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Computing pioneer Alan Kay once said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
As an agency in charge of developing, launching, and marketing new products, each new product development process is an opportunity for you to mold the future. It’s also a process where a lot can potentially go wrong. (Changing the world, it turns out, is rarely an easy task.)
The good news is that a strong product management workflow can eliminate many of these potential mishaps and help development teams bring successful products to market faster and more effectively.
If you want to supercharge your product management process and build a roadmap your product team can follow all the way to the promised land, here’s everything you need to know about building a product management workflow.
What is a product management workflow?
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You’d (hopefully) never build a house without a blueprint to follow — and, in many cases, building a great product is a lot more complicated than building even the largest and most luxurious house.
A product management workflow outlines the steps and stages of managing a product throughout the product lifecycle, from brainstorming to launch and beyond. It ensures that team members and other stakeholders are aligned toward common objectives, have a detailed product roadmap to follow, and that the product vision is clear for everyone involved.
Benefits of a strong product management workflow
When it comes to project management (in any of its various forms), having a strong workflow for your team to follow is key. This is doubly true for product development projects, which tend to involve a lot of interconnected processes and team collaboration.
From improving product quality to ensuring that the finished result aligns with your client’s goals, here are the top benefits of a strong product management workflow:
Better product quality
74% of customers say product quality is the number one thing that keeps them loyal to a brand. While excellent customer service and a pleasant customer experience are key brand differentiators in 2023, wowing your customers still starts with delivering a great product.
An effective product management workflow helps guarantee product quality by ensuring you’ve dotted all your i’s and crossed all your t’s. By outlining all of the milestones, product requirements, and functionalities you need to meet, a product management workflow helps agencies deliver high-quality products.
More efficient resource allocation
Few, if any, project managers have the luxury of unlimited resources. If you want your product strategy to go off without a hitch, you’ll need to make good use of the resources you have available.
A strong product management workflow improves the visibility of your project, making it easy to see where resources are being spent and where they’re needed most. This empowers product teams to use their resources more effectively. It also helps ensure that everyone is held accountable for the resources they use.
Faster time-to-market
Whether it’s software development, creating a new electronic device, or anything in between, developing a great product takes time. However, taking too long to bring a new product to market can present issues for agencies and their clients.
By streamlining and organizing the product development process, a product management workflow helps speed up time-to-market without sacrificing quality. This allows agencies and their clients to capitalize on market opportunities quicker and prevent projects from dragging past their estimated timeline.
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Closer alignment with client goals
A product management workflow aligns product teams toward common goals — and the most important goals to keep in mind when developing a product are the client’s.
Prioritizing customer needs and the user experience when developing new products is the number one way to keep your clients coming back. By structuring your product management workflow around the client’s goals for the end result, you can ensure that you meet (and exceed!) their expectations every step of the way.
The 7 stages of a product management workflow
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Part of the purpose of a product management workflow is to break the project down into bite-size stages. When creating and executing your product management workflow, here are the seven phases you’ll go through:
1. Idea generation and evaluation
Every new product that takes the world by storm starts as an idea flitting around in someone’s head. However, product development teams don’t have the luxury of waiting for inspiration to strike; if you want to generate innovative new ideas for products, you need to implement an ideation process designed to bring them to the surface.
Through a structured process of brainstorming, market research, and analyzing customer feedback, you can generate and evaluate product ideas in a way that is much more reliable than hoping to catch lightning in a bottle.
2. Requirements gathering
Once you pin down the basic idea for your product, it’s time to start figuring out what the product features and requirements will be. This usually involves working closely with stakeholders as well as marketing, sales, and development teams to gather a diverse collection of feedback on what requirements you’ll need to meet.
3. Roadmapping
This part of a product management workflow outlines the vision, goals, and planned features of the product over a specified period. It’s a key communication tool for aligning cross-functional teams and stakeholders on the product's direction.
Your product management roadmap should outline the project’s anticipated schedule, covering things like planned features, timelines, and resource allocation. However, it should also be flexible enough to accommodate changes based on client feedback, market shifts, or changing business priorities.
