How Does Product Manager Conduct Internal Product Reviews
Have y'all ever worried about knowing what to practise side by side for your production? Oft, the qualitative and quantitative data you have on mitt virtually your production can provide merely a fuzzy outline of what is happening and it can exist challenging to know if you're heading in the correct direction.
While product managers have a diversity of techniques to cope with this ambiguity, from the Listen the Product slack aqueduct to thunderdome-similar meetings, one powerful solution is product review. This is a formal review of the production'south progress by senior product managers in guild to appraise the status and suggest avenues to explore. I decided to apply this tool when I was the VP of product management and innovation at Telenor, Norway'due south state-owned telecommunications provider.
Why Product Review?
Telenor has limited resources to spend on developing digital products. Product review is a way to assess how the products were doing, and suit the resources allocated to the products. Resource in this case meant people, such as assigning a new designer, and money, for hiring an advertising bureau.
How did you Identify Product Stages?
Telenor has a gate system to categorize products ranging from ideas (Stars) through to mature products (Space Stations). Each product is assessed by its level of completion of the requirements for each stage of development, and this assessment translates into the categorization of the product. Once the product is assigned to a designated category, it goes through the product review for that phase.
Stars, Bottle Rocket, and Satellite are considered early on-stage products and accept metrics related to learning. Space Shuttle and Space Station are considered mature products and have metrics related to financial earnings.
Running specific product reviews for specific stages of development is an important component of Telenor's product review. There is no point in request a squad that's immersed in testing basic assumptions almost a production how they plan to scale the solution technically – it's an irrelevant question for the team. Previous to Telenor's product review plan, all products had been assessed on the same criteria, which didn't align with the reality of the different stages of development.
Frequency of Product Reviews
In general, product reviews are run monthly for Stars and Bottle Rockets, and quarterly for Satellites, Space Shuttles and Space Station. The product manager and reviewing senior product resources would hold on a engagement for the production review meeting, allowing time for the product manager to gear up. The earliest-stage products have fewer resources and are more likely to produce learnings in a short period of time that will alter their direction, hence the need for a more frequent product reviews.
What Happens During Product Review Meetings?
Product review is an opportunity for product managers to present the bug they encounter to senior production resources. Discussion of these issues may lead to a reallocation of resources – ranging from aid in hiring a design resource to a few hours with the legal squad. The director who controls the budget for the product squad is besides typically present, allowing for directly requests to exist made for changes. The senior product resources are then responsible for securing the assistance requested as part of the product review.
Product metrics are also discussed. For the first two phases of product (Stars and Bottle Rocket at Telenor), metrics evolve as we learn more well-nigh the problem being investigated. For the third stage (Satellite), metrics remain relatively stable over two or 3 product review cycles (every six to nine months), and modify only as significant, new data comes to light (for case, a technical architecture modify needed for progressing to new level of scale.) For the last ii phases (Space Shuttle and Space Station), metrics do not alter (at Telenor the timeframe is xviii months) every bit the problem is already well understood, the proposed solution is far along in development, and the markets they address are well-defined. It is possible that the metrics for Space Shuttle and Space Station could change over a longer period of time.
After our first product review, we realized that the use of templates would make information technology easier for teams to organize the data. While it isn't necessary to attach strictly to the template, the questions posed in the template need to be answered. Nosotros establish nosotros rewrote the templates several times over the course of a year to better contain changes in the product review process as we reviewed more products. For case, we added an "onboarding" template that had a brusque set of questions from each of the stages so that nosotros could meliorate assess where products were in the maturity scale.
What's the Well-nigh Effective Environment for Product Review?
Production reviews are near helpful for organizations with inferior and mid-level production managers who don't have senior product managers as their line managers. Product review is a way to brand the most of scarce senior product director resources, and can piece of work fifty-fifty when the senior product managers are brought in equally consultants (equally was washed with two of the senior production manager resource nosotros used at Telenor). Having said that, I believe that all levels of production managers would benefit from taking the time to distill what they have learned in the preceding months and to talk through their next steps with another product managing director resource. As senior production managers tend to seek out these learnings independently, the benefits may simply be less dramatic than for an system with less seniority in their product management department.
In addition, the organization should support the idea of dynamically allocating resource to support further product development. Rigid budget structures for product development spend can cause problems when a pace-change in resources is needed to take advantage of the results of the product development process. Buy-in to the idea of changing management as new information is gathered is disquisitional for line managers who control the budgets for production development.
Lastly, equally with all systems, product review likewise requires senior management support. Support is needed in areas such equally budgeting, allowing for space for promising products to receive additional funding, or human resource policies, allowing employees to fluidly move between teams to build their careers.
How Would y'all Improve Future Production Review Systems?
Our squad learned a lot virtually the challenges of deploying a product review system across a big organization similar Telenor. Here are a few ideas about what we would go on in mind for side by side fourth dimension:
- Start with a template. We tested both with and without a template, we found that employing a template was a much better way to get across the kinds of topics that could be addressed in product review.
- Gear up up a system for regular feedback. Multiple countries, multiple cultures, multiple products – there was a distinct need for setting upwardly a regular feedback machinery to assess the usefulness of the product review arrangement.
- Contiguous discussions work best for detailed discussions. Video conference calls practice not piece of work equally well as face-to-face for establishing rapport between teams. We had to bear some product reviews on video or audio calls, and these were not considered as helpful by the teams engaged.
About
Lisa Long
Source: https://www.mindtheproduct.com/solving-product-development-challenges-product-review/
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