Top 5 Product Management Frameworks for Product Optimisation

Today’s most prosperous businesses, including Amazon and Spotify, are known for continuously producing top-notch goods. It does not occur by chance. These businesses frequently have well-defined frameworks for managing and producing their products.

Product Management Frameworks, like jobs to be done, provide teams with a repeatable method to develop and maintain their products. Recreating the process that resulted in the last successful product without a product management framework would be challenging.

Consider making a cake. If you stick to the recipe, you’ll have a fair chance of producing a delectable cake. You could even know it by heart and be able to continue baking delicious cakes on your own. Nevertheless, you’ll need that recipe to continue producing fantastic cakes if you wish to manage a bakery with various employees (bakers, purchasers, cashiers, etc.).

Use a product management framework if you want your business to create goods like those from Spotify, Amazon, Shopify, and other companies. To understand how very successful organizations regularly produce excellent products, we studied their product management systems.

These frameworks provide you with repeatable instructions on identifying, prioritizing, and executing products.

1. Narrative & Storytelling

People have been using stories to communicate since the earliest civilizations. You can find it in religious writings, school textbooks, family stories from elderly family members, and product management. When someone recounts a narrative, if it contains the necessary components, we all sit up and pay attention.

Your market serves as the situational backdrop; the hero or protagonist inside is your client, who has demands, conflicts, and pain points. By introducing the product that aids the buyer in achieving his objective, the narrative moves logically toward its conclusion. Storytelling is a powerful tool for deconstructing complexity and is considered a very important task in the list of jobs to be done for effectively marketing a product, especially if you use digital channels like Twitter or other social media channels.

Apple frequently uses this technique to explain its complicated and cutting-edge product line in a way that is understandable to everybody. Another excellent example is the clothing business TOMS. This business has developed a community centred on the brand by sharing client tales.

 

2. Mapping the Consumer Journey

There is a feeling that client journeys have been complicated in recent years. That’s not fair; it is more appropriate to state that we now have a deeper grasp of them. Sellers claimed that a customer’s trip consisted of entering a shop, selecting an item, paying for it, and then leaving. We now realize that client demands and expectations vary greatly.

A framework for effectively articulating client needs and expectations is customer journey mapping. It offers crucial information for each stage of product creation and administration since it is an excellent approach to pinpoint the negative and good elements of how people connect with a brand.

Two of the most well-known companies to employ customer journey mapping are Spotify and Amazon. Since there are so many various templates online, getting started is simple. It only requires that you select one out of two or three that best fits your company’s needs before filling in the other forms.

3. Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

This framework emphasizes the value of learning while developing, emphasizing the product development stage of product management. It suggests initially creating a “bare bones” product with only the bare minimum of functionalities. MVP may then be tested, with the development team receiving feedback on the results to create a positive feedback loop for ongoing improvement.

Because it reduces time wasted on designing pointless features or traveling down dead ends, the technique is also referred to as lean product development. The MVP framework has been successfully applied in web app development services. It played a key role in creating some of the most well-known software programs. These include Instagram, Groupon, Amazon, Airbnb, and even Facebook.

4. Jobs to be Done

Jobs To Be Done is a framework that pinpoints the product’s value proposition or the need it will satisfy, instead of the actual product. This method of approaching product creation has several advantages. Along with the apparent benefit of better matching product developers with customer needs, there is also a risk-reduction component. Jobs To Be Done helps organizations avoid the pitfall of creating a fantastic solution only to spend endless time looking for an issue to solve.

The creator of Jobs To Be Done, Alan Klement, notes that the framework is extremely agile since it deals with principles, which tend to remain constant, rather than procedures, which are simple to learn but have a short lifespan. Some well-known firms have utilized jobs to be done structure across a variety of industries.

As you can see, when you go on to LinkedIn, the idea is being used there. If you look at the different membership categories, you’ll discover that they are described in terms of tasks to be completed, such as “find leads more quickly” or “search jobs with confidence and get recruited.” These are all part of the jobs-to-be-done framework.

5. Kano Model

Product development teams may utilize the Kano model as a prioritization framework to identify the aspects or qualities of a product that are most important to buyers. The model may prioritize projects and various parts as a product is being developed.

Dr. Noriaki Kano, a leading expert in quality management, created the Kano Model at the Tokyo University of Science in the middle of the 1980s. It instructs developers on which features are important and which are not and splits the important features into three groups.

• Basic Features: The product’s fundamental elements provide its primary functioning. They won’t make customers jump for joy, but if they don’t operate as planned, they can make them unhappy. The windscreen wipers on an automobile might serve as an illustration of this.
• Performance Features: Concerning performance characteristics, the amount you spend on them directly correlates to the improved happiness you receive. For instance, users will be happy with a smartphone with greater storage space.
• Excitement Features: Exciting features are extras that give a product more oomph and can help set it apart from rival products. No one would miss these features if they were missing. But, if they exist, they will raise contentment.

The Bottom Line

If you make only one excellent product, customers could take notice. But if you never do it again, they’ll stop paying attention to you and go on to the next thing. Your brand will develop if you consistently release top-notch items, leading to the creation of champions, evangelists, and customers.

Product Management Frameworks, like the Kano model and Jobs to Be Done, contribute to the popularity of Spotify, Shopify, Amazon, and others. They regularly produce top-notch goods. Using product management frameworks, like jobs to be done, will enable you to offer goods like many of the profitable businesses of today.