Product initiative + Strategy

😎 Describe the initiative/project or idea.

Provide a brief summary providing an overview of the epic’s goals, objectives, and desired outcomes.

Team rituals.

What artifacts are created from the initiative/project that helps reinforce the project's goals? Celebrate its success? Support continual learning and growth?

How would the project be structured? Are they any key milestones? Are we launching a beta version?

✅ Must-have list

📅 Provide dates.

What will influence decisions and possibilities to be closely considered in planning this initiative? Timeline, relationships, budget, governance, etc.

Add sticky notes inside the "can influence" and "beyond scope" section.

What type of information will help you achieve your objectives and reach your desired outcome?

Add key highlight here and provide a list of links and resources.

Add competitor products and features to the board.

Add competitor products as well as their core features.

Discuss and evaluate each feature:

You will use a 1 to 5 scale to evaluate each feature. Where:

Add any final thoughts on what this means for your competitive advantage and how you might move forward based on areas of low or high ratings ⭐🌟🌟.

Where do you want to be?

Tip: Leaders spend more time leading brainstormings sessions, and testing ideas. (Update your scope/timeline)

Define your goal. What are your goals for the coming year?🔥 Include at least two KPIs. Identify the departments or team members who are responsible and should be held accountable for reaching this goal.

Add your major steps, events, and milestones that must be taken to achieve your goal. How? Use sticky note or tasks If you are using sticky notes use a different color per department or team. (Define each team or Team member and their tasks and responsibilities by adding information inside the 👫Team/people section) Task or event duration can be shown by making sticky notes longer.

Break the leadership team into groups of two or three.

Ask each group to come up with the 3 to 8 key functions processes that will need to be involved during this project or new sprint.

Start by having each member of the executive team fill in the first blank column by adding the initials of the person they think is accountable for each function or business unite.

Tip:

You want to ensure you promote and hire leaders who:

Ensure that everyone knows who is owns each function.

Once the team has agreed on the people accountable for each function, consider following these four questions: Do you have more than one person accountable for function?** The rule is that only one person should be accountable, otherwise there will be confusion. Does someone's name show up in more boxes than someone else's?** Do you have any boxes with no names in them?** This sometimes happens when the whole team think is accountable for operations or human resources. Are you enthusiastic about the person you have in each box?** Discuss the four questions and decide where there are glaring gaps in the leadership team. Tip: The rule of accountability means one person must ultimately take ownership, however the person to whom these people report has the overall accountability.

How is change managed? How is information shared? How is disagreement processed? What type of information will each stakeholder group need?

Quick summary of actions and accountabilities.

Notes: The only notes you need to keep and update from a meeting of an hour or longer.

Before you start: The mood-o-meter: (Take the temperature in the "project") How is everyone feeling after this project?

Each team member member writes down what they think went well. Then, discuss those wins as a team.

Following the same format, each team member shares anything that didn’t go as planned.

What should we 😫 stop doing? What should we do differently?

👆Add one suggestion per sticky note.

Any ideas?Once any down-falls have been identified, the team is invited to brainstorm ideas that can be taken to improve problem areas.

Share moments of gratitude and shoutouts for individual team members.👏🙏

Launching a new product feature or creating a new product requires that a product manager not only prepares user stories and writes a good epic for developers, but also defines a good action plan and strategy for that initiative. This includes having a good communication plan, a way to train users to use the new feature or product, and a launching strategy. Product managers can use this tool as a checklist to think about each phase of the product, from discovery to validation.

Product phases:

Answer the following questions and define an action plan to answer them: What do you know about the market? What are your competitors doing? 😭😫What do you know about your users and their pain points? 👀What job are they trying to do (Job-to-be-done)? How would they describe their pain? How often do they experience it? How likely are they to change the way they currently respond to that pain? Why should they choose your product?🙂

Define the problem you are trying to solve. What should success look like? What is causing the problem? Can you solve the problem or are you creating a painkiller or a distraction? What would be nice-to-have? What are your current assumptions, and how risky are those assumptions?

By the end of this initiative or product launch, what do you want to learn? How are you going to measure success? How should designers measure success?

Explore what should be simplified and focus on solving the problem first. How would the design look? Would it be good enough to validate this experiment? Provide a success criteria.

🔥🔥What do developers need to implement this design? What is non-negotiable? What is the timeline?

Define how this product or feature should be launched. Do you need to send an email to communicate these changes to current users? Should you write a post or a press release? How will you generate excitement about this product or feature? Create a list of key activities to support your launch.

How will you ensure users don't have to contact your support team to use the new product or feature? Do you need to update your Q&A page? Do you need to create how-to videos? How can you ensure people can find the information they need to achieve their goals?

How will you attract new and current users to use this new product or feature? How will you increase your revenue? Think about a promotion or a lead generation campaign.

Finally, go back to the validation phase and validate your learning. What have you learned? Have you validated some of your hypotheses?

What's next? Would you change something to improve the results?

👉👉Add your conclusions inside the conclusion section.