In the second stage, working on your takeaways from the first stage, you now have clarity on areas to focus on and, hopefully, a level of prioritisation. I like to thematically group these opportunities, usually around feature sets focused on customer outcomes.

Why Customer Outcomes, in this phase it ensures that the focus is wider than the product itself and reduces the bias that can creep in. When using a customer perspective, you allow for broader ideation that creates more meaningful, valuable solutions that resonate with your customers needs and goals and galvanise your team around the value they create.

Workshopping

I approach the first parts of both the same way: by facilitating workshops tailored around landing on the definition of customer features, prioritisation and some concepts.

Whilst these workshops may not involve your customers (which is why having customer outcomes guide you is necessary) before you move forward, your best measure of being on the right path and ultimately, your success is to test your early thinking with them. 

Top Tip: ensure that you have representation from across your business stakeholders and delivery partners in these sessions. It will pay off in ensuring you land on concepts you can deliver.

Concept Development

If you have been able to create concepts that you have tested with your customer from your workshopping, you will now mature this based on the feedback. Otherwise, you will be starting this at this stage. The goal is to create a concept that your customers validate and guides the approach to delivering on the experience. Concepts can be anything from storyboards and screen mock-ups to interactive wireframes.  

My top tip is to don’t over engineer these, whatever gets you in front of your customers/users and stakeholders at pace. We are talking days, not weeks! In this face you are looking to fail forward and progress with a level of confidence that you are meeting your customers needs and will drive business value.

If your timeline allows for it, try some iteration cycles, but if not, I suggest bringing in options that showcase the experience being realised in different ways. Similar to A/B testing.

You will walk out of this with clarity on what your customers desire.

Feasibility and Viability Assessment

This step allows you to start understanding what is involved in bringing to market what your customers desire. 

My top tip is to ensure in your workshops that you have a good cross-section of representation across your business and delivery partners, as it will minimise the impacts at this stage.  You don’t want to get here after validating concepts with customers to realise that, technically, it cannot be achieved or that there are regulations that prevent you from moving forward in the way that you have proposed. 

Prioritisation and review against funding

The goal is to arrive at the product feature sets with clarity of the intent, definition of done, measures and approach to deliver them. This will translate into your product roadmap and Epics.  I have provided a prior blog on Prioritisation approaches that can be checked out here.  

You should also ensure adequate funding is adequate based on this planning step.

Tip: If you have a Product Owner &make sure they are present for this stage, if you are going to start to prioritise your Scrum Coach would also be a good inclusion.  Also consider the scale of the change and your need for internal and external marketing, education or promotion. If so, bring this into the planning and ensure you have the resources and time to support it. resources could include Change Manager/Finance/Marketing/Corporate Affairs. You don’t want delays due to not planning for this at launch. The goal is no surprises late, you want to know going into the next phase that you are working on a viable and feasable solution.

Planning & Design

In this phase, we are building out the concepts validated from the ideation phase and defined within your Epics, and packaged down to your User Stories. A User Story should be able to be completed in a Sprint cycle; this in my experience, is two weeks tasks.

In planning for this phase, you will be partnering with your Agile Product Owner(s) [if that isn’t also you], scrum master/coach and your delivery tribes to build out your user stories and define the approach and sizing of the features that you will be delivering. Ensure that this is not limited to just the product's design, you should be assessing the need for Change Management, Finance (if you’re changing your pricing) and Marketing.

Planning is not a set-and-forget phase, in Agile delivery there will be continuous pre and post planning activities that you will be working on. Also you should be considering how you will appraoch bug fixes. These could be done in a dedicated sprint or form part of all sprints ie 10% of a sprint allocation.

Your tribe(s) headed up by the Agile Product Owner, will be working on creating the customer experiences to support the features and, in doing so, building out on the earlier phases, including the research that informed how you got here. You may also need to engage with other stakeholders and delivery partners throughout this phase.

This phase could include further research at the feature level, landscape reviews and if you have it validation against your Design System.

The goal is to create interactive wireframes or other concepts that can be validated with your customers and kick off change and communication activities.

Tip, based on the impact, effort and confidence in the delivery of the feature you should scale up the sizing of the feature and the resource capabilities required to get you there. Consider the user research and validation activities and if you want to know more about this check out this link here.

Approach

• Define the design principles and definition of done.

• Complete research

• Validate or define the Information Architecture for digital solutions.

• Create customer personas, storyboards, user flows, and wireframes determined based on what is required to get your concepts validated by customers.

• Build out your pricing forecast model

• Change Management plans and Marketing engagement as required

• Conduct walk-throughs with internal delivery partners to ensure feasibility and viability. I also suggest running showcases with wider stakeholders to mitigate conflicts or inform of opportunities for alignment or improvement. Iterate designs and assess if validation from this group is required.

• Validate with customers and other end users and iterate based on outcomes and in alignment with design principles and definition of done. Be careful of scope creep during this stage.

• Do a walk-through with delivery partners and engineering resources and conduct wider showcases.

• Create design packages for engineering teams to develop.

Development

I have worked across many different Agile tribe structures. The best I have found is when your engineers (developers) are embedded in your tribe(s). Your developers may be in dedicated squads onshore or offshore in some structures. This will change your approach to managing this delivery phase, and there are usually scheduling and handover requirements to consider.

