The Product Management Workflow: 6 Main Stages

Not all ideas are great to kick-start with. With this, product management plays a key role in bringing chaos to order, ultimately products to market.

There’s no unique recipe for the product management workflow. But, the underlying sequence of operations for most companies is identical. Moreover, the product management strategy shepherds things along.

This article examines the product manager’s responsibilities and practices to follow throughout the process.

Creating a Vision 

While vision creation doesn’t come under product development yet, this is where the product management workflow begins with idea management when team members discuss a new product or service. When creating the vision, a product manager defines the product goals and places the following questions:

• Which problems will the product solve?

• What is the buyer persona (s) for the product?

• How can businesses assess the success of the product?

Understanding Customers

Knowing your customers is fundamental for creating a successful product. A recent report suggests that over 66% of customers expect businesses to track customer sentiment.

Product managers along with product marketing managers need to conduct multiple surveys to get a deeper understanding of the customers. It involves:

• Developing user personas

• Identifying consumers’ needs

• Investigating consumer patterns

Devising Development Strategies 

After developing a vision, knowing the industry, and understanding consumers’ needs, product managers formulate specific product strategies. While a vision specifies the product objectives, strategy demonstrates how to meet them. The product management plan must be a clear and realistic roadmap for the team working on a product.

An effective product management strategy defines the product's crucial aspects, customers and their needs, and key performance indicators (KPIs) that the product has to fulfill. 

Developing the Product 

Product development begins with developing archetypes and design through the User Experience (UX) team; these tasks, a product manager can find themselves jotting down technical specs. Their chief objective is to understand what the customers demand and convey these insights to the project manager and the development team.

For that, product managers conduct target-group and personal interviews with prospects. The subsequent results enable them to prioritize the essential and non-essential aspects. Finally, they write the product-related documents, such as functional specifications documents (FSD) and product requirement documents (PRD). 

Forging Marketing and Sales Strategy 

A full-grown marketing strategy incorporates several pre-launch activities to create excitement around the product even before it appears on the market. These pre-launch activities include advertising via multiple media channels, pre-launch freebies, and designing top-notch, SEO-optimized content. They all have to focus on the particular focus group pre-set during the previous industry research. 

In small- and medium-sized businesses (SMB) that don’t have the independent role of product marketing manager, the product manager might take up more responsibilities at this phase, including:

• Setting the pricing strategy

• Writing business use cases

• Shaping the product launch plan and distribution models

• Identifying the focus market

• Defining sales support and necessary tools

In large businesses, these activities are typically distributed among professionals from the sales, product, and marketing teams.

Monitoring Product Metrics 

After rolling out the product, the product manager tracks its progression and examines the data to measure its success. These metrics can be categorized as:

• the financial metrics for gauging the revenue, such as monthly recurring revenue  

• metrics demonstrating customer interest, such as retention rate  

• metrics indicating customer engagement, such as session duration  

• metrics showing customer satisfaction, such as net promoter score  

• metrics that assess the product prevalence, such as the number of sessions per user  

The outcomes of such analysis will show the management crew how well the product performs and if any tweaks are necessary - adjusting the sales tactic, adding new features, or updating the ad campaign.

Master the Art of Product Management

About a fifth of the products fail to satisfy customer needs, underscoring the importance of a well-performing product manager.

While there are several reasons for this, one of the most notable is that loads of products aren’t adequately developed for the market. Ignoring one element of product development and increasing focus on the other generally triggers financial damages. With proper product management, businesses can bypass such repercussions and boost chances of the product taking the market by storm. 

A survey says that 87% of the product knowledge gained by the product managers is on-the-job experience. This marks a skill gap that adequately lacks formal training. As many learning platforms today offer professional courses to become data-driven product managers, it can be a master skill in prospecting the future.

In this need of the hour, premiere business institutes, IIM Lucknow (IIML) and WileyNXT have come up with an Executive Education Program to meet the needs. This course offered by IIM Lucknow covers the three most important training needs which are Product Understanding, Marketing, and Strategy Development across the Product Lifecycle. 

The course is entirely experiential and outcome-based learning, integrating Data Analytics and Design Thinking concepts and their applications in scaling customers in a market-centric business.  It is co-developed by top faculty at IIML and Wiley Industry leaders, along with 50+ businesses from emerging tech and product leaders of the Wiley Innovation Advisory Council.  Miles Education is the official channel partner.