The words of Product Management.
The definition of done (DoD) is when all conditions, or acceptance criteria, that a software product must satisfy are met and ready to be accepted by a user, customer, team, or consuming system. We must meet the definition of done to ensure quality. It lowers rework, by preventing user stories that don’t meet the definition from being promoted to higher-level environments. It will prevent features that don’t meet the definition from being delivered to the customer or user.
Agile is an iterative approach to project management and software development that helps teams deliver value to their customers faster and with fewer headaches. Instead of betting everything on a “big bang” launch, an agile team delivers work in small, but consumable, increments. Requirements, plans, and results are evaluated continuously so teams have a natural mechanism for responding to change quickly.
Product management in an agile environment, where planning is done in an iterative way to allow product and engineering to continuously adjust the near-term roadmap and meet customer needs.
The Agile Manifesto is a document written up by a group of 17 developers called the Agile Alliance. It details four key values and 12 principles that software developers should adhere to for their work. It’s important to note that the Agile Manifesto doesn’t prescribe a specific methodology or framework. Instead, it proposes a mindset that software developers should adopt.
Alpha testing is the first end-to-end testing of a product to ensure it meets the business requirements and functions correctly. It is typically performed by internal employees and conducted in a lab/stage environment. An alpha test ensures the product really works and does everything it’s supposed to do.
A product backlog is a list of the new features, changes to existing features, bug fixes, infrastructure changes or other activities that a team may deliver in order to achieve a specific outcome.
A buyer persona is made up of the characteristics of a large group of people who have a say in the purchase process. This might involve a number of decision-makers and influencers within the company who aren’t even utilizing the product. As a result, it makes sense for product teams creating B2B solutions to create both a buyer and a user persona.
“Churn” refers to the number of customers or subscribers who stop using your service during a given time period. A high churn rate can negatively impact Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) and can also indicate dissatisfaction with a product.
Customer Acquisition Cost, or CAC, is a metric that determines how much a company pays to acquire new customers. The overall cost of sales and marketing efforts, as well as property or equipment, required to persuade a client to acquire a product or service, is known as CAC.
Competitive analysis means Identifying your competitors and evaluating their strategies to determine their strengths and weaknesses relative to those of your own product or service.
Customer experience is the impression your customers have of your brand as a whole throughout all aspects of the product. It results in their view of your brand and impacts factors related to your bottom line including revenue.
In the context of software, documentation refers to information that is either incorporated in code or published separately and defines what the code is, how it works, and other pertinent details.
Design thinking is a process for creative problem-solving. Design Thinking is described as a human-centred approach to innovation to help make decisions on what customers really want.
Dual-track agile is an agile methodology that contains two separate tracks. There’s the “Discovery” track and the “Delivery” track. Dual-track agile enables product teams to work on research and product development in parallel.
Epics are a helpful way to organize your work and create a hierarchy. The idea is to break work down into shippable pieces so that large projects can actually get done and you can continue to ship value to your customers on a regular basis. Epics help teams break their work down while continuing to work towards a bigger goal.
A kickoff of a product feature is a meeting in which a product manager and related stakeholders set plans, priorities, and obligations for the work of the team on a new feature. It also sends the team a significant signal: the organization has given priority to building this function and is ready to start immediately.
The feedback portal lets you create and embed a branded and customized portal to collect feedback from your users with ease.
A feature is an aspect of your product that aims to solve a problem. It could be an idea (as a potential solution to a problem) or an initiative (as a larger project to develop a feature in order to solve a specific problem.)
A go-to-market strategy is a tactical plan detailing how a company plans to execute a successful product release and promotion, and ultimately its sale to customers. Common elements of a product’s go-to-market strategy include:
The Kano Model (pronounced “Kah-no”) is an approach to prioritizing features on a product roadmap based on the degree to which they are likely to satisfy customers. Product teams can weigh a high-satisfaction feature against its costs to determine whether or not adding it to the roadmap is a strategically sound decision.
A Kanban board is a tool for visually arranging and tracking a team’s workflow. Project management commonly uses this method. Kanban boards consist of columns representing various stages of progress, such as “not started” or “in review.” Under these columns, the team adds cards describing discrete tasks and moves these cards to their appropriate columns so everyone has a clear view of the team’s progress.
Key performance indicators, or KPIs, are quantitative metrics that organizations use to track and analyze performance or progress toward business objectives.
Lifetime value (LTV) estimates how much revenue a customer represents a business over the life of that relationship. Also called customer lifetime value (CLV, or CLTV), this is a critical metric for a company trying to gauge the cost efficiency of acquiring new customers and supporting them over time.
Lean Software Development (LSD) is an agile methodology that focuses on reducing development time and resources, eliminating waste, and providing just the features that the product requires. The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) strategy is a Lean method in which a team exposes a bare-minimum version of its product to the market and learns from customers what they like, don’t like, and want.
MoSCoW prioritization, also known as the MoSCow method or MoSCoW analysis, is a popular prioritization technique for managing requirements. The method is commonly used to help key stakeholders understand the significance of initiatives in a specific release.
A core component of the lean philosophy is the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Using MVPs correctly will help you focus on what matters the most while saving you valuable time and effort during product development.
A net promoter score is a method of using a single survey question to gauge customer satisfaction with a product. Businesses can send out this question— “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend [our product or company]?”—at various stages of the customer’s journey.
Needfinding is the process of discovering a market demand for a solution in product management. The product roadmap will be developed when the product team has identified this requirement and verified it with potential consumers. Needfinding necessitates product teams to interact with consumers and observe them in their daily activities.
A product vision, or product vision statement, describes the overarching long-term mission of your product. Vision statements are aspirational and communicate concisely where the product hopes to go and what it hopes to achieve in the long term.
Ask a few people that question, and their specific answers will vary, but they’ll all probably describe it as a physical item you find in a store or order through Amazon. In reality, the term product refers to a much broader range of goods and services.
User personas are fictional representations of your users that help your teams understand who they’re building for. A good user persona is realistic, easy to visualize, and tied into your day-to-day decisions and processes. Personas should also be living documents that get updated as the needs and challenges of your users change.
Product-market fit describes a scenario in which a company’s target customers are buying, using, and telling others about the company’s product in numbers large enough to sustain that product’s growth and profitability.
The role of Product Manager (PM) is a vital and pivotal position within many companies, and it’s often not well defined. While the responsibilities of PMs vary quite a bit across industries and businesses, all PMs drive the development of products and are ultimately responsible for those products’ success.