Category: General

As a product manager, one of your key responsibilities is to ensure that your product is validated before it is launched. This helps to ensure that a product is developed that meets the needs of the target market. It also helps to reduce the risk of launching a product that fails to meet customer needs or expectations. Without validation, a product is simply a collection of ideas that may or may not be successful. By validating it, you can be confident that you are developing a product that will be in-demand and that consumers will be willing to purchase.

How Important It Is to Understand the Market Trends

Understanding current market trends is one method of evaluating your idea before launching a product. Market trends will tell you whether your concept is worth pursuing and you can form hypotheses about what will or will not work. Then you may build prototypes to test your ideas and analyze:

• Whether your target market’s consumers demand your product and how much market you will be able to capture. If a large percentage of people are interested in your product, your idea is exceptional and can be continued.
• Whether your product solves the challenges that consumers have with similar products? If yes, you are on the right track.

How to Validate Your Ideas and Turn Them into Products

Validation is an ongoing process. Even after a product has been launched, you should continue to conduct customer research and surveys to ensure that the product is meeting customer needs.

If you are looking to launch a new product, or if you want to ensure that your existing product is validated, there are a few things that you can do:

Customer Development

Customer development is all about talking to your target market and understanding their needs. This can be done through interviews, surveys, or even just casual conversations. It’s important to get to know your target market so that you can build a product that they will actually want to use.

Surveys

Surveys are another great way to validate your product idea. They allow you to reach a large number of people quickly and easily. You can use online tools like SurveyMonkey or Google Forms to create and distribute your survey. Just make sure that you create a survey that is clear and concise so that you can get the most accurate results possible.

A/B Testing

A/B testing is a great way to test different versions of your product before launch. This allows you to see which version of your product is more effective in meeting customer needs. A/B testing can be done through online tools like Google Optimize or Optimizely.

Beta Testing

Several big firms have started beta programs to test new product features. They prefer to listen to their customers’ feedback on their products. You might also opt for one to know your customer’s feedback, as it is one of the most acceptable ways to validate your product. Obviously, a successful firm is one that cherishes its customers.

Focus Groups

Focus groups are a more traditional method of validation, but they can still be very effective. Focus groups allow you to get feedback from a smaller group of people in an intimate setting. This can be useful in getting detailed feedback about your product idea.

All these validation methods are important in ensuring that you are building the right product for your customers. By taking the time to validate your product idea, you increase the chances of success for both you and your company. So what are you waiting for? Get out there and start validating!

How did I validate a product at a Healthcare startup?

Since validating a product is crucial before taking it to market, we took a rigorous, step-by-step approach to validating everything at our healthcare startup. This is the process we followed:

Define the Problem Statement

The first step in validation is to clearly define the problem you’re trying to solve with your product. This involves understanding the needs of your target customer and how your product will address those needs.

In our case, we identified a need for a healthcare product that would make it easier for patients to manage their medication schedules. This was a problem that we knew many of our target customers were facing, and we felt that we could develop a solution that would address their needs.

Research the Competition

Once you’ve defined the problem statement, it’s time to start researching the competition. This will give you a better understanding of what solutions are already out there and how your product can be differentiated.

We looked at both direct and indirect competitors when researching this particular product. We found that there were already several solutions on the market but none of them offered the specific features and functionality that our target customers were looking for. This gave us confidence that there was still room in the market for our product.

Develop Hypotheses

The next step is to develop hypotheses about your product. These hypotheses should be based on your customer research and should aim to answer questions like “will this product be successful?” and “will customers use this product?”.

For our product, one of our key hypotheses was that patients would be more likely to stick to their medication schedules if they had a tool that made it easy for them to see when they needed to take their next dose. To test this hypothesis, we developed a prototype of the web application and recruited test users from our target market.

After getting the feedback from users on the medication schedule web app, I analyzed the results to see what improvements could be made. Based on the feedback, I decided to make changes to the design, functionality, and content. The goal was to make sure that the app was as easy and user-friendly as possible. Patients who started using our web app found that it helped them stay on track with their medication schedules. The app made it easy for patients to see when they needed to take their next dose, and also provided reminders if they forgot. Overall, the app helped patients to better manage their medication schedules and improve their health outcomes.

Without these validation steps, there is no way we would have been able to confidently say that our problem statement would have had any impact on our target market.

Why Is Validation Important?