The goal is to code your features and complete integration (user testing and validation). Engineers should partner with your designers to ensure alignment and that the build aligns with your validated designs. You want to limit the disconnect in this phase, so this partnership is vital and you should plan for this.

You should also be finalising your change management and marketing approach.

Approach

• Define agile development approach and cycles.

• Code and test features

• Quality assurance, user testing and bug fixes

• System integration testing

• Iterate on the development efforts to enable handover to production.

• Package and validate Production readiness walkthrough.

• Change and marketing launch planning.

Production

You have been working towards this, having your product in the hands of your customers and users. Time to celebrate!

Tip: Most organisations have gates to ensure that features are fit for production, so you should check what these are for your company.

Depending on the scale of the change, you should be looking at how you will create awareness of your change.  You can look up the ADKAR model if you need a reference here for your approach.

You may need to consider external marketing and promotion, which should have been planned for as part of your Epics.  I have seen launch dates shift to the right for not considering the need for this upfront.

You should also be thinking about your internal communication and promotion and showcases across the business.

Approach

• Launch Plan & Testing

• Package up for go-live teams.

• Final System integration testing

• Sales and Customer Service Management: Change Management – Communication, training etc. launches

• External Product Launch: Marketing and promotion activation

• Internal: Product showcases, communication

• Pre-launch Quality Assurance and signoffs

• Go Live!

Assessment

The great thing about product management is that your connection doesn’t stop once you Go Live, which is a core difference between Product and Project management.

In this phase, you monitor and evaluate the product and ensure you realise the metrics you defined in the earlier phases. You will be doing so by using data from qualitative and quantitative sources, usually and depending on the measures you have adopted.  

The goal here is to gather feedback to validate you are on the right path or to iterate and improve on what has been delivered.

You should also be thinking about your internal communication and promotion.

Tip: Based on the scale of the change and take up, think about your assessment cycles and when you will have enough data to support this phase. Also during this phase you will more than likely be building on your backlog which will see you bringing in changes or new User Stories.

Approach

• Define cycles for assessment.

• Product Analysis: Gather data to support the measures for success on all measures, including marketing and offer testing.

• Report on the findings

• Assess changes or new features to go into the planning cycle

• Issue resolution

• Communication and engagement plan

In Life & End of Life Management

Your product portfolio or product will need to be assessed based on performance, corporate offering alignment and innovation within your industry.

The Assessment phase mentioned earlier is your way to understand performance. Separately, you will also need to assess the product alignment to your organisation and business strategies, as well as the product landscape within the industry, to ensure that it is still fit for purpose to meet your customer needs.

 In Life

When a product is in the market and accessible to your customers, it is considered “In-Life”. Your role here is to ensure its ongoing commercial success and alignment with the organisation's product offering strategy. The ongoing assessment will inform this and indicate any changes that may reflect changes to market conditions and alignment with customer needs.

You will also need to assess the product for alignment with your organisation's product offerings and changes within your industry. For Example – Industry reforms, new regulations or standards, emerging technologies, and innovation in the product sector.

Assessment of your products is not just about the reporting but using insights to inform changes to maintain or decide that the product is transitioning to End of Life.

End of Life

The focus here is to withdraw products from the market whilst maintaining your customer base. I will cover this in more detail in a future post. The focus here is to establish and implement a plan that manages the processes, customer retention, stakeholder and partner relationship and design & technical infrastructure considerations.  If you are required for regulatory reasons to withdraw a product from the market, you will also need to follow protocols that ensure timeliness and reporting of compliance.

Many organisations have a defined process for end-of-life, so you are best to check to validate this.

Here is a bit of a checklist to follow:

·      Do you regularly assess your products to see if withdrawal is the best option?

·      Have you considered how you will persuade customers to stay with you, the options to do so, and the process that will make this seamless?

·      Do you have a standard plan for end-of-life that includes the relevant processes and stakeholder management for this to occur?

·      Does the timing of the end of life give you the best outcome in reducing the impact on customers, employees, partners and the business?

Conclusion and Next Steps

In this guide to the product lifecycle, we've covered the six key phases: Strategy, Ideation, Design, Development, Production, and Assessment. Each phase is vital in bringing a product from concept to reality.

To summarise:

• Strategy: Align your product strategy with corporate and customer needs. Define your product's "Why, How, and What”, creating a roadmap for success.

• Ideation: Generate innovative ideas that align with your strategy, involving customers to ensure success.

• Planning & Design: Agile Planning to define your Epics and User Stories. Your tribe(s) will work through allocated User Stories and their allotted tasks to build interactive wireframes, maintaining close collaboration between designers and engineers for successful execution.

• Development: Code your features, conduct quality assurance, and ensure alignment with design.

• Production: Prepare for launch by ensuring features are fit for production. Consider external marketing, change management, and internal communication for a smooth rollout.

• Assessment: Monitor and evaluate the product's performance post-launch, using data to continually refine and improve the product whilst it is in the In-life phase and identify when an End-of-Life plan needs to be developed.

The next steps involve applying this framework to your Product Management journey, ensuring each phase is tailored to your organisation's unique needs and customer requirements. Success in Product Management lies in navigating and optimising each phase effectively and remembering these are not linear.

If you have any questions, please reach out.