Visual Guide to Product Management Frameworks

Strategy

Business Model Canvas

The Business Model Canvas is a framework that is helpful when trying to quickly get a holistic and strategic perspective on a particular business. It is a template that ensures thinking across the value proposition, the customer, as well ass operational and financial aspects.

Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

The Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) describes the characteristics of the profitable customers. It does this by looking both at how hard and costly the customer will be to acquire and how valuable the customer will be once signed up. An ICP covers both the type of company and the persons at the company to approach, and more specifically looks not only at general characteristics, but also on situational characteristics.

4Ps of Marketing

The 4Ps of marketing are Product, Price, Place, and Promotion, often also called the "Marketing Mix". This framework is especially relevant for product managers, as it helps them see that their core focus area is one out of 4 closely interrelated aspects of marketing. The 4Ps can help PMs consider how they can best support the entire business.

AIDA

AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. It is a marketing funnel framework that looks at the journey of prospective customers until they sign up. As product managers (PMs) naturally gravitate towards what happens after customers sign up, this is an especially relevant framework for them to think about. A PM should know how user come to their product and why.

PESO

PESO is a framework for categorizing marketing channels and stands for Paid, Earned, Social and Owned. For product managers (PMs), it is important to think about how different feature launches can be handed over to marketing in the rollout plan, and then it is helpful to make sure that different types of marketing channels are properly covered.

Discovery

Persona

A persona is an archetype for a type of user, based on grouping many similar users together and synthesizing their attributes into a single fictive user with a name. Great products are developed with empathy for the user. However, it is not possible to emphasize with a multitude of users directly. By working with personas, that becomes possible.

Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD)

Jobs-to-be-done is an approach for understanding the motivations of users of products. The approach is to remove the product from the equation, and to instead look at it as the user wanting help with a job. The approach is often used by product managers, as it gives a new perspective on the success criteria for their product, as well as who the competitors are.

Customer Journey Map

Customer journey mapping is a method for understanding the experience of a user, including not only during actual use of a product, but also covering adjacent experiences. A customer journey map brings together and illustrates all the touchpoints a user experiences for a certain scenario, both physical and digital, and also includes an attempt to describe the thoughts, feelings, and overall satisfaction of the user throughout.

Double Diamond

The Double Diamond is a framework originallty used by designers for developing physical products, that has gained popularity in software development. It can help product managers first ensure that they solve the right problem, before diving in to thinking about the solution.

Opportunity Tree

An Opportunity Solution Tree, also known as an Opportunity Tree, is an artefact that can be used to bridge problem and solution discovery. Like the name suggests, the artefact is structured as a tree. In successive levels it cascades down from Outcome -> Opportunity -> Solution -> Experiment.

Ideation

USER framework

USER is a framework for triage of product feedback. It can be used both for user feedback and for handling internal ideas. USER stands for the 4 steps to be applied to incoming feedback: Understand (the point of the feedback), Scrub (away if not relevant), Extract (a theme by clustering feedback and mapping to user problems), Rank (once at this stage vs other potential features).

Spotlight framework

The Spotlight framework helps categorize customer feedback based on the underlying issue. By looking at the type of questions being asked, it categorized feedback into three underlying issues: User Experience issues, Product Marketing issues, Positioning issues.

Prioritization

Value vs Effort matrix

The value vs effort matrix is a simple 4 quadrant prioritization matrix with Value on the Y-axis and Effort on the X-axis. It provides a rough gauge for product managers to quickly do feature prioritization, part of the product management process.

ICE prioritization

ICE prioritization is a scoring model where a numerical value (one to ten) is assigned each to an idea's Impact, Confidence and Ease and the ICE score is deduced by multiplying the 3 values. ICE is a fast and straightforward framework for prioritising features which is an important part of the product management process.

RICE prioritization

RICE is a prioritization framework used by product managers to quickly identify what ideas, initiatives and/ or features to prioritize, which is an important part of the product management process. Core to the framework is the formula (Reach x Impact x Confidence) / Effort.

Weighted Scoring

Weighted scoring is a prioritization approach by assigning a numerical value to a list of items based on a cost-benefit analysis that is weighted against an organization's objectives. Product managers can use the framework for feature prioritization, in the product management process.

Kano model

The Kano model is a framework used to prioritize features. It is a good complement to other prioritization frameworks as it looks at what is expected to differentiate on the type of satisfaction a feature will drive - does it merely remove dissatisfaction or does it create excitement.