There are a few key reasons why validation is so important for Product Managers:

Save Time and Money

If you wait until your product is fully developed before beginning validation, you risk wasting a lot of time and money on features that may not be used or valued by your users. By validating early and often, you can avoid this pitfall that has ultimately killed many companies.

Gain a Better Understanding of Your Users

Through validation, you’ll gain a better understanding of who your users are and what they need from your product. This knowledge is invaluable in helping you make informed decisions about the direction of your product. 

Build Confidence

Validating your product hypotheses gives you the confidence to move forward with development knowing that you are building something that will be impactful for your users.

Course Correct Quickly

If during validation you discover that one of your assumptions is not correct, it’s no big deal! The sooner you catch it, the easier it will be to course correct. If you wait until after development to validate, any issues that arise will be much more costly and time-consuming to fix.

As a Product Manager, it is essential that you validate your product hypotheses early and often. Validation will save you time and money in the long run, help you gain a better understanding of your users, build confidence in your product, and allow you to course correct quickly if necessary. So what are you waiting for? Start validating today!

Validation Analysis and Implementation

Finally, conduct post-launch customer research: Even after a product has been launched, it is important to continue to conduct customer research. This can help you to understand how the product is being used and whether or not it is meeting customer needs. Validation is an important part of the product development process. It helps to reduce the risk of launching a product that fails

Productize is here to help you validate your ideas so you can make confident decisions for your business. By collecting product insights, competitive analysis, and closing the feedback loop, you can save time and money and avoid building something that nobody wants.

With Productize, you’ll be able to validate your ideas quickly and easily, so you can get back to what’s important – running your business.

As a product leader, you are tasked with ensuring that your team is always progressing and achieving objectives. But how can you tell if your team is on track? The answer lies in metrics. By tracking the right product management metrics, you can get valuable insights into how your team is performing and where improvements need to be made. Not only can this help you keep track of the health of your business, but also create a feedback loop for your team to work more effectively towards specific and achievable goals. So, what are the top 5 product management metrics that every product leader should be tracking? 

1. Conversion Rate 

Conversion rate is a metric that measures the percentage of visitors to your website or app who take the desired action. This could be signing up for a free trial, making a purchase, or subscribing to a newsletter. Tracking your conversion rate will give you a good indication of how effective your marketing and sales efforts are. If you see a sudden drop in conversion rate, it could be an indicator that something is wrong with your product or that your marketing message is not resonating with potential customers. 

2. Customer Churn Rate 

The churn rate is the percentage of customers who stop using your product or service over a certain period of time. A high churn rate can indicate that there are problems with your product or that your Return on Investment (ROI) is not high enough. If you see a sudden increase in churn rate, it’s important to take action quickly to find out why customers are leaving and make the necessary changes to keep them engaged. 

3. Customer Lifetime Value 

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the total amount of money that a customer will spend on your product or service over their lifetime. CLV is an important metric to track because it gives you an indication of how much revenue you can expect to generate from each customer. If you see a decrease in CLV, it could be an indication that your product is no longer meeting customer needs or that there are problems with your pricing model. 

4. Net Promoter Score 

Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures customer satisfaction with your product on a scale of 0-10. It’s calculated by asking customers how likely they are to recommend your product to a friend or colleague on a scale of 0-10, then subtracting the percentage of customers who answered 0-6 (detractors) from the percentage of customers who answered 9-10 (promoters). NPS is important because it’s a good indicator of customer loyalty and can help you predict future business growth. One challenge you may encounter is collecting enough responses to make the data significant enough to analyze.

5. Average Revenue per User 

Average Revenue per User (ARPU) measures the average amount of revenue generated by each user over a certain period of time. This metric is important because it helps you assess the profitability of your user base and whether or not your pricing model is sustainable in the long run. If you see a decrease in ARPU, it’s important to take action to find out why users are spending less and make changes accordingly. 

There are several ways to obtain information about your app’s ARPU. You can ask your users directly, look at publicly available data, or use a combination of both approaches.

Asking your users directly is often the best way to obtain accurate and specific information about their spending habits. You can do this through surveys, interviews, or focus groups. This approach gives you the ability to obtain detailed information about why users spend money on your app and how much they are willing to spend.

Additional Metrics to consider 

1. User engagement: How often are users using your product? Are they using it regularly, or are they dropping it off after a few uses? Pay attention to engagement metrics to ensure that users are finding your product valuable and are using it regularly.

2. Retention: Once users start using your product, how long do they stick around? Are they using it for a few days or weeks, or are they continuing to use it month after month? retention rates can give you insights into whether users are finding long-term value in your product.

