Product Lifecycle Management and People Operations

 

Product Lifecycle Management includes Product discovery, Strategy and roadmap development, Roadmaps execution, Performance assessment and People operations.

A) PRODUCT DISCOVERY (20% of total time):

1. Define the present stage, desired future stage, environmental scope and constraints.

    1.1. define industrial ecosystem with direct and indirect audience

    1.2. develop understanding about their experiences and behaviors (what and why they do?)

        1.2.1. define the audience's struggles, executional and operational roadblocks (how they are doing?)

        1.2.1. discover gaps and friction in overall user experience and efficacy of processes (howmuch?)

    1.3. define the problem focus area and required industrial, business and user constraints

    1.4. envision and define the outlines of desired future stage

2. Gather insights to define the problem statement and deliver proven hypothesis, which is as follows:

    2.0. conduct market research, subject specialist interviews, perform data and competitive analysis, to gather insights.

    2.1. translate this insight into hypothesis using the following methods

2.1.1. first principle thinking 

2.1.2. design thinking approach

2.1.3. issues tree/map approach

    2.2. prioritise all these hypothesis by using

2.2.1. weighted metrics (calculate the criticality, easy to ship)

2.2.2. ordering as business impact (RoI,MR), Ux, tech

2.2.3. solution guiding principles

    2.3. evaluate hypothesis with

2.3.1. user feedbacks, app store ratings, reviews

2.3.2. customer support issue logs and subject specialist feedback

2.3.3. user interviews and dummy functional prototype walkthrough

2.3.4. rapid mvp(prototypes) experiments

    2.4. use proven hypothesis to frame the problem statement with user journey or workflow

        2.4.1. define product and business KPI & KRIs

        2.4.2. define solution guidlines 

3. Brainstroming (with wireframing) to discover solution idea for problem. 

- along with user experience designers, engineers, data scientists, and subject specialist

4. Evaluate these ideas in terms of 

    4.1. desirability : user and stakeholder experience study

    4.2. viability : swot, opportunity cost, market window analysis such as, Is it the right time to dev/launch? When will it become out of trends? What factors will cause that?

    4.3. feasibility : available technology & resources, ability to built & scale.

5. Choose the best suited solution idea with weighted metrics. And calculate its cost, time to market, estimated RoI, resource such as tech, manpower, time, budget requirements with operational process.

6. Define product vision, principles and success metrics (choosen business/product KPIs).

B) PRODUCT STRATEGY AND ROADMAP DEVELOPMENT (40% of total time):

7. Product strategies: Prioritize required initiatives with timeline and OKR on a roadmap by composing all possible use cases, user personality journeys and business models that articulates the product vision.

    7.1. Market Positioning Strategy: [output- sales, marketing, customer & business dev roadmaps]

        7.1.1. Who are our direct, indirect, early and later stage customers? How can we reach, onboard and retain these user group efficiently?

    (reference desirability and viability study, performing market and competitors analysis).

        7.1.2. Segment them Evaluate and prioritize them on the scale of business criticality and urgency.

        7.1.3. Define business operation models. Create processes and frameworks to execute, support and track the success of those activities and initiatives.

        7.1.4. Align chosen initiatives on a time and KPIs bounded milestones roadmap which is also known as Market positioning roadmap.

        7.1.5. Assisting the finance team to generate financial forecasts for all product lines.

    7.2. DevOps Strategy: [output- devOps release roadmaps] Understand the technical landscape.

        7.2.1. Create all use cases that correspond to Product vision and principles.

        7.2.2. Segment them into standalone modules and functionalities.

        7.2.3. Conduct customer interviews, market research, user feedback and data analysis to drive more insights.

        7.2.4. Translate those insights into hypotheses, prioritize and evaluate them.

        7.2.5. Align selected(critical) hypothesis on a product delivery roadmap.

        7.2.6. Work with engineers and UX designers to articulate over all solution design and translate it into product development (or devOps) roadmap.

  7.3. Commercialization Strategy: [output- business & pricing model, IP & regulation roamap]  Translation to legal tender by articulating finance and regulation strategies.

       7.3.1. Financial Initiatives:

           7.3.1.1. Identify direct indirect revenue streams with its viability and volume.

           7.3.1.2. Articulate the pricing schemes for product offerings (fixed subscription, pay as you go, transaction volume centric).

