The Guiding Principles

of the Product
Planning Process
Take your product from idea to launch, to market success
Table of Contents
Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Why Do Product Managers Need a Product Planning Process? . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

7 Strategic Phases of the Product Planning Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Building Your Product Roadmap Planning Team . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

How to Actively Involve Stakeholders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

A Product Planning Workbook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

Conclusion: You’re Always in the Strategic Planning Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

THE GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF THE PRODUCT PLANNING PROCESS 2

Introduction
Imagine you’re about to start a product planning process from scratch. As
you stare at a blank whiteboard, a dozen thoughts flash through your mind.

How will I figure out if our customer wants the product idea we developed?
Which stakeholders will I need to involve?
Will we all agree on what goes into the Minimum Viable Product?
Will I be granted the resources and support to build it?

Even under the best circumstances, the journey from product concept
to market launch can feel overwhelming. And if you lack a transparent
planning process, you’ll never operate under the best circumstances. At
any point, you could find yourself frozen, unsure of what to do next, and
that’s the last place you want to be. Product management success defines
whether or not a product professional knows what to do next.

THE GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF THE PRODUCT PLANNING PROCESS 3

The Struggle Is Real

Product managers face these challenges every day. In our Product

Managers’ Survey, 41% rated their happiness with their current planning
processes a 3 out of 5—not miserable, but not thrilled with it, either. Worse,
another 29% described themselves as either unhappy or very unhappy with
their product planning. Think about that: 7 out of 10 product managers
don’t find value in their strategic planning process. Is that an effective way
to develop products? Probably not, and that’s why we wrote this guide

The Solution Is Real, Too

We know that product managers everywhere, even at many of the world’s

leading companies, struggle with strategic planning. This short book will
help demystify the process. We’ll walk you step by step through planning
your product’s journey from concept to launch to maturity, solving problems
for your customers.

THE GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF THE PRODUCT PLANNING PROCESS 4

Why Do Product Managers Need a Product Planning Process?
Think of a team of filmmakers. They start with nothing but an idea. A rogue
group of former astronauts plans the space-based robbery of a gold-mining
operation on an asteroid. Eighteen months later, millions of moviegoers
walk into theaters to see Space Heist.
The same is true for you. As a product manager, you’ll find it difficult enough
to create a successful product even if you follow your strategic plan to the
letter. But imagine how unlikely you are to find market success if you start
developing a product with no plan at all.

Between the one-sentence concept and releasing their two-hour movie, Let’s review a few key reasons product professionals should always build
those filmmakers had to take thousands of small steps to move the project their work around a product planning process.
forward. But one of their first steps, almost certainly, was to formulate a
strategic planning process. Write the script. Secure investment money.
Hire a director. Cast the actors—scout locations. There’s no way they
could’ve gone from idea to the film premiere without a plan outlining
strategic milestones.

THE GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF THE PRODUCT PLANNING PROCESS 5

Product Planning Gets You to Market Faster
(and Less Expensively)
Without proper planning at each stage of the process, your team faces a
greater chance of making misaligned strategic mistakes with your product.
Undoing those mistakes will mean more development work, more resources
spent, and more time that your product isn’t on the market earning revenue
and serving customers.
Product planning leads to more efficient and
successful product development.
Here’s another way to think about this: Product planning leads to more
efficient and successful product development. When you take the right
planning steps upfront, your developers will be able to spend more of
their time working on the right things and helping you bring your product
to market sooner.
Product Planning Improves Your Chances
of Success
What if the filmmakers behind Space Heist were in such a hurry to start
shooting their movie that they skipped a strategic step? What if they
decided it was a waste of time to research the market for space-based
films and instead relied on their intuition that the movie would find a
huge audience?
The team might miss learning that another studio was also working on a
space-robbery movie with a bigger-named cast by skipping the research
phase. Maybe they’d fail to uncover industry surveys and box-office stats
suggesting audiences were losing interest in space movies. Or—perhaps
worst of all—they’d fail to learn that a director they all admired had just quit
another space movie due to a fight with the studio and was looking for a
similar project.
When you build and execute the right product planning process, you
increase the chances that you can take advantage of opportunities that
appear in your product’s path while avoiding the many pitfalls that could
take it down at each stage of your product development.
THE GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF THE PRODUCT PLANNING PROCESS 6
 PRODUCT PL ANNING

Product Planning Enhances Your Credibility

and Leadership

There are no lone-wolf product managers. Product management is a team Gets You to Market Faster
sport. To bring a successful product to market, you will need people’s help, (and Less Expensively)
trust, and hard work in development, sales, marketing, customer success,
senior management, etc.