3. Revenue: This one is pretty self-explanatory – but obviously, as a product manager, you need to keep an eye on your product’s revenue. Make sure that your product is generating enough revenue to sustain itself and grow over time.

4. Customer satisfaction: Are your users happy with your product? Keep tabs on customer satisfaction levels to ensure that users are generally satisfied with your product.

5. ROI: Finally, track your product’s return on investment (ROI). This metric will give you insights into whether your product is generating enough revenue to justify its costs.

Keep these ten metrics in mind as you manage your product. By tracking these metrics, you’ll be able to make better decisions about your product and ensure its long-term success.

Conclusion

Product management metrics are essential for assessing team performance and progress, as well as business health. By tracking the right metrics, product leaders can get valuable insights into where improvements need to be made, and be able to report on them effectively to the executive team and/or board of directors. Incorporate these metrics into your tracker today, and drive a more effective product team!

Product management is a critical role in the success of any product. It requires deep understanding of the market, customer needs, and competitive landscape. Product managers are expected to develop products that meet those needs while also driving revenue growth within the company.

While the rewards can be great when successful, there is a hidden cost associated with product management: long hours and testing the unknown. Product managers often manage teams that are spread across multiple locations, which requires a lot of coordination and communication. They also have to design, develop, and launch products in an ever-evolving marketplace, making sure their product is agile enough to keep up with customer demands.

The hidden cost of product management can manifest in various ways. Product managers may find themselves working long hours to ensure their product is successful, and it can be difficult to switch off from work at the end of the day. They also have to take risks testing new ideas that may not pay off in the short term, which can make them feel uncertain about outcomes.

Product management is a rewarding job, but it’s important to remember the hidden costs associated with it. While the rewards are great when successful, product managers need to be aware of the amount of time and effort required for success. Understanding these hidden costs can help product managers make better decisions about their products and teams in order to maximize their success.

By acknowledging and understanding the hidden costs of product management, you can be better equipped to manage your own product wisely and successfully.

The other hidden costs of Product Management are…

1. An Opportunity Cost

In addition to salaries, there is also the opportunity cost of resources expended on product development. Every hour that an engineer spends working on a new feature is an hour that he or she cannot spend working on improving an existing feature or fixing a bug. And every dollar spent on designing and building a new product is a dollar that cannot be spent on marketing or sales efforts. Nothing slows down or stalls a company’s growth faster than misallocated resources.

2. Sunk Cost

Sunk Cost is an investment made in products or features that are ultimately discarded or never launched. This can happen for any number of reasons—the market may have changed, the technology may have become obsolete, or the product may simply have been misjudged. Whatever the reason, when sunk costs occur, they represent a loss for the company.

3. Failed Releases

Another hidden cost of product management is failed releases; when a product or feature fails to meet its intended purpose or fails to live up to customer expectations. This can happen for any number of reasons, including poor planning, unrealistic expectations, or changes in market conditions. Whatever the reason, failed releases waste both money and time. While no company can ever be 100% successful with every release, thorough planning and testing of each new product or feature prior to it’s release can help mitigate the majority of that risk.

4. The Cost of Trying To Please Everyone

Another cost of product management is trying to please everyone. Because the role is so multifaceted, you often have stakeholders with competing demands pulling you in different directions. Trying to make everyone happy is an impossible task, and it’s important to set expectations early on about what you can and cannot do. Otherwise, you’ll constantly be fighting an uphill battle—and probably not making anyone happy in the process.

5. The Cost of Never-Ending Changes

Another hidden cost of product management is dealing with constant change. The landscape is always shifting, whether it’s due to new technology, changing customer needs, or competitive pressures. This means that your product roadmap is never set in stone—and that can be frustrating when you’ve put all your energy into planning for something that ends up getting delayed or scrapped entirely.

6. The Cost of Bad Data

One thing that tends to get overlooked is bad data. This can come from a variety of sources, but it often comes from relying too heavily on analytics tools. While analytics tools are essential for product managers, they can’t always be relied on to give accurate data of what’s to come. This is because they often only show what has happened in the past, not what is going to happen in the future, leading  to decision-making based on outdated data, which has the potential to be extremely costly

7. The Cost of Poor Communication

Another hidden cost of organizations of all sizes is poor communication. This can occur when there is a lack of communication between the product manager and the rest of the team leading to confusion about the vision for the product and how it relates to broader company goals. This can even lead to internal conflict, causing delays in the development process as disagreements get discussed and resolved.

