25.4 Product Vision 🤙
This section includes a reminder to have a mentor call 🤙
By this point, you've done a lot of research. Now you are ready to identify and start drafting the enhancements you'll propose for your product. Bring everything you learned into this process to ensure that your vision is aligned with the business goals and user needs. The deep level of understanding you developed—of the competition and overall market, of your users, of how the company makes money, and of how it measures its success—all play a part in coming up with solid product ideas that demonstrate your business acumen and product thinking.
From brainstorm to idea
First, brainstorm at least five changes or enhancements you'd recommend making to your product. The design thinking methods you learned about several months ago could be useful here. These ideas can be new features, significant changes to existing features, or even new product lines.
Next, map your five enhancement ideas and consider how they would impact user flows and business metrics. How would you measure their success? What would the MVP be? What data or anecdote supports your focus on this user problem?
Then, settle on what you think is the best solution based on your comprehensive knowledge of your product, the market, and your users. Create storyboards or a journey map to better communicate your vision to the stakeholders you'll be presenting to.
Finally, create wireframes or mockups to communicate the new user flow you're proposing. User test these with at least two users.
When showing users your ideas, remember that the user is never wrong. You just need to figure out how to ask the right questions and apply the feedback to make the product and enhancement more intuitive. Revise your designs based on the feedback from users.
Building your product
Next, you will work through your responsibilities as a PM, leading up to implementation and testing by your engineering and QA teams. In real life, this is the stage at which you'd be establishing a roadmap. For the purposes of this capstone, you won't be required to present a roadmap. Instead, you will be focusing on prioritizing recommendations. Why?
This capstone is designed to provide you with a strong project to reference in your portfolio or when you're interviewing with potential employers. Since you don't have the inside data and full context of the company you have chosen, coming up with a realistic roadmap will be hard. There are many things you might not know about from the outside, from time-consuming bug fixes to significant infrastructure work and database issues. Showing your roadmap for a product you don't know enough about to a potential employer could backfire and make you appear presumptuous. So, while roadmaps and backlogs will be a huge part of your job as a PM, they won't be required in this final project. If, however, you are working on your own startup idea, or on a company product where you have access to internal information (like a current employer), you would want to create a realistic roadmap and show the timeline for the work that you propose.
Technical specifications
Think about the technology and requirements of your product, and how you will explain these requirements to your engineers. This includes all of the following factors:
- How to translate the enhancement concept into epics and user stories.
- How would you validate your ideas before you ship them? Are the proposed enhancements large enough that you should consider an MVP for initial development? What would that scope include? Are there factors that could create a "ship, iterate, or kill" situation?
- Identify technical considerations. Can you figure out what stack your intended company is using? Are there any APIs involved? Will there be database enhancements needed? It's okay if you don't know all of the answers, but thinking about these issues shows your understanding of the technology side of things.
- Consider alternative ways to implement your vision. Is the best approach to buy, build, or partner with another company or service? If any of these options (such as buying "off-the-shelf" software instead of building your own) was considered and rejected, you should communicate to your stakeholders why this option was ruled out.
- Think through the features and if users' actions are generating data that would be valuable for your analytics. What metrics do you need your product to capture?
Set goals and align the teams
Next, you'll establish measurable KPIs and goals for the benefits you're targeting with your product enhancements. How will these changes affect the funnel? Revenue? Customer acquisition? Average order value? Take this opportunity to demonstrate your awareness of business metrics and how these product enhancements will improve them.
Identify the internal stakeholders from different functional areas that will be key to the successful implementation and rollout of your product changes. Consider the following questions:
- What issues are likely to need coordination? How will you address those?
- Are there any security, privacy, or competitive risks? What can you do to address them?
Draft a release plan
You have one more chance to practice your PM skills before this capstone wraps up. Look at the product changes you're proposing and consider the communications that will be necessary for release planning. Ask yourself the following questions:
- What would be the key points to include in a press release?
- Who are your target audience or audiences?
- Are there features that will be significantly changed or eliminated?
- Would any end-user training be needed? How would you communicate with your users about these changes (for example, would you use in-app pop-up notifications, documentation in user forums, email, etc.)?
- Are there updates to the overall product marketing that should be considered?
- Would specialized training on the new features be necessary for the customer support teams? Account management? Sales staff? What would any of these new trainings need to include?
If you've followed all these steps, you now have a well-designed, market-appropriate product vision based on user research, and a good idea of how to implement it and make it a reality. All that's left is to convince your stakeholders that it's worth investing in with a succinct, engaging, and impressive presentation!
Assignment
You should have the following parts ready for your capstone:
- The original brainstorm of at least five ideas you considered
- Which idea or ideas you chose to build and why
- Notes or summaries from user testing your mockups with at least two users
- The epics or user stories that will accomplish your product enhancement
- KPIs for success and how you'll track them
You are now ready to put all of this together and submit your final project in the next checkpoint!
Mentor Call 8 🤙
Time for your final mentor call. Although you could get mentored from any free platform online, we recommend ADPList as it's free and boasts a huge community of product experts. You might have to signup to it's platform (which is again free) and schedule a mentor call from the ADPList platform itself.
Schedule a mentor call with an ADPList product mentor. ADPList provides free mentorships for everyone and is an amazing platform to learn and meet experts. Please ensure you take mentor calls with importance. Mentors play a crucial role in your career. Do not ask mentors to review assignments. They are only meant to guide you and give you tips on your growth. These are optional calls as well.
Let the mentors know beforehand what the call is about. Share you questions and let them know you are a bootcamp student. Again refrain from asking assignment related questions. They aren't meant to review your assignments.
Below are the list of mentors that we have collaborated with at PMcademy.
Looking for more mentors ?
You can choose to get mentored from any other mentor as well. Visit this link to find more product mentors from ADPList. However note that not everyone is aware of PMcademy, it that case let them know beforehand about PMcademy.com and about your meeting agenda.