Product Planning: Product planning is deciding which projects to invest in

Article Description: Product Planning Seven deadly Sins.

Remark: Product planning, deciding what not to do is more important than deciding what to do. Many company products do not do well because there are too many products at the same time.

For product planning, every product company has little to worry about. It covers a range of activities: Business strategy, product strategy, product roadmap, portfolio management, Opportunity assessment, project planning and tracking, and project oversight.

But plainly, product planning is deciding which projects to invest in.

I'm writing a series of articles on different levels of product planning, but here I want to start with a problem most often encountered by a product company.

No matter what product planning process you use, it's your priority to pick out good ideas and discard bad ideas. In the previous articles, I discussed product exploration, emphasizing that the primary responsibility of product managers is to discover valuable, useful, and viable products. If you don't find such a product, all the other efforts are "unproductive".

Obviously, this means that projects that are not favoured should be forced to "miscarry" before they are implemented. But some projects that should be "aborted" have not been terminated, leaving the company with a huge loss.

I have summed up the reasons for roughly 7:

1. Inertia--terminating a project or a bad idea is more of a drag than letting it continue. the decision to stay in a project requires sufficient justification and detailed data to support it, but few teams do.

2. Opinionated-Many people do not like opposing opinions and are unwilling to face customer criticism. in the face of criticism, they always comfort themselves, and wishful thinking that once the product is released, users will certainly like it.

3. face-saving-Many people think that the termination of the project means failure, and failure is shameful. but I think it would be "a fiasco" to keep the doomed project going, wasting time and money on worthless products and watching it be strangled by opponents in the marketplace. If you don't find a good solution, or if the user's response is different from what you expected, it's wise to terminate the project immediately. After all, a timely stop is a lot better than a crushing defeat.

4. sinecures-Many product managers take the position of a manager as a armchair, in which they do not seek their administration. in order to sit in their position, these products rarely take the risk of making such "unpopular" decisions, giving up their responsibility as product owners.

5. Corporate culture--some enterprises believe that the end of the "chicken" project is not in line with their own corporate culture, not to mention the project has invested so much resources to pay so much effort. but a good corporate culture should lead employees to despise such behavior: wasting the most valuable resources and manpower in projects destined to fail. Putting people into these projects is unfair or disrespectful to employees.

6. Poorly planned-"the engineers are going to finish their work next week, so they can't be idle!" "This is undoubtedly a" desperate "suicidal act, absurd but very common. at this point, it is particularly important to develop a meaningful work plan (backlog) to be completed. If a team is idle and your project is not ready, then you can arrange for them to do other worthwhile work.

7. Blind obedience-we have to face the reality that many projects are like the pet of the boss who thinks the project is important. don't think that they are the boss, you must be right. Although many of the great products come from Smart bosses, err is not.

Product exploration and innovation is like farming. If you want carefully nurtured ideas to harvest, you have to sow less weed-like ideas and prevent them from grabbing "nutrients" from good ideas.

At present, many companies run too many projects at the same time, there are good and bad, bad ideas will no doubt consume the company's resources, and can not concentrate on the implementation of good ideas.

In the final analysis, corporate policymakers have to perform their duties, end bad projects, and devote resources to products that look promising.

The time and money spent on bad ideas is obvious, but many people do not realize that greater loss is the opportunity cost of an advantageous project-you could have spent time and money making more valuable products. However, the idea of good and bad, many teams in the initial period is difficult to distinguish, only after implementation to know.

To change this dilemma, product exploration (see Revelation: Creating the product of User love, chapter 12th) is a good approach. The management team needs to ensure that valuable resources such as development, testing and so on are used to the edge.

This article is an excerpt from the author's blog from the Book of Revelation: Creating users ' favorite products. This book introduces the practical experience and idea of modern software (Internet) product management from three angles of people, process and product. I hereby thank Mr. Marty Cagan for his authorization.

Marty Cagan Published on March 9, 2009, the original link here, translator Wei Jong/revisers Tanfong can Lin Hang