Product Management: Tools in the Toolkit of a Product Manager

Many people assume that the best product managers (PMs) and leaders rely on their guts to identify and build the best products. In reality, though, there are various tools and techniques we, as product managers and leaders, use to identify business opportunities, reduce the risk of our assumptions, and build products that are loved by thousands and millions of people. Behind every successful product, there has been a ton of work, validation, and iterations.  

Below are 8 important tools every product manager and leader should be aware of and be able to pull out of their toolkits at different stages of the product development cycle as needed. As you put your product strategy and product roadmap in place and/or shape and test various hypotheses, these are some tools you can utilize to make your product case stronger and eventually enable others to see why they should support investing in the proposed idea or category:

1. Company Strategy: One of the most important ways to prioritize and decide what to build -- or, more importantly, what NOT to build -- is to clearly align the company’s product strategy and product roadmap with the company’s overall strategy. If your company doesn’t have a strategy, clear direction, or north star, you, as a product leader, need to work with the CEO, founders, and other executives to put that in place. If your company already has a clear strategy in place, you need to align your product strategy and roadmap with the company’s strategy.

2. Market Research: Conduct market research to understand the market size of the opportunity under assessment, grasp the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of that market in the coming years, and identify other market trends that are to your advantage or disadvantage. This exercise enables your team to work on ideas / categories that matter and can have big outcomes.   

3. Competitive Analysis: Perform comprehensive competitive analysis to understand what the competitive landscape looks like, what feature sets your competitors offer, how they position themselves in the market, and what kinds of customers they target. After that exercise, evaluate your own company’s existing product and competitive advantages. This process should allow you to decide how best to position your product in the market and build competitive moats to let you win in both the short and long term.  

4. Stakeholders’ Input: For any product hypothesis or product strategy under evaluation, you should bring other teams and stakeholders into the conversation early on and take their input seriously. This is not only important for you to assess the feasibility of the opportunity under assessment, but it’s also key for having their buy-in as you move to the execution stage. You particularly need input from your Business Team and Engineering Team because this can help you to clear the value risk and feasibility risk, two of The Four Big Risks Marty Cagan regularly talks about.  

5. UX Research: UX research includes a wide range of qualitative and quantitative methods. Many PMs either don’t know about various UX research methods or don’t utilize them enough. Here you can learn more about various types of UX research. It’s important to note that certain methods such as interviews, field studies, and concept testing are more suited for early days of exploration of an idea, while others such as click-stream analysis or A/B testing are more suited for later stages of product testing. It’s also important to distinguish between attitudinal (what people say) and behavioral (what people actually do) approaches.  

6. Prototypes: Prototyping is critical to help validate ideas without spending a lot of engineering time and bandwidth building something that no one cares to use. Tools such as InVision and Figma allow PMs to prototype without writing a single line of code.  

7. Data & Financials: Utilizing data and financials in order to make product decisions is important in two ways: 

a) You always have to know how each product or feature under consideration will move which metric(s) and by how much. You also need to be able to have informed discussion about the following topics:

• Will project A increase retention, engagement, or revenue?
• Should your team work on project B, which decreases customer acquisition cost (CAC) or project C, which increases lifetime value (LTV)? Why?
• By how much do you expect project B or C to move the needle from the current baseline?  

b) In many companies, there is a strong interest and focus on ROI-driven product development. The return on investment is typically measured by a marginal increase in revenue or a decrease in costs associated with each project and the engineering time/value spent to build that.   

8. Industry Experts: For certain products or categories where your team may not have all the necessary knowledge and expertise, PMs are encouraged to work with external experts, scientists, researchers, and the like to ensure they are building the right product. 

Please share your reaction to these tools or provide other tools you use that help you be more effective with product development.