Kellogg PM: Week9 Product planning and strategy
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Last week, I learned the Agile product development framework. It’s one of the most complicated unit I have learned so far. This principle focuses on fast feedback loop, flexibility to move ahead with uncertainty in mind, and frameworks to successfully govern the whole company. It plays a vital role in the tech startup and technology company due to a great use case in lean principle.
In almost every week except the first, we simply focus on details of product management. This week, we step back and look at a higher level of product management- Portfolio of products. Product planning and strategy role combines with CPO or senior leadership team but it’s still good to learn. Planning a product happens when we have a clear understanding of features or requirements that we need to do.
In product planning we have four product line decisions: next version planning, product line extension, product sunsetting, and product line pruning. I think the last decision is the hardest one because no one wants to make a kill decision. People would like to leave what happens as it is, this relates to default selection bias that humans have in nature. If that particular product can make money then it’s tougher to kill it but as you might know as well. In any company, we have a bunch of opportunities that we could touch. Peter Drucker once wrote in his book, we need to have a systematic guide or framework to review and kill what is no longer relevant to the business. This would improve the whole company not just a particular product, abandoning unassociated product will eventually save company times and resources.
Key learning
- Product decisions consist of 4 main decision
- Next version planning
- Product line extension
- Product sunsetting
- Product line pruning
Miro
According to Miro site, “Miro is an online collaborative whiteboard platform”. It fosters collaboration through interactive whiteboards with thousands of templates to use. In my case, I use Miro to build product roadmapping. I think it’s a beautiful and powerful interactive tool. I can use this template to visualize my ideas real quick. Below is my product roadmapping, please note that it uses a freemium model. I would not be able to export any images in the high quality format because I do not have a premium account.
