The Ultimate Guide to Product Planning

What is Product Planning?

Product planning is a complex term to define due to its broadness. It involves so many different aspects of a product manager’s job. It’s probably a much more significant portion of your role as a PM than you might realize.

What is Product Planning?

Product planning involves all of the internally focused decisions, steps, and tasks necessary to develop a successful product. In other words, it involves everything you must do that affects the product itself. By contrast, go-to-market planning involves all external-facing steps to introduce and market your product to the public.Let’s compare some examples from a product plan and a go-to-market plan to understand better how we see both functions.

Product Plan:

• What features should we prioritize for the product’s development?
• How will we determine the price points for our product?
• Which vendors will we work with for manufacturing?
• What will be our revenue targets, our goals for new-customer adoption?
• Are there other metrics that we can track to determine the product’s level of success?

Go-to-Market Plan:

• What email campaigns will we develop to inform prospects about our new product?
• Which pieces of marketing collateral should we create for this product launch?
• How and when will we train our sales force on selling the new product?
• Should we develop limited-time promotions to boost early purchases?
• What PR campaigns will we roll out to increase industry awareness before launch?

7 Strategic Phases of the Product Planning Process

While no two products follow the same path, there are some standard stages that nearly all traverse. From the initial spark to the final sunset, here’s what you can expect.

Product Concept Development

Product concept development is the fun part. Coming up with ideas, identifying pain points and problems to be solved, imagining the delight and satisfaction your product can bring. It’s the phase for optimism and possibility.When there’s enough support for an idea, it’s time to validate it during product discovery, making sure this concept is legit with further exploration and investigation. These learnings and concept reviews help refine the idea.

Competitive Analysis

Chances are, you’re not the first one to come up with this fantastic idea, so it’s time to see what else is out there. If you’re late to the game and others are already executing, it’s an opportunity to see where they’re falling short and what parts of the market they’ve already locked up.The output of this activity reveals whether you’re truly breaking new ground or merely aiming to be a disruptor. With a firm grip on the competitive landscape, you’ll know what you’re up against if you decide to move forward.

Market Research

Qualitative and quantitative research helps the business get their arms around the real opportunity. How many people will want your product? How much is a solution worth to them?By identifying the total addressable market, the team can decide whether they think it’s worth it to invest some technical resources and start making it a reality. You’ll also lay the groundwork for mapping out your go-to-market strategy down the line.

Minimum Viable Product Development

Building an MVP lets you put something in front of prospects that’s more tangible than a slick landing page or slide deck. It’s the best test yet as to whether your concept resonates with users and addresses the pain points and problems that sparked your initial idea.Coming up with the “minimum” part of the MVP also kicks off the first—of many—times you must prioritize what matters most. Using a framework makes this easier and removes some of the subjectivity for making those calls.The reaction to your MVP and subsequent iterations of the product set the stage for your initial release.

Product Launch

Your big idea has grown into an actual product, and now it’s time to unleash it upon the world with a thoughtful product launch. Product marketing will be fully engaged as they A/B test landing pages, marketing slogans, and price points to maximize the initial buzz of a new release.When you pull back the curtain, the product positioning and channels to promote the launch are all part of the plan. Meanwhile, the analysts comb through the data and feedback, kicking off another round of learning.

Product Lifecycle Maintenance

Now a mature product, it’s all about the product roadmap and iterative releases addressing problems. This adds incremental value and expands the market. Planning will focus on themes as the business aims to reach its strategic goals and set new ones once they’re achieved.The product lifecycle stage spans the product’s rapid growth period. Moreover, the product will hopefully take many years to reach its conclusion. SWOT analysis and similar introspective exercises reveal what must happen to shore things up and chart a course for ongoing success. New functions and target markets may emerge, building on the success of each release.

Product Sunsetting

Most products eventually reach a point of diminishing returns. There’s limited upside in investing additional product development resources or marketing spending as customers move on to the next generation of solutions (or see their original problems fade away).But this winding down period takes a while; sometimes, the business seeks to maximize the revenue it can extract from its dwindling user base. While this occasionally results in a pivot and newfound life for the product, more often than not, it’s just a slow decline in usage until it’s time to pull the plug finally and transition the remaining user base to something new.

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Getting Others Involved in Product Planning

Being Inclusive Without Surrendering Control

Knowing how important it is to include executives, sales, marketing, operations, support, and product development in product planning, it’s natural to worry about managing all these stakeholders. You want their opinions, input, and buy-in, but ultimately you’re the one who must drive the process and corral all those voices into an intelligent, understandable plan.

Step 1

First, ensure the highest-ranking person in the room doesn’t try to take over. Product should always lead these activities, a neutral party serving as a facilitator. If an executive has concerns, let them air them—ideally in private before the group session begins—reiterate that this is a collaborative process.

Step 2

Next, be sure to state the goals for this exercise upfront. The emphasis here is on making customers happy, so focus on personas and user stories that focus on external users rather than internal wants and needs.

Step 3

Third, actually make the process collaborative. Use prioritization frameworks and other methods that give everyone a turn to vote, score, or otherwise chime in. Give every suggestion a fair hearing, even if you’re ready to dismiss it out of hand, creating an open and welcoming atmosphere.That said, this doesn’t mean ideas should get a free pass. Press stakeholders for details, context, and a sound rationale. Not just for you, but everyone participating. These arguments should be solid enough to win over the entire room, not just you or the boss.Finally, be sure to base decisions on reality. That’s why you have product development there! They can usually come up with a quick level of effort and explain why something that seems minor is big (and why something that seems like a massive undertaking isn’t that tough).Because product managers talk to everyone, they’re the best ringleaders for these activities because they have a holistic view. Offer up that context when needed to explain any tough calls and soothe ruffled egos.

Product Planning for Lone Wolves

Not every organization has a product team. Sometimes it’s just you. But that doesn’t mean you’re on your own to create a product plan all by yourself.When you’re the only product manager in the place, it’s even more important to involve others in the process. You’re already likely suffering from a case of impostor syndrome, spending chunks of time explaining to coworkers what product management does with no other internal examples to reference.Your boss is probably in marketing or technology and doesn’t comprehend the full scope of what product planning entails, skimping on the areas outside their comfort zone. And your plate is overloaded with tasks that need delegation.However, you can turn your unicorn status into a weapon for good by breaking down silos. Since you don’t have a product team to rely on, pull representatives from different teams for planning exercises, welcoming their expertise and perspectives.This alignment lays the groundwork for slow, deliberate consensus building while also burnishing your internal reputation and credibility. When people see you working closely with different parts of the business and sharing what you’ve learned, they’ll be more confident that your plan represents an amalgamation of internal viewpoints and priorities and not just your particular vision for the future.

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A Good Product Planning Strategy

A Product Planning Workbook

Product teams don’t need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to product planning. There are plenty of playbooks and best practices to leverage, streamlining the process while ensuring nothing important gets overlooked.To help you kick things off, here is a template from ProductPlan. The workbook covers all the bases and can jumpstart your next product planning journey.

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