But to turn these people from across the company into a well-coordinated
team, you’ll need a plan. You’ll need to show them that you’ve thought
through the strategic steps the group will need to take—from brainstorming
Improves Your
ideas, learning important details about your personas, building a product
roadmap, and determining what goes into the Minimum Viable Product.
Chances of Success

The more you can show that you’ve thought through this process and
developed a plan for success, the more willing, even enthusiastic your
product team will be about helping you bring the product to reality.

Enhances Your Credibility

and Leadership

THE GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF THE PRODUCT PLANNING PROCESS 7

7 Strategic Phases of the
Product Planning Process
Okay, we’ve convinced you that it’s not a good idea to start working on
a product without a strategic plan. Now let’s discuss how to employ an
effective product planning process.

Note: By the time you begin the first phase below—brainstorming

product ideas—you should have a strong understanding of your
target user or buyer personas. You and your team will deepen your
knowledge of these personas throughout the product planning and
development process. But before you can begin thinking of product
concepts, you’ll need to know the problems your personas are
facing so you can help solve them. Think of this as Phase 0.

THE GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF THE PRODUCT PLANNING PROCESS 8

Phase 1: Product Concept Development

The product concept phase can and should be fun. One benefit of making
this the initial stage of your product planning is that it’ll be a great first
exercise for the strategic team you’re building. The phase can help you
quickly build chemistry and trust among the team.
During this phase, you and your team will discuss what you know about your
key personas. You’ll answer questions such as:
These discussions should lead to product and feature ideas. And if you’ve
created an atmosphere where people feel comfortable and valued,
those ideas might start flying rapidly as the astronauts in Space Heist.
As a product manager, that’s your responsibility—establishing a trusting,
welcoming environment in your product brainstorming sessions that will
encourage people to unlock and share their creativity.

• What challenges does our persona face completing desired tasks?

Tip: For product concept meetings, create an environment where
• What things frustrate or upset our persona regularly?
everyone feels comfortable and valued. That can unleash creativity

• What other products does our persona use but find lacking and great ideas.

essential capabilities?

• What solutions would our persona (or their company) find valuable
enough to purchase?

THE GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF THE PRODUCT PLANNING PROCESS 9

 Finding the best product concept to pursue

After a lot of brainstorming, with some debates, and almost certainly a
lot of laughter, you’ll have a list of viable product ideas. Your next step is
to narrow that list to the most promising concept. You can do this using a
couple of strategies.
ASK YOUR PERSONAS
You can also use quick market validation methods to learn whether your
product concept has a real user base. Here are a few fast, low-cost ways to
run your ideas by your target market:
• Send out a short survey.
DECIDE AS A TEAM
Have your team rank each idea and work together to come up with a
winner. You can use the weighted-scoring approach, for example. You’ll
create a consistent set of cost and benefit criteria and then score each
idea against these costs and benefits. The product concept with the best
overall score wins.
When you have completed this phase, you could have a product concept
that the evidence suggests has merit. If so, keep going. But if either your
team can’t agree on a clear winner, or your prospective users don’t show
interest in the concept your team chose, you might need to revisit Phase 1.

• Hold a few in-depth interviews with personas in your network,

customers of your existing products, or other relevant people
whose opinions you value. Tip: Use both methods. You want buy-in from your team. But
nothing beats hearing directly from your potential customers.
• Publish inexpensive digital ads for your concept to gauge
industry interest.

THE GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF THE PRODUCT PLANNING PROCESS 10

Phase 2: Competitive Analysis

If you’ve advanced to this step, you and your team have a product concept
and built up enthusiasm around it. That’s great. But before you invest more
time or resources, you need to examine the competitive landscape:

Note: If you discover that many of your target customers have

• Have other companies already released similar solutions?
• Do many of your target customers use a different type of
product to solve their problems?
• Have the majority gotten used to a clunky workaround,
even though they’re not thrilled with it?
found a workaround to the challenge your product would solve, that
doesn’t necessarily mean your concept isn’t viable. It might mean
that your goal will be to educate your market on how using your
product will make their lives easier, save them time, or otherwise
make them better off than if they continue to use their workaround.

But it’s also worth noting that if your analysis reveals that competitors are
already succeeding with a similar solution, that might mean you need to go
back to Phase 1—and start over with another high-scoring product concept
from your list.

