Product management frameworks
By: Varatharaj Rajagopal
Tags: Product Life Cycle, Productivity, Framework, Product Management, Product Development

There are many product management frameworks that product manager follows. I have listed out some of the frameworks that I follow at my work. Before we jump into frameworks, I wanted you to know framework does not fix all your problems. The framework will help you with these aspects.

Better understand your context Create a structure for problems Communicate ideas & solutions

I often use these frameworks in my product work, sometimes without realizing it.

3X framework by Kent Beck

A product can be in one of 3 stages. For product leaders, this is the most vital framework to understand because almost every important decision should account for the stage your product is in.

Explore — to overcome disinterest, try many small experiments.

Expand — to overcome bottlenecks to scaling, ease the limitations of the next rate-limiting resource.

Extract — to sustain growth, continually increase profitability while you finish growing.

The examples of decisions you can make more rigorously with the 3X framework:

— Optimize for inputs, outputs, or outcomes?

— Set more qualitative or quantitative goals?

— How to measure progress?

— What skills to look for?

— How to evaluate PMs’ impact?

5Qs for product rigour

This framework provides a useful structure for product proposals, reviews, etc.

1) Who is the customer?

2) What is the problem/opportunity?

3) What is the main customer benefit?

4) How do you know customers want this?

5) What is the customer experience?

Amazon uses this 5Qs framework for their product development.

ICE prioritization by Sean Ellis

The ICE framework may be the most popular useful framework when scaling and optimizing shipping time, developer ROI, user retention and funnel maximization.

What is ICE?

ICE is a combined evaluation of features based on three levers: Impact, Confidence and Ease. The impact is an estimation of the optimization of the effort, confidence is an estimation of the thoroughness of your hypothesis and ease is an estimation of the amount of effort by the time that will be required to ship the feature/ product. Each lever is graded on a scale of 1–10 and the feature worthiness is evaluated by multiplying each lever’s score.

ICE Score = (Impact +Confidence +Ease) / 3

Impact

The best way to measure impact is to understand how does it move a user/ customer across the funnel AARRR. AARRR (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue) describes the five stages of converting a customer and maximizing ROI. Each stage has a series of drivers and metrics that allow product managers to quantitatively define and measure the impact of their efforts.

Confidence

Confidence also measured on a scale from 1–10, is a measure of the conviction required that warrants the feature build-out. Heavily weighted and biased towards experiments and customer evidence, confidence eliminates the anecdotal and subjective biases in feature priorities.

Ease

Ease is usually measured in time to determine how much work will be required for the feature to be shipped. Different companies have different methodologies to measure the ROI of their DevOps. For example, Manoj Chaudhary, CTO and VP of engineering at Loggly, uses the following ROI to measure the success of his DevOps’ team.

Release frequency: How fast code releases to production. Infrastructure recovery: How fast production recovers from “fires” Infrastructure resiliency: Reduction in downtime/problems with infrastructure. Infrastructure efficiency: How well resources are shielded from production deployment problems. Automation: Reduction in human intervention to fix problems.

Conclusion

I still experimenting with some of the frameworks in my product development. The most important goal is Better to understand, Create a structure for problems and Communicate ideas & solutions.

Thank you!