Strategic and Data-driven Product Management
Strategic product management involves thinking highly about the product, what shape it should take and what the end state should look like.
It also involves changing the direction by anticipating the change in the business landscape.
- Identifying a problem: Figuring out what problem needs to be solved is one of the early wins that can go a long way in the product’s success.
- Identifying the opportunity (Market Sizing) – Figuring out whether the market is big enough to venture into building a solution for it.
- Creating a Product Vision: A product vision drives the whole team. It also clearly articulates – what are we building? and who are we building for? One of the famous examples of product vision is Amazon’s – To be earth’s most customer-centric company, to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online…
This vision tells what Amazon wants to be, and all its actions align with it. The business is driven towards it.
- Coming up with the best solution: Once the problem is defined, the opportunity is evaluated, and the product vision is defined. A potential solution is a next goal to achieve. Here the MVP is built, and the product is shaped.
- Finalizing on the Product-Market Fit: Once the product has gotten some initial success and users are using the product, if the users like your product and come back to use it, the product is said to have attained a product-market fit. This is when product managers can start building on top of the product. Additional features and scale-up happens to post this stage.
- How to plan for years to gain a competitive advantage– This is the point where product managers try to bet on the future. Regularly assessing what the new charters are, what the product can extend to, and how a product remains relevant and competitive in the market.
Data-driven product management – Data-driven product management is particularly useful once there is a product-market fit. It can help in getting incremental benefits and further optimization of the product. Here product managers are more focused on metrics and how to improve them by doing product interventions either by optimizing an existing feature or by adding a new feature.
A few metrics used in data-driven product management are;
- Onboarding funnel improvement
- Conversion funnel improvement
- Engagement improvement
- Feature adoption
- Contribution of assets/components to the product goal
- Attribution to conversion
These metrics are to be looked at hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly, depending on the type of the product.
~ Ashwani Kumar Mishra, Senior Product Manager at Pharmeasy
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