Definition

Product Requirements Document (PRD)

A Products Requirements Document (PRD), also known as a product brief or a product specification, is used by product managers (PMs) to put the thinking about a feature in writing and as a starting-point for future collaboration.

One Page / One Hour

One page / one hour is both a method and a pledge that teams of product managers can take together. If they do, they commit to not spend more than one hour and to not write more than one page, before bringing their thinking to the team for feedback. It is particularly useful for PRD-writing, but is also useful across many other areas, and also for other teams beyond PMs.

Amazon 6-pagers

Amazon 6-pages is a method pioneered by Jeff Bezos at Amazon. The idea is that powerpoint slides and presentations are a waste of time, and that it is better to first express and elaborate the thinking on a topic in writing, and then to begin meetings with participants reading that text, and only after that to have a well-informed discussion.

Refinement

User story map

The idea with a user story map is to be able to have a conversation across several user stories with team and stakeholders. Generally, the approach is to visually place the user stories so that they tell a bigger story together, still from a user standpoint.

Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

A minimum viable product, commonly referred to as an MVP, is the minimal experiment or product required to validate whether it would be worthwhile to invest in developing a more fully-fledged version of a specific product or feature.

Minimum Lovable Product (MLP)

A minimum lovable product (MLP) is a product or feature that is very slimmed down in terms of both design and engineering effort, but that still manages to create a strong positive response from users. It is often done as the next step after feedback has been received on an MVP.

User flows

A user flow is a type of diagram that shows the different paths a user can take when performing (or trying to perform) a certain task or use case. They are useful for product teams to make sure they have properly thought through all relevant scenarios.

Lo-fi / high-fi designs

Lo-fi / hi-fi stands for low / high fidelity, the degree of exactness with the intended final design. As product teams work with different features to potentially build, they can be much more effective is they learn to work with increasing degrees of fidelity.

Development

3 C's

The 3Cs is a method stating that user stories have have three critical aspects, Card, Conversation, and Confirmation. The Card is just the name of the user story, the Conversation is everything that is said, and the Confirmation are the agreed criteria for when the user story should be considered done.

Story point

Story points are a format to express estimates on how much developer time it will take to complete a user story. There is no unified definition of how big a story point is, as that varies between teams, and they are meant to be a rough and not an estimate measure, but for many teams a story points come to mean roughly one day of work for one developer.

Acceptance criteria

Acceptance criteria is a pragmatic approach to agreeing on how to confirm that a user story has been developed. The given-when-then format is common to use for describing how the product should behave in different scenarios, but the type and format of acceptance criteria used varies depending on situation.

Evaluation

Pirate metrics (AAARRR)

Pirate metrics are a set of metrics can describe the performance of a product across the marketing funnel. They are called Pirate metrics, as the acronym AAARRR sounds a bit like "aargh", i.e. something a pirate would say. There exact letters vary, but the use of Awareness-Acquisition-Activation-Retention-Revenue-Referral is common.

North Star metric

A North Star is a metric with strong predictive value for the long-term success of a customer. The idea is to find a metric that corresponds with the amount of value created for the customer, thereby making it a better metric to work towards than even revenue.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is the most commonly used measurement of customer satisfaction. It is based on simply asking users how likely they are to recommend the product to others on a scale of 0-10, and the responses are then calculated as a score from -100 to 100, where 20 is considered good and 40 is considered great.

DAU / MAU

DAU stands for Daily Active Users and MAU stands for Monthly Active Users. DAU / MAU is the ratio between the two, and is an expression of how engaged users are with a product. A ratio of 1 means that all users come back every day, i.e. incredible engagement, whereas a ratio of 1/30 is as bad as it gets.

Feature usage

Feature usage denote different ways to measure the engagement of a feature after it has been deployed. Measures can include number/share of users that have tried the feature, frequence of use for users that use the feature, as well as specific measures relating to how the feature is used.

Leadership

Eisenhower Matrix

The Eisenhower Matrix is a method for prioritizing tasks. It is sometimes also referred to as the Urgent / Important Matrix. The main benefit of the matrix is the introduction of the distinction of urgent vs important, helping the user to avoid pursuing things that seem high priority because they have a near-term deadline.

4 Ds

The 4 Ds of time management is a framework to help you down-prioritize doing tasks that come your way, based on 4 different tactics. It is sometimes also known as the 5 Ds, but the last D is not really a tactic. The Ds are: Delete, Delegate, Defer, Diminish, Do.