THE GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF THE PRODUCT PLANNING PROCESS 11

Phase 3: Market Research

Let’s say that after your competitive analysis, you concluded there is a
big, untapped market for your product concept. Now it’s time for some
market research.
This phase should include gathering and analyzing two types of data.
02 QUALITATIVE
Are your potential customers simply curious about your product, or are they
counting the days until you release it? Is this the type of product your users
would share with their friends, family, and coworkers? How often would
users engage with the product, and would they view it as a must-have part

01 QUANTITATIVE of their lives?

What’s the total addressable market for your product? What is the average
Analyzing qualitative research from in-depth interviews or focus groups can
customer lifetime value of similar products? How much do businesses
give you a better sense of how committed your market will be to buying your
making these types of products spend on development, advertising,
product. It can also help you shape the product to make it more valuable—
and other overhead? What percentage of the potential users you survey
even indispensable—to your customers.
indicate they’re likely to buy your product?

Your quantitative research should give you an estimate of the potential

upside of moving forward with this product.

THE GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF THE PRODUCT PLANNING PROCESS 12

Phase 4: Minimum Viable Product Development

If your market research indicates that your product concept could find a
customer base, your next step will be to build a Minimum Viable Product.
The MVP should include, at most, a few core features. Maybe only one. You
want just enough functionality to let your team learn if the product can
attract early adopters.
Addressing that question might be the most significant step in the early
phases of the product planning process. The difference between choosing
the right or wrong problem to solve with your MVP could make the
difference between finding a ready market of early adopters—or having to
start over again with a new idea.

The critical strategic step here is to figure out what those core features
should be. When you spoke with your friendly prospects, you learned about
Tip: Key question when designing your MVP: If we could build a
their challenges, frustrations, and goals. Those insights, combined with what
product that lets users complete just one valuable task, what would
you learned studying the competitive landscape, should give you an idea
that task be?
about what feature or two would create the most significant impact in your
bare-bones product.

Remember, you won’t have the time or resources to build a complete

product with all bells, whistles, and cool designs. Your team needs to
address this question: If we could build a product that let our early
customers complete just one desired task, what would that task be?

THE GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF THE PRODUCT PLANNING PROCESS 13

Phase 5: Product Launch
You’re about to take your product from theory to reality. Soon after you’ve
released your MVP to the market, you’ll begin compiling your first real-
world data to gauge your early product’s strengths and shortcomings. If it’s
a digital product, for example, you’ll learn things such as:
• How many people have downloaded the app or visited the
website to use it?
• How many new people are signing up each day?
• What’s the average length of time users interact with our
product per session?
• Are users coming back to the app multiple times per day?
• Are users completing their tasks with our product in the
way we anticipated?
• Do users seem to be getting stuck or abandoning the app
at the same point?
Note: To this point, we haven’t discussed your coordination with
the other people in your cross-functional team. But it’s important
to understand that before this stage, you should have been working
with your product marketing team to devise an MVP launch
campaign. You will have been helping your marketing co-workers
develop messaging and plan the rollout schedule for ads, press
releases, and other media opportunities.
You want to make sure your MVP launch generates buzz in the right places,
reaches the right personas, and has sufficient numbers that give the
product a real chance to find an audience. You don’t want your first market
release to fall flat simply because your team didn’t get the word out.
THE GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF THE PRODUCT PLANNING PROCESS 14
Phase 6: Product Lifecycle Maintenance
Assuming your MVP enjoyed some success with early users, you’ll gain a
great deal of valuable feedback and usage data to help you build out and
improve the product over time.
01 INTRODUCTION
Technically, you already introduced your product, in its MVP form, to
early adopters. But now, with a full product ready for prime time, you’ll be
presenting it to a much broader market. You might even be marketing the
product to user personas or industries you didn’t realize viable markets until
you put your MVP out there.
But you’ll want to treat this launch—product version 1.0—as its market
introduction. During this stage, you’ll be experimenting with messaging,
pricing, your sales strategies, and finding the most compelling value
propositions for various personas.
Now, here’s where the movie goes into fast-forward, and we quickly cover a
lot of ground. When you’ve built out a full-featured product, your team will
be ready to begin the product’s lifecycle, which consists of four stages:
02 GROWTH
At this point, your team has identified successful strategies for marketing,
sales, and pricing. Now the product itself is gaining new customers at a
rapid pace.
Because your team is forward-thinking, you will also use this time to listen to
your growing base of users and turn their feedback into new ideas and goals
on the product roadmap.
THE GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF THE PRODUCT PLANNING PROCESS 15
03 MATURITY
Your product has proven itself over time and earned loyal customers, but
the market for new users is no longer massive. The good news is that’s
because many of those users are already your customers.
But as your product enters the maturity stage, your team will spend less
energy coming up with excellent new functionality and more time making
sure everything still works, and your existing customers are still happy.
04 DECLINE
No product lasts forever, well, maybe the fax machine.
No matter how successful it has been, the market for your product will fade
at some point. Tastes change, and newer technologies replace older ones.
People find new ways of getting things done.
But that’s okay. It’s a natural part of the evolution of all products in all
industries. Apple stopped making the iPod Shuffle. And they’re still
doing alright.
Besides, by the time your product transitioned from the growth stage to
maturity, we’re guessing you started shifting some of your team’s attention
and creative energy into developing exciting new products.
THE GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF THE PRODUCT PLANNING PROCESS 16
Phase 7: Product Sunsetting
Product Sunsetting will be a bittersweet moment. It’s time for you and your
team to throw your aging product a wild retirement party and send it off to a
condo in Florida.
Think of this final phase as freeing up some
resources and creative energy to work on
something new.
You might decide to sunset your product because your team has developed
a newer, better one. Or it might just be the case that the product’s
existing revenue is no longer sufficient to justify the continued costs of
development, support, security, etc.
You don’t need to limit your use of this strategic product planning
process only to those times your team is ready to build a new product
from scratch. You can also use portions of the process for more minor
strategic decisions—such as deciding which feature to include next on
your product roadmap.
If your team remains torn between several viable feature ideas, run through
the first phases of the process, just as you would with an entirely new
product. Review your competing feature ideas. Run through a prioritization
exercise to score each one. Identify the winner. Then start your competitive
and market research. This process can work for any strategic decision
regarding your product.
After all, what is a strategic product planning process, if not a step-by-step
approach to making informed decisions about making your product better?
THE GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF THE PRODUCT PLANNING PROCESS 17

