8 key steps of the product management process
A successful product development process is derived from a comprehensive plan, a strong strategy, and teamwork among team members.
Just because it has a great product vision doesn’t mean it will have a positive outcome. It requires idea management, a long-term plan, time, effort, and a team of experts.
From market research, designing, and building to marketing, this seems to be a heavy workload for product managers. Their role is crucial for organizations.
That said, many product managers[1] rely on the product management process to outline the series of actions toward project success.
Product management processes enable businesses, especially startups, to have seamless key practices that are performed in a strategic and logical order.
In this article, we’ll discuss what a product management process entails, its importance, and the key steps businesses need to adopt.
What is a product management process?
Every business has a strategy for managing product development. Thus, a flexible and effective process is essential to achieve business objectives.
A product management process is a series of steps organizations perform to develop a better product. The steps encompass everything from product vision, design, market launch, product management, and beyond.
It can take different forms depending on the organizational structure and industry. For startups or small organizations, product managers supervise each step of the process.
In large enterprises with a more complex target market, designated product development teams handle each step of the process.
The role of a product manager in the product management process
A product manager’s responsibilities include setting up a project vision, defining a product strategy, and delivering business value.
Product managers act as the bridge between various stakeholders, including existing customers, development teams, and business leaders.
They also coordinate cross-functional teams to ensure successful product development and launch. Product managers oversee and continuously monitor the product’s performance for further feature prioritization and strategies.
Having a breakdown of the entire product management life cycle helps companies prioritize each task and use the right resources.
In fact, a study conducted by PM 280 Group revealed that a fully optimized product manager increases a company’s profit by 34.2%. What’s most important is it enables companies to set up certain projects from being out of scope.
What are the benefits of the product management process?
The product management process is long. However, once it is clearly outlined, it can bring many benefits to organizations.
More specifically, an effective product management process delivers the following advantages;
- Higher team productivity and greater flexibility
- Improved customer satisfaction
- Efficient and straightforward process management
- Faster delivery of products
- Effective resource allocation
8 key steps of the product management process
Clearly, the product management process has no rulebook. Although the procedures product managers follow will vary from one organization to the next, the steps may be somewhat similar.
Here are the eight key steps of the product management process:
1. Identify customer pain points and manage product ideas
Thorough market research is the starting point of product development. Before creating a product,[2] it is important to identify the customer needs and their pain points.
The gathered information should not just be about customer trends; it should also include on-demand products and growing industries.
Idea generation can occur as teams begin brainstorming product ideas. These sessions help filter conceptualizations and decide what is viable for consideration.
This stage also involves goal setting, which entails the company’s vision, how the product management team can make it happen, and its results.
The first step of the product management process is crucial for getting an overview and avoiding being overwhelmed by the product backlog.
2. Determine technical specifications
During this stage, the ideas, suggestions, and feature requests from the product backlog are elaborated clearly. The product manager works closely with different stakeholders to create product specifications.
Product specifications, sometimes referred to as product specs, are blueprints that outline the requirements for product features and functionality. They are important to the product team because they serve as a guide in building the product.
3. Create a product roadmap
The third step of the product management process is road mapping. It comes before the prioritization stage.
With road mapping, the team takes into account the product vision and strategy. This step is more focused on the bigger picture.
Most often, a product roadmap involves mapping out all the overarching specific and measurable goals for the product.
4. Prioritization
The prioritization phase looks into the details and decides which items from the product backlog should be prioritized.
Product managers decide what should be built at a specific time based on what’s more valuable to the user and the product.
Some common prioritization frameworks include the MoSCoW method, RICE scoring model, value versus effort technique, and product tree framework.
5. Development and delivery
Once the product roadmap and a set of prioritized items are implemented, the product comes to life. The development and delivery stage varies from one organization to another.
According to the project managers’ requirements, developers, engineers, marketing, and the support team are the key people in these steps.
These teams of experts ensure that the product features are delivered with high-quality quality and meet the set product specifications.
6. Analytics and experiments
Running analytics and experiments is another important step in the product management process.
The product development team gathers connections, correlations, causations, and other learnings using product analytics tools.
This is a great way to test and improve the product, understand its value to users before launching, and increase its chances of success.
7. Gather customer feedback
Gathering customer feedback, which encompasses requests and complaints, will significantly help the team to validate and improve the product and its features.
Feedback is essential as it offers insights and suggestions that help the staff understand the product problems that they are trying to address.
This also applies to existing products where project managers analyze data, test it again, and manage its defects. This helps with scaling operations and optimizing efficiencies while minimizing costs.
8. Product improvements
Constant product improvement is critical in product management, as it aims to enhance a product’s functionality, usability, and overall value.
This involves identifying areas where the product can be better aligned with user needs and market demands. Key activities in this step include:
- Gathering user feedback
- Data analysis
- Market research
- Evaluating key metrics
Based on these insights, product managers may suggest implementing new features, refining existing ones, fixing bugs, and optimizing the user experience.
Implementing these enhancements helps maintain competitiveness, increase customer satisfaction, enable higher customer engagement, and drive business growth.
Add more value to your product management process
Product management isn’t just a series of steps but an ongoing process. Each step has essential functions to be implemented and goals to be achieved.
This process significantly helps both product managers and their team members. The steps increase their efficiency in laying out priorities and guidelines on what to address in the product management process.
Thus, it helps development and support teams build products that will satisfy customers’ needs. It is the overall strategy for organizations to scale up operations and achieve business goals.
Article References:
[2] Creating a product. Murphy, W. H., & Gorchels, L. (1996). How to improve product management effectiveness. Industrial Marketing Management, 25(1), 47-58. https://doi.org/10.1016/0019-8501(95)00063-1
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