           7.3.1.3. Discover the price offerings that inspire customers to upgrade plans, repeat purchases and promote products.

           7.3.1.4. Assist finance team to create financial projections and estimations.

        7.3.2. IP and Industrial Regulation Initiatives:

           7.3.2.1. Identify associated industrial regulations and legal compliances.

           7.3.2.2. Intellectual property asset development and management process.

    7.4. People Operation Strategy: [output- team estimation, customer service roadmap]

        7.4.1. User Support services: Feedback collection, Issue resolution and damage compensation policy.

        7.4.2. Articulate the team structure, role and responsibilities. Identify the required skillsets and number of peoples.

[above 4 are essential to reach product market fit. And following is the next step for growth]

    7.5. Growth and Innovation strategy: [output- growth and innovation roadmap]

        7.5.1. Marketing and business development initiatives and content

        7.5.2. Idea and Innovation initiatives.

8. Define the north-star metrics for each strategy and associated KPIs as tree. Now define OKRs for individual teams and assign the works (i.e. roadmaps) to respective teams.

C) PRODUCT ROADMAP EXECUTION (20% 0f TT): 

9. Execute product roadmaps with product managers while tracking and reporting progress to all stakeholders.

9.1. DevOps roadmap execution: Articulate functionality by defining use cases, solution and platform architecture, customer interviews, data analysis, design and first principle thinking, brainstorming with product teams etc.

    9.1.1. Research, analysis and brainstorming to drive features

    9.1.2. Define MVP experiments - scope, timeline, kpi

    9.1.3. Features prioritisation on development release roadmap

    9.1.4. Assign teams OKR

    9.1.5. Sprint execution: User story, CI/CD, Quality assurance, Production release, Retrospective analysis.

9.2. Market launch roadmap execution: Translate Market positioning strategy into a set of activities, process, success metrics, and risk mitigation plans. Prioritize them as multiple milestones and timeline.

    9.2.1. Sales pipelines : lead generation and tracking programs, sales pitch creation etc. 

    9.2.2. Marketing pipelines : SEO, SMM, Offline/BTL, Content marketing initiatives etc.

    9.2.3. Business development initiatives : building distributors network, connecting marketplaces etc.

    9.2.4. Strategic alliances initiatives : identifying, negotiating and forging strategic alliances for smooth market entry and expansion programs.

    9.2.5. Content generation initiatives : Functional and promotional content for launch activities.

    9.2.6. Promoting product in industrial events, public demonstrations, community and live podcast.

9.3. Customer service roadmap execution

    9.3.1. Feedback collection initiatives

    9.3.2. Customer support programs such as resolving user queries ontime.

9.4. Regulation roamap

9.5. IP roadmap

D) PRODUCT PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT (10% of TT):

10. Evaluate goal achievements by tracking product and business metrics and KPIs. Keep sharing this periodic insights with C-level executives, users and all stakeholders.

    10.1. Tracking and grooming metrics: business and product KPIs and KRIs

    10.2. Evalute team performance by OKR achievements

    10.3. Make Pivot Vs Iterate Vs Scale decision?

    10.4. Identify and rectify gaps, roadblocks, and monetize new opportunities to ensure Product market fit and Solution problem fit.

    10.5. Analyzing end to end product life cycles to acquire learnings of best practices.

E) PEOPLE OPERATIONS (10% of TT):

11. People Operations: Articulate the process across cross-functional department such as business, product, engineering, compliance, customer support for effective collaboration practices and traking of important milestones and activities. Evangelize the product and nurtures the knowledge sharing culture within organisation.

    11.1. Stakeholder experience and relations

        11.1.1. Team building, coaching, mentoring and trainings (as per people operation strategy)

        11.1.2. Cross-functional collaboration process alignment and Relationship management

        11.1.3. Product training process development and workshop organizing

    11.2. User experience and relations

        11.2.1. Experience design (part of devOps process)

        11.2.2. Support services (part of people operation strategy and customer support roadmap)

        11.2.3. Relationship channels development (part of market positioning)

    11.3. Communications - internal, external, cross-functional and public.

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During PLC, I also take care of following additional activities :-

• User, Stakeholder and Customer interaction.
• Coaching and mentoring product managers.
• Idea collection, prioritization and evaluation initiative.
• Acquiring learnings through research and experimentation.
• Supporting customer success teams in resolving user queries.
• Promoting product in industrial events and public gathering.
• Assisting the finance team to generate financial forecasts for all product lines.

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I use a systematic, iterative and efficient approach to solve complex problems, by:-

• performing heavy research and analysis on market trends, competition, data, business process, user and stakeholder needs.
• understanding the problem by breaking it into individual issues, generating, prioritizing and evaluating hypothesis (against user reviews, surveys, dummy functional demo or walkthroug, mvp experiemnts, inshights share by the subject experts, and direct customer interviews).
• defining solution guiding principles, success metrics, abstract solution idea for proven hypothesis.
• for chosen hypothesis, conducting a number of brainstorming sessions with subject experts, user experience designers, engineers, data scientist or business teams in order to come up with potential solutions.
• defining RoI, priortisation principles, possile risk and mitigation plans for discovered solutions.