Building Your Product
Roadmap Planning Team
Now you have a big-picture view of the product planning
journey, from coming up with a great product concept to
retiring your product after years of success on the market.
Let’s zoom in on one of the most critical steps in the
strategic product planning process: building your product
roadmap planning team.
Why Do You Need a Roadmap
Planning Team?
Why is this step so vital to your product planning? Because building
a roadmap team consisting of the right people, and tapping their
knowledge and skills, will help you make the best strategic decisions
possible about where to spend your team’s limited resources.
The goal of your product roadmap planning team will be to vet and
confirm your product strategy. Through a series of strategic product
planning sessions, your team will answer questions such as:
• What product functionality should we build first?
• Do we have the resources, skills, and budget to complete the
work in the necessary timeframe?
• What will success look like?
• Have we done sufficient research to determine there is a
profitable market for this product and that our competitors
aren’t going to beat us to it?
• Do we have the data, a compelling story, and other elements
we need to earn executive approval to move forward?
THE GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF THE PRODUCT PLANNING PROCESS 18
Who Should Be on Your Product Roadmap Planning Team, and Why?

Short Answer

Your roadmap planning team should consist of the decision-makers who

can help you move your product planning and development forward.

Longer Answer

PRODUCT MANAGER PRODUCT OWNER

We’ll assume this is you. Your role on the roadmap planning team will be
twofold. First, you bring a lot of industry research, knowledge about your
personas, and experience working with customers. You will use these
learnings to help the team shape the product’s strategy.
Your second role will be to lead the team itself. You will host and guide
the team’s roadmap planning sessions, for example, and administer the
exercises to help the team prioritize themes and goals. You’ll also be
responsible for encouraging the team’s enthusiasm for the work they’re
doing. That’s a key goal here. The more enthusiastic your planning
team is, the more engaged they’ll be in these strategic sessions,
cultivating creativity.
As a liaison between the product and development teams, your product
owner will play an essential role in your roadmap planning.
Hearing the early discussions about product strategy, customer needs,
and which functionality to prioritize will help the product owner better
understand the company’s vision and goals for the product. Productive
discussion sessions will help the product owner communicate these
concepts to the development team. Effective communication will improve
their workflows and reduce the chances of misunderstandings and re-work.

