Skip to main content

Product Management Deliverables

The reports that we put together at Cauvin, Inc. serve as an example of the deliverables a product manager produces. As I've mentioned in previous posts, we use an iterative approach to producing our documents. In fact, we begin delivering reports to clients the first week. The reports consist mostly of templates. Feedback the client gives us on these templates enables us to modify the documents to suit the client's needs. We incrementally flesh out these documents until the project ends.

Here is the set of documents we typically deliver to a client:

buyer profiles - profiles the different kinds of buyers in the market
market segments and sizing - divides the market into segments and estimates the size of each segment
market requirements - details the problems in the market and requirements the product must satisfy
positioning and messaging - messages and themes to use in advertising and PR
naming - what to name the product and/or company
pricing - how much to charge for the product
competitors - analysis of the product's competition
prospect interview notes - notes from one-on-one interviews with prospective customers of the product
survey report - results of survey(s) of prospective customers
key findings - significant observations and conclusions from market study (interviews and surveys)

Armed with this information, clients are able to plan and strategize their product development and marketing.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why Spreadsheets Suck for Prioritizing

The Goal As a company executive, you want confidence that your product team (which includes all the people, from all departments, responsible for product success) has a sound basis for deciding which items are on the product roadmap. You also want confidence the team is prioritizing the items in a smart way. What Should We Prioritize? The items the team prioritizes could be features, user stories, epics, market problems, themes, or experiments. Melissa Perri  makes an excellent case for a " problem roadmap ", and, in general, I recommend focusing on the latter types of items. However, the topic of what types of items you should prioritize - and in what situations - is interesting and important but beyond the scope of this blog entry. A Sad but Familiar Story If there is significant controversy about priorities, then almost inevitably, a product manager or other member of the team decides to put together The Spreadsheet. I've done it. Some of the mos...

5 Ways Companies Make Product Decisions

In the last blog entry, we reviewed the  four problems that companies face, or are trying to overcome, as they make product decisions .  Now we'll look at the ways that most companies make their product decisions. Companies that develop, market, and sell products and solutions make strategic and ongoing tactical decisions.  They decide what features to include in their products, what messages they will use to communicate the value of their products, what marketing tactics they will use, what prospective customers they will target, and many day-to-day choices. Whether or not these decisions are deliberate or ad hoc, most companies use some combination of the following ways of making product decisions. (A downloadable "map" that summarizes the product decision landscape is included at the end of this article.) Customer Wants Product decisions based on feature requests, focus groups, and what prospects and customers say they want. Companies are selling products to ...

Is Customer Development Pseudoscience?

The “Science” of Lean Startup Lean startup practitioners embrace the scientific method, seeking the "truth" about what business model and strategy will lead to product success. We do so by: Formulating hypotheses Crafting and running experiments to test them Learning from the experiments Iteratively feeding our learnings back into revised hypotheses Sounds pretty scientific, at least in spirit, doesn't it? Yet this process actually neglects a key ingredient in the scientists' mode of operation. To identify what’s missing, let’s examine “customer development”. Customer Development Steve Blank is one of the pioneers of the lean startup movement. He introduced into the lean startup lexicon the term “customer development”. Customer development consists of sessions and interactions with customers to test hypotheses. For example, a product manager might interview a prospect, asking if she agrees with the product manager’s hypotheses about the problem...