8. The Cost of Unrealistic Expectations

This often happens when the product manager sets unrealistic goals for the team or for the product itself. It can also happen when stakeholders have unrealistic expectations about what the product will be able to do. Is your product really going to change the world, or can you hone in your expectations to be able to target your ideal customers? Setting realistic expectations is essential for avoiding frustration and disappointment later down the line.

Conclusion

Product management is essential for any company that wants to succeed in today’s competitive marketplace. However, it is also important to keep in mind the hidden costs associated with this critical function. From salaries to opportunity costs to sunken investments, these costs can add up quickly and impact a company’s bottom line. By understanding these hidden costs and taking steps to minimize them, companies can ensure that their product management efforts are as efficient and effective as possible.

Captain on the field

With any team, especially football (American), you train, practice, prepare both physically and mentally, all so you can execute at the highest level every week during the game. But, no matter how much game film you watch, or how often you run through the playbook during pregame, there still needs to be someone on the field calling the plays and making the tough decisions when the game is on the line. For football teams, this is unequivocally the Quarterback. Calling an audible (this is when they change the play last minute) when the initial play is not the optimal one. Trusting their teammates to do their jobs. All in the spirit of competing and winning at the pinnacle of their sport. There is a reason that almost every quarterback in the NFL wears that C for “Captain” on their chest.

Product managers serve the same role in any successful product and engineering team. The Captain in the conference room (or Zoom room), they have to be more prepared with data and customer understanding than anyone else. They are the ones the rest of the team relies on to drive everything in the direction that will correlate to the most success. If the executive team are the coaches, helping to mentor and prepare the team and drive the overall company direction, the product managers are the Quarterbacks, ready to call an audible at the line and make the toughest decisions: what will bring the most value to their customers?

Leading the team

Not only are PMs the ones who have to be armed with the most information, but they also have to dictate in which areas the development team focuses. Think of your backend devs as the offensive line, laying the foundation and setting the tone for how the offense/codebase is built at scale. Then come your fullstack and frontend devs, your skill players who score big points and give your app the look and feel that brings customers in the door and keeps them there. They are all extremely skilled at their jobs, and contribute to the success of the team, but at the end of the day, it is the PM who calls the plays and runs the offense through the engineering leaders and their teams.

With product usage metrics, call recordings and transcriptions, competitive analysis, and customer conversations, product teams have more data at their fingertips than ever before. With the ever-growing access to differing forms of game film, the analysis to best prepare what will bring value to customers becomes more and more difficult. 

Productize brings data science to the forefront, showing the most valuable plays to run at any given time. By automating the pregame preparation and analysis that helps lead to the highest chance of success, it allows the Product Managers to focus on leading, on being the Captain, and guiding the team down the field when the game is on the line. Isn’t it about time we put a C on their chests too? 

The Data Problem

As data has become the foundation of how our world is shaped, particularly when it comes to business, data science has become the key to unlocking the meaning behind it all. From cloud computing to speech transcription, to dynamic pricing, all the keys to success now stem from data science, AI, and ML. So the question remains, why should Product Management be left out in the cold?

When prioritizing a roadmap, product management teams may have the most difficult job in business. They have to compile, understand, and optimize for what will create the most value for customers and prospects, all while balancing the time and effort it will take to develop these features and functionality. While there are different methodologies for this that many teams use today (RICE, OKR, etc.), the problem remains that there is simply too much data for any amount of people to adequately analyze on their own.

Data as Intelligence

In today’s Product-Led-Growth vs. Enterprise-Sales-Motion world, there are many solutions that unlock data for PMs & POs. From NPS and customer reviews to competitive analysis, to product usage metrics, to feedback and feature requests from Sales and Support, these point solutions give access to everything that is fundamental to doing their jobs. The problem still remains that all of these still have to be digested and analyzed manually, one at a time. What do you do if your CEO is telling you what they think needs to be in the product, but the data suggests that the majority of your users will not benefit? 

Productize is solving this by bringing Intelligence to the product management world. Unlocking the science behind all of this data is the key to making sure that teams are always shipping what is most valuable to their customers. With data science at its core, you can validate if what your sales team is asking for matches with what your usage data is also indicating. You can immediately understand how your ICP feels about your competitors vs. your own platform. You can have a backup for when you have to say “no” to your Sales team or CEO. No longer does product analysis have to be left in the data abyss. Product Intelligence changes how we can think about prioritization, and what it truly means to create value for customers.