THE GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF THE PRODUCT PLANNING PROCESS 19

EXECUTIVE SPONSOR(S) And ideally, but not necessarily:

You don’t want to go through the effort to pull this team together and build
PRODUCT MARKETING MANAGER
out a roadmap, only to have the entire concept shot down by your executive
Your product marketing team will glean a lot of helpful knowledge by joining
staff. Having an executive sponsor on your team from the beginning will
your roadmap planning meetings. For example, hearing your discussions
help you clear this hurdle.
of product features and solving customer problems will help them with

Also, a company executive can bring valuable insights the rest of your team product messaging.

might not have. Executives have a broader view of the industry, current
You’ll also want a product marketing manager in the room to offer insights
business trends, and other factors that could affect the strategic decisions
about things like upcoming industry events, marketing’s budget, and how
you make for your product.
quickly they can develop the materials needed for a go-to-market plan.
These things could affect your product development strategy.
DEVELOPMENT MANAGER

Whatever themes, epics, and initiatives your team decides to

include on the product roadmap, your development team will have to
execute on them.

A development manager will bring a broader knowledge of the

development department’s resources, other commitments, skill sets,
tools, etc. You’ll want this person in the room for your product roadmap
planning to let you know whether your plans are feasible.

THE GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF THE PRODUCT PLANNING PROCESS 20

How to Actively
Involve Stakeholders
While you’re working with the core roadmap planning team you’ve
assembled, you’ll also want to look for valuable strategic input across your
company. Maybe even some people outside the company.

Here are some key stakeholders to seek out:

• Sales
• Customer Success
• Marketing
• Executives
• Prospects and Customers

And here are a few ideas to tap into their knowledge and insights.

THE GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF THE PRODUCT PLANNING PROCESS 21

 Meet with Them One-on-One
You’d be surprised how much you can learn from a coworker just by taking
them out for lunch or a drink.
Think about how many interactions your customer success representatives
have with real users of your company’s existing products. Do they hear a lot
of similar questions about some areas of your products? Do a lot of callers
offer compliments about some surprising feature that they love?
If you’re looking for guidance on how to begin developing a new product,
this could be a great place to start. Take a customer success rep out for a
beer. Or a sales or pre-sales rep. Or someone on the marketing team who
goes to industry trade shows and talks to a lot of your target customers.
You could uncover plenty of valuable information just by having a casual
meal with a coworker.
Benefits: New insights, different perspectives, validating product
ideas, teambuilding
Show Them What You’ve Got
One great way to uncover the best thinking and ideas from your
stakeholders across the company is by first showing them your thinking.
Here, we recommend presenting your research, your roadmap team’s
most current thinking, and ideally, the product roadmap itself to your
stakeholders.
Your sales reps, marketing colleagues, customer success team, and others
across your organization want to contribute to your product. They have
knowledge, perspectives, and ideas that could add value to your strategic
product planning process.
Show them why you’re thinking about building the product, the market
problems it will solve, and the evidence that you’ve found an eager market
for it. Then, when you’ve told your strategy story about the product, invite
them to offer their input.
Benefits: Generating consensus, enhancing trust, creating
enthusiasm for your new product.
THE GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF THE PRODUCT PLANNING PROCESS 22
 Use the Right Product Planning Tools

The best way to jumpstart these discussions is to provide your stakeholder

a visual roadmap that outlines your narrative. Your product concept’s story
will be much more compelling if you offer an interesting visual to support
it. Here are a few examples of helpful product planning tools for your
stakeholder conversations.

PRODUCT ROADMAP SOFTWARE

When you meet with your sales rep to discuss your product strategy, you
don’t want to force that person to stare at a spreadsheet-based roadmap.
That will only detract them from the product narrative you’re trying to tell.

Instead, use a visually beautiful, web-based tool designed just for

roadmaps—and just for moments like these. At ProductPlan, we’ve been
providing an award-winning roadmap app to product managers worldwide
for years. Hundreds of them have told us popping up their visual, easy-to-
understand roadmap in stakeholder meetings makes those conversations
much more productive.

