Three disciplines of product

Every day is subject to context switching in the life of a PM. It’s the breadth of exposure to user experience, innovative technology, and business strategy that create the best ideas. Across these disciplines, the PM often represents the final business "gatekeeper" for the success of the product.

But it’s important to apply the principles within each discipline across all stages of the product development process. It's not quite waterfall, and it's not quite agile.

Consider this process as something that resembles concentric circles: the circles contain user experience, technology, and business in a reinforced loop, but the circles get ever smaller to focus on that center sweet spot of PMF. The goal is to make it easier and faster to set up the circles every time.

Even if the idea doesn’t land, at least the execution was certain.

User Experience

Figure out how to build something that the user really wants and needs to improve their quality of life.

Discovery: User feedback, feature requests, competitive research. Market surveys.

Delivery: User flows, user and buyer personas, wireframes and prototypes for user testing, user testing.

Deploy: Iterate and test and iterate. Experiment with multiple variants of everything.  

Technology

Figure out how to use technology to help users in the most efficient and scalable way possible.

Discovery: Architecture diagrams, data modeling, infrastructure setup.

Delivery: Scaffold and hack method. Keep iterating small and large pieces to join together the bigger picture.

Deploy: QA. QA again. Schedule launch, and monitor.

Business

Figure out how to generate value for the business by using the value that's created for the users.

Discovery: Market research, industry trends, market sizing. Target KPIs. ICP.

Delivery: Sales process. Internal and external training. Documentation. Business development and partnerships.

Deploy: GTM across product marketing, sales, customer success.