4. Development
This is the stage of a product management workflow where the rubber meets the road. From creating prototypes to carefully testing each new feature as it’s added, the development stage can involve several sub-processes. Carefully outlining them in your product management workflow will help ensure that your development process proceeds without any hiccups.
5. Quality assurance
Once you’ve developed a minimum viable product (MVP), it’s time to start testing, testing, testing. Carefully outlining functional, usability, performance, and security testing procedures in your product management workflow helps iron out any kinks so that you can deliver a perfectly polished product. Along with keeping your clients happy, this will also help eliminate some of the burden on your customer support team.
6. Launch and post-launch monitoring
With the product developed and thoroughly tested, it’s finally time for the official launch. This stage involves creating marketing strategies, setting pricing, and planning the product’s release. Once the product launches, this stage then transitions into post-launch monitoring — which includes things like tracking key metrics, collecting user feedback, and analyzing the product’s performance.
7. Feedback and iteration
Your product management workflow is the roadmap that sees a product through to its launch. But, once a product launches, customer feedback will be the most effective tool you have to improve the product further. Create a system for gathering and implementing customer feedback post-launch and you can continually fine-tune the product to match customer expectations.
How to standardize your product management workflow
Having a standardized product management workflow that you can adapt to each new project is much more efficient than creating new workflows from scratch every time. If you want to standardize and streamline your project management workflow for maximum efficiency, here’s what you need.
Create templates
Creating templates for key documents and deliverables such as product briefs, roadmaps, and project plans makes it easy to adapt your product management workflow to any new project. It also helps maintain consistency across projects.
Use a collaborative task management platform
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Effective collaboration is one of the biggest keys to implementing a consistent and standardized product management workflow. For that matter, it’s one of the biggest keys to product development success, period.
With an advanced project management platform such as Teamwork.com, you can provide your team with the user-friendly product management tools they need to collaborate efficiently.
Thanks to helpful features like task tracking, project templates, file sharing/document management, and communication tools, Teamwork.com provides the foundation agencies need to establish a streamlined and standardized product development process.
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Establish communication protocols
Giving your team the right communication tools encourages more efficient collaboration — but you’ll also need the right protocols. Define when and how to conduct meetings, updates, and progress reports to make sure everyone on your team understands what’s expected of them when it comes to communication. This also gives your client an idea of what to expect and establishes healthy boundaries from the start.
Document requirements
Thorough documentation is one of the ways product development teams can help prevent issues from snowballing as the project progresses. By carefully documenting things like user stories, product features, and any technical details, you can ensure that you and your team can trace the breadcrumbs back to the root issue anytime problems arise.
Prioritize and roadmap
A big part of the decision-making that goes into seeing a project through from concept to launch is prioritizing the features and tasks that are most important.
To make these decisions more consistent and reliable, create a prioritization framework that determines how to prioritize features and tasks based on their impact and importance. From there, you can create a roadmap to outline the milestones and timelines you need to meet based on that framework.
Perform testing and quality assurance
It’s helpful to standardize every part of your product development process, but standardizing your testing/quality assurance process is especially key. This will help ensure every product your agency develops meets that same set of agreed-upon standards and specifications.
Include feedback and iteration
We can’t overstate the value of collecting quality feedback from your clients and the product’s end users. Feedback fosters continuous improvement, which your agency can use to improve future product iterations. Establishing a standardized way to collect feedback consistently ensures that you get feedback consistently. That might include client interviews, surveys, or — depending on the type of product — testing panels.
Baking feedback into your product management workflow can save you time and money on future rework and lead to better resource utilization. A customer-centric approach by prioritizing your client’s thoughts, concerns, and opinions can also help build stronger relationships. When your clients feel valued, they’ll continue working with you.
Teamwork.com helps agencies establish a uniform product management framework
Flying by the seat of your pants isn’t typically a recipe for great results when it comes to product development. If you want your projects to be organized, standardized, and optimized for success, creating a uniform product management framework is an important place to start.
At Teamwork.com, we help agencies organize and streamline their product development projects via easy-to-use collaboration tools and a cutting-edge project management platform.
Sign up for Teamwork.com today to make product management your agency’s superpower!
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