THE GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF THE PRODUCT PLANNING PROCESS 23

WIREFRAMING SOFTWARE
Do you know another great way to generate enthusiasm from stakeholders
while you’re discussing your product concept? Show them the product
itself!
You can’t show the actual product, of course. It won’t exist yet. But with
an easy-to-use app for making wireframes of digital products, or mockups
of physical products, you can give your stakeholders the next-best thing.
Try a user-friendly app like Balsamiq, which allows you to design visually
compelling mockups for product ideas.
SURVEY SOFTWARE
If you’re going to host product brainstorming or strategy sessions with
stakeholders, you can help tell the story behind your concept by showing
them the data that led to your strategic thinking.
One great way to do this is with the visualization tools available from
survey apps like SurveyMonkey. These apps let you present your survey
results in beautiful, visual form—with pie charts, bar graphs, etc. They’re
great conversation starters, which help break the ice and encourage team
engagement.
These visual data points demonstrate to your stakeholders that you’ve
utilized real-world information as the foundation of your strategic thinking—
not hunches. Visual data points will enhance your credibility with your
stakeholders and make them more likely to offer their best insights.
THE GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF THE PRODUCT PLANNING PROCESS 24
 Host a Customer Advisory Board

If your company already has products on the market, your team might
benefit from pulling together a handful of trusted customers whose
opinions you value.

You’ll then invite this group of customers, called a Customer Advisory Board
(CAB), to have an informal, in-depth discussion about your new product
idea, your existing products, their challenges, and other relevant topics.

You can have only your core roadmap team in these meetings. But we’d
recommend broadening the group and inviting representatives from the
other stakeholder departments we listed above—marketing, sales, customer
success, an executive, etc.

Benefits: Generating early champions for your product, validating

your ideas, gathering market intelligence
A Product Planning Workbook
Are you still feeling overwhelmed? Not sure where to start? Here’s an actual
product planning example. This workbook walks you through the broad
steps for the early phases of your product planning and gives you the key
questions to answer for each phase.

5 Stages of Product Planning:

01 Product Concept Development

02 Competitive Analysis
03 Market Research
04 MVP Development
05 Product Release

Note: There will be a big jump, and a lot of work, between stages 4
(developing the MVP) and 5 (releasing the entire product). So, we’ ll take
this product planning workbook only to the MVP phase.

A PRODUCT PLANNING TEMPLATE 26

 Stage 1: Concept Stage 2: Competition

When our team has agreed on a product concept to pursue, we will

To help come up with ideas for a new product, I want my team to include:
investigate the competitive landscape, looking for:

• Other companies already offering a similar product

• Other companies with a similar product in the works (but not

yet released)

• Different products or services my persona might use to solve

the problem

As we talk through our persona’s issues and brainstorm ideas, I’ll • Workarounds my persona might also use to solve the problem
use the following method(s) to prioritize and rank each idea:

(For example, these might include weighted scoring, the Kano model, or value
versus complexity.) For these research tasks, I will enlist the help of:

A PRODUCT PLANNING WORKBOOK 27

 Stage 3: Market Research

Next, my team will conduct market research to learn: For these research tasks, I will enlist the help of:

Quantitative Details

• How many user/buyer personas are there for our product concept?

• What is the average lifetime value of customers for similar products?

• How much do similar vendors spend on overhead for these products?

• What percentage of potential users we survey say they’d be

interested in our product?
Notes:

Qualitative Details

• What level of enthusiasm do our potential users show in this product

concept?

• Do our survey respondents indicate they’d tell friends and family

about the product?

• How often do respondents suggest they’d engage with our product?

A PRODUCT PLANNING WORKBOOK 28

 Stage 4: The MVP

We will now work with the development team to create a Minimum For these tasks, I will enlist the help of:
Viable Product (MVP). First, though, my product planning team will
use our research and strategic thinking to decide on one or two core
features to include in the MVP.

To figure out which core functionality to build, we will do the following:

Hold strategic sessions and discuss our competitive and market

research, and other learnings.

Conduct a prioritization exercise ( ; e.g., weighted Notes:

scoring) to determine which feature or two to include in the MVP.

Work with product marketing on messaging, reaching out to early

adopters, and preparing materials and scheduling for the MVP
launch campaign.

A PRODUCT PLANNING WORKBOOK 29

Conclusion: You’re Always in the
Strategic Product Planning Process
As we hope this book has made clear, product planning is not a one-and-
done task, but instead an iterative process. It will remain an ongoing part of
product management—and a vital one. If you don’t have a process to take
you from one strategic step to the next in your product development, you’ll
always be guessing about what to do next.

Product planning is not a one-and-done task, but

instead an iterative process.

The strategic product planning process provides guardrails to keep you

on track as you take those thousand small steps from product concept to
launch and beyond.

We hope you find it a valuable addition to your product team’s toolbox!

THE GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF THE PRODUCT PLANNING PROCESS 30

About ProductPlan
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and share their strategies across their entire organization. With our
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and more time shipping products.

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