Important product management frameworks

The idea is simple: start by writing the press release you'd love to issue for the feature or product you're planning to build. While each PMs approach to this exercise might vary a little, key items to consider are the following:

• Heading: the name of the product in a easy-to-understand name
• Summary: what is the product and the benefit?
• Problem: what problem does it solve?
• Solution: how does it solve it?
• Testimonial: what's an ideal customer testimonial?

The document should be concise (1.5 pages max) and use "Oprah speak."

The core idea is that a job is what an individual, say your customer or prospective customer, wants to accomplish in a given circumstance. The circumstances themselves are more important than product attributes, technologies, etc. And good products or features solve problems that had only poor or inadequate solutions before.

For PMs, understanding the "jobs" their customers want to "hire" their product for is a critical guide for knowing what to build, how to build it and how to market it.

Clayton Christensen explaining the jobs to be done framework

Funnels are a technique that allow PMs to quantify user flows through the product.

It's a super helpful technique because it nicely connects the visual design and interaction model of the app to the quantitative realities of how users engage with the product.

In mission critical parts of the product, like signing up for the product or making a purchase within the product, you'll want to have a clear understanding of how users "flow" around that part of the app. 

While the specific metrics a company or product tracks will vary depending on the tactics they use (e.g., Facebook ads versus email marketing, etc), the steps in the user journey that teams will be fairly consistent:

• Acquisition: users enter your site / app / product from various channels
• Activation: users learn about and engage with your product
• Retention: users return to your product
• Referral: users refer other users to your product
• Revenue: users are monetized by your product

The user growth framework can help illuminate the drivers of user growth by decomposing an aggregate number like MAU (or DAU, WAU, etc.) down into segments. For example, MAU = New users + Reactivated users - Churned users.

The model describes a four-step process: a trigger (e.g., a notification about a friend sharing a story), an action (e.g., logging into Instagram), a variable reward (e.g., user sees their friends story and loves it, or not) and an investment (e.g., the user contributes his/her own story to the app, which increases his/her likelihood of returning).

The sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers.

The process proscribes specific activities to each day, starting with mapping the problem on day 1, proposing solutions on day 2, picking a "best" solution on day 3, building a dead-simple prototype on day 4 and testing it with potential customers on day 5.

This framework is focused on illuminating where a product team is in the lifecycle of a project. It has similar elements to the Facebook 3 question approach but is slightly more geared toward helping the team (and external stakeholders) understand where they are in the lifecycle.

• Phase 0: What is the problem we're trying to solve?
• Phase 1: How are we going to solve that problem?
• Phase 2: What does our solution look like?

The value from this model is two fold: 1) clarify the right questions and feedback for a particular project and 2) divorces getting agreement on the problem.

To start, you survey your users and begin with one critical question: "How would you feel if you could no longer use Superhuman?" The options are: 1) very disappointed 2) somewhat disappointed and 3) not disappointed. Studies have found that products who have 40% or over answer "very disappointed" tend to get traction and take-off.

Knowing how many users answer "very disappointed," and importantly, what type of users they are can kickstart a process of user segmentation and feature iteration. Ultimately, the goal is to understand what segment of users really care about your product.