Product Management Lifecycle Framework

According to the Gartner Group, you also will not be able to move up the process maturity curve from having operational problems, to being aware of the process, to internal and external control and automation, to enterprise goal driven control, and then to agile innovation.

Process Maturity Curve

A modern framework and strong, clear processes will build a “can-do” culture – a culture of success.

Assess Your Product Lifecycle Process

16 Questions to Assess Your Product Management lifecycle

Now that you know the Six Keys to Product Success and the need to have mature, repeatable processes that follow a modern framework, the question becomes where is your organization in terms of keys to success, process and framework?

Over the years I have developed 16 questions you can ask in order to conduct an assessment.

They cover all the interpersonal and inter-organizational behavior questions that are key to understanding what is working well, what is not, and what your team should suggest to be done in order to improve. The questions and their resulting answers also cover asking about the inputs that will help your team get the job done, and what competencies they need to actually do their job. The questions also help you get a feel for how well your team understands your company’s culture, and whether or not the culture is enhancing success — or encouraging failure.

Here are the questions to assess your process:

Assessment questions:

1. What is your role?
2. Who owns the overall responsibility for the product’s success?
3. What is your process for gathering and prioritizing requirements and feature re-quest?
4. What deliverables do they own or greatly contribute to?
5. What is working best?
6. What is missing?
7. What are your biggest challenges?
8. Where are the biggest bottlenecks? What slows you down most?
9. What changes would you make?
10.  Are there things that you have done or seen at other companies that worked better?
11.   What tools and software do you use today?
    1. What is good about them?
    1. What could be improved?
12.  Specifically, what information about your customers and your product is available to your product managers and product marketing managers that helps them do their job?
    1. What additional information do they need?
13.  How do you go about assessing the competency of your  product managers and product marketing managers?
    1. What are your plans to improve those competencies?
14.   In your words, what is the vision of your company?
15.   What are the values of the company?
16.   Please describe the company’s culture.