Managing Product Life Cycle as a Product Manager — Part 2- Define
After doing Product discovery in depth , PMs discover the key problems to go after .While in discussion with the engineering or design team, PMs are in a soup because there are plenty of disagreements with the team because the Designers/Engineers have envisioned the perfect solution , however it is taking more 7 months of efforts & preparing a stripped down version is not going to achieve the desired results. In this case, where the PMs faltered?
The PM lacked the clarity in the Define stage resulting in evident disagreements. Thus, the define stage plays a key role in zeroing down the problem scope to a specific , practical & manageable chunk so that it is consumable for the team.
Define
The key role of the PM in this stage involves in shaping the outcomes which they are aiming for & simultaneous outlining the big picture which the complete team understands well & work towards it in a phase-wise approach.
There are 7 key tasks which are part of the Define stage , namely :-
- Narrowing down on the Target customer
- Mapping the customer journey
- Creating a long term product vision
- 30,000 foot view of product roadmap
- Prioritizing the customer pain points spotted in Discovery stage
- Identifying the success metrics
- Planning the timeline
Define phase kickstart the PLC journey in terms of approval from the leadership team & assignment of the team members.
Stay tuned ! In the next post , I will talk about the next stage— Design.
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