ADVANCE? Course Introduction
Introduction to How to Operationalize Digital Innovation through Proper Product Management
Hopefully you have arrived on this article after reading the introduction to this course. If you don’t know what ADVANCE? is please read the course introduction article.
Welcome to ADVANCE?, A Free Product Management Certification Course for Aspiring Product Managers, and the Enterprises that hire them. In the this section of the course I will outline the product development lifecycle and the composition of ADVANCE? Digital Product team. Exposing each team members area of responsibilities, experience level, average salaