Let’s recap: how does it all fit together?

Let’s summarise what we’ve learned over the past few weeks.

Product managers use the tools and techniques we have covered in this course across all stages of the product life cycle. The process of building products is not usually this linear, but visualising it like this can help us to understand how these things fit together.

It starts with the product vision. This is both your starting point and your end goal. As we learned in Week 1, a tool we might use at this stage to help express the vision is a product vision board. Alongside your vision, you need to develop a product strategy. This is a plan for how you will get to your vision and what you need to do. An online tool you might use for this is the Business Model Canvas.

A roadmap visualises your product strategy by showing the high-level milestones or objectives of your product that lead towards achieving the vision. Remember that a roadmap should not contain dates or launch deadlines for specific features – dates belong in a delivery plan.

Product managers are responsible for the product backlog. A backlog is essentially a to-do list of tasks that the product manager communicates to the team during sprint planning and the team works to complete during the sprint, which is a focused period of work normally lasting a few weeks. There will be multiple sprints throughout each stage of product development.

There are a number of online management tools that will help with this, such as Trello or Jira.

This leads you to actually building your product. To build a successful product, you need to conduct user research, analyse data such as performance metrics, and communicate with stakeholders to ensure your product fits with business priorities. There will be stakeholders within your business and externally, so you need to ensure that you are managing all their expectations at all times, even if these sometimes compete.

All of this information informs your sprint planning and your long term strategy, which is why the diagram shows the process looping back on itself.

By completing the various tasks throughout this course, you have created your own product vision board and roadmap. You should now understand how each tool works individually and in relation to the others.

Task

Think about your current role and the various tools and techniques we have discussed throughout this course.

Which tools and techniques are the most beneficial for the work that you’re doing at your organisation and why? Have you learned about any new techniques that you will introduce to your work, or have you realised that there is a way to improve your current processes? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.