Dr. Mark, I am the Director of product management at my company with a team of 3 PMs.
My team and I do lots of market research, create plenty of MRDs, voice-of-the-customer reviews, industry segmentation and basically it is my belief that no one in the company reads any of our work. In fact, some of the items never even make it to review. Worse, prioritization of the release and features still appears to be done still on gut executive level agreement and the political clout of the head of engineering. How can I summarize and simplify the process for a more quantifiable review, executive level buy-in and trade-off across priorities and also prevent wasted effort?
Thanks,
Iggy Nored
Thanks for your e-mail Iggy. The challenge is that despite great research, lots of data and well thought out reasoning, a typical product planning and roadmap still becomes a matter of opinion, politics and personal agenda. This is because of an absence of an agreed way of quantifying and measuring and weighting the critical components and elements that contribute towards priorities. Today, product management software is available to help with the process and capturing data to ultimately help in the process, but if you are a typical small technology company good luck getting the budget to purchase $50k worth of software to help with product management and planning.
In lieu of software, all you really need is a spreadsheet to be able to reflect basic quantifiable assessment of the value, risks and tradeoffs of the product, module or solution you are proposing. For example you can use this simplified 12 step product planning and analysis scoring system I developed:
| STEP |
PRODUCT PLANNING ANALYSIS |
PRODUCT, MODULE OR SOLUTION BEING PROPOSED |
SCORE |
| 1 | Description of proposed project/offering | WHAT: Describe what it is | |
| WORKS: Describe conceptually how it works | |||
| WANT: Describe how you would explain this offering to any new prospects and/or our existing customers and why they should want it | |||
| 2 | Strategic business value | Describe the strategic business value of this offering | |
| 3 | Estimated market potential | 3=Excellent market potential (Paying customers already lined up) 2=Good market potential (Based upon customer feedback, research and current prospect deals there is interest) 1=Mild market potential (A leading edge innovative product but potential market acceptance is as yet undetermined) 0=No direct market potential (Not a standalone product but supplemental to other revenue generating opportunities) |
0 |
| 4 | Estimated profit potential | 3=Excellent profitability (Estimated margins at greater than x% (exact percentage TBD)) 2=Good profitability (Estimated margins at less than x% (exact percentage TBD)) 1=Mild profitability or break-even (Close to break-even) 0=No profit potential (Loss leader designed to support other initiatives or offerings in the portfolio) |
0 |
| 5 | Customer’s business value | 3=Excellent business value (When deployed can dramatically impact the success of a customer’s business – Success will be visible to ‘C’ level prospects with quantitative metrics or qualified successes) 2=Good business value (When deployed has isolated impact to the success of a customer’s business – Success will be visible to department/regional heads) 1=Mild business value (When deployed impacts only the day-to-day user of the product) 0=No business value (It’s a technical component not directly related to the business) |
0 |
| 6 | Competitive technical differentiation | 3=Excellent technical value (Leading edge implementation that advances our technology significantly) 2=Good technical value (Brings us in-line with new technologies that are being touted/exploited today) 1=Mild technical value (Catches us up to competitive capabilities or fills a hole demanded by only certain customers) 0=No technical value (This is a cosmetic change or addition) |
0 |
| 7 | Engineering complexity and risk | 3=Not Complex (It’s a piece of cake as it is up to us and us alone consider it as good as done, we’ve done this before and know exactly what it takes and everything is completely within our control) 2=Mildly Complex (We’ve done it before but you never know what might go wrong, there are still some outside dependencies) 1=Complex (We’ve delivered upon this kind of project before but either the time-frames are extremely aggressive OR the stability of supporting components present risk OR we have some expertise in house but do not have a track record of execution on technology or type of project) 0=Extremely complex (many partners, many variables, significant co-ordination and integration) |
0 |
| 8 | Engineering resources | 3=Excellent Comfort level (We have in-house skills with bandwidth. No need to add/hire additional resources or outsource. Existing hardware and software can be leveraged) 2=Good Comfort level (We need to re-assign resources off other activities to execute. Some minor spend on hardware/software may be required) 1=Mildly Comfortable (We need to add new resources and/or hardware and software but may not be within our budget) 0=Not comfortable (Need significant new resources or costly outsourcing definitely needed. Significant investment in new software and hardware) |
0 |
| 9 | Other identified risks and key issues | Legal/Patent issues? Key resource dependencies? Hardware/Software procurement issues? Partner dependencies? New distribution channel required? International? Marketing resources and budget? Support Resources? |
|
| 10 | Review of Quantifiable Categories | BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY TECHNICAL EFFORT AND RISK Estimated market potential 0 Our technical value 0 Estimated profit potential 0 Engineering complexity and risk 0 Customer’s business value 0 Engineering resources 0 -Opportunity score = 0 of 9 -Effort and Risk Total = 0 of 9 Total 0 of 18 |
0 |
| 11 | Summary | Summarize the proposed offering | |
| 12 | Next steps & Recommendations | Provide initial time lines for proposed next steps Short-term Medium-term Long-term |
If you get everyone in your product management team to go through the same thought process and score steps 3 through 8 on a scale or 0 to 3 for each section. You should get a score out of 9 for business opportunity and another out of 9 for technical effort/risk and a score out of 18 for total evaluation and comparison across proposed initiatives. By applying these 12 steps you standardize the thought processes required before you engage in lengthy MRD creation and you get a vehicle for communicating and presenting your proposal in a simple digestible format for early evaluation. Typically I would translate each step in a PPT slide and deliver a 30 minute presentation to the reviewing team.
Of course you need to get everyone including your executives to buy in on the weightings of relative level of importance of each of the areas/steps, but that is a good thing, since you are engaging them in a quantified, emperical review of how to go about prioritizing the major initiatives in the roadmap. However complex you make the weighting formulas behind the categories, if there is a final score and relative scores to other items being proposed, the political and personal agendas should be reduced or at the very least called out into the open.
Finally, having each category segmented allows for a thoughtful discussion and agreement/disagreement before proceeding to next steps, thereby more efficiently using your PM resources.
Thank you and keep the questions coming.
About Dr. Mark Eteer
Mark Eteer was born in the UK in 1966. He studied computer science at the University of Essex and after 8 years as a programmer, moved into marketing. He obtained his PhD entirely online. His successes marketing for major corporations and minor startups, combined with his no nonsense straight forward guidance on all matters marketing, has led him to be sought out by some of the most well known marketing stars in Mollywood. Although unsubstantiated, he claims that he was the marketing/PR mind behind Tom Cruise’s behavior on Oprah, although he admits that Tom took it a bit too far. He currently lives in an exclusive suburb of Mollywood.
As a leading provider of scalable, enterprise-wide, high ROI marketing ideas, Dr. Mark uses his cloud-based, next-generation approach and solar-powered, game changing methodology which leverages social media to answer paradigm shifting questions about marketing and product management.
Dr. Mark would like to thank Ramon Chen for allowing him to be a guest blogger here on Cloud ‘N Clear and understands that Ramon disavows any knowledge of any bad advice he might offer.