What's included

• Product Brief

  A product brief is a summary of user research, direct and indirect competition, market segmentation (optional), key problems, product ideas, insights, product experience principles, goals and metrics. It is most valuable when you need to - Understand the user in detail - Be very specific about the problem space - Start with a sound basis for good idea generation and scoping - When you’re still exploring what the product might be

• Product Requirements Document (PRD)

  A PRD is an important living document that provides context about the problem, proposed solution, feature breakdown and behavior, and launch plan. If we have already completed the Product Brief, that will be the starting point and the PRD will go into more detail about key features, flows, decisions, timelines and operational checklists. The PRD is extremely valuable for aligning all stakeholders, including leadership, engineering, design, sales, marketing, legal, and customer success.

• Product Experiments

  Experiments are small product improvements meant to maximize learning from real user behavior while advancing the business towards its key objectives. We start by outlining the goals, agreeing on the metrics to measure success by, and ideating a set of experiments that we believe will move those metrics. If desired, I can then create wireframes, UI designs, and a prototype for each experiment.

• Roadmap

  A product roadmap is the concrete expression of a strategy. By laying out a clear connection from strategy to roadmap, your team can be aligned on a shared understanding of how the work they're doing will help drive product and business outcomes. We can use workshops and group exercises (with the key stakeholders in your company) to express those strategic objectives clearly, work through the set of product ideas and backlog items that relate to those objectives, and prioritize them using a heuristic rating system on impact, urgency, effort, and dependencies. I then work with the engineering team to fine-tune the roadmap to make sure it is flexible, achievable, and sets them up for high productivity. I can also work with the senior leadership team to help connect the roadmap to sales and marketing messaging, investor updates and pitches, and any other business needs.

• Metrics System

  It's nearly impossible to succeed if you don't know what success looks like. With a product metrics system, we can collaboratively decide on the key drivers of success for your business and the leading indicators that help you determine you're on the right track. We'll write your business, adoption, engagement, and retention metrics, and diagram any assumptions about how they relate to each other. Lastly, I'll work with your engineering and/or data teams to make sure that these metrics are being tracked easily and accurately.

• North Star Metric + Framework

  Identifying your North Star Metric can be challenging, but so valuable to know early on. One way to think about it is: If you were to ring a gong in your (virtual) office celebrating one user action above all others, what would that action be? For a product like LinkedIn, that might be Connects. The more connections, the stronger the network. Most other features can then be evaluated by their impact on that metric. A complete North Star Framework takes that one step further, showing all the downstream metrics that can be proven to have a causal relationship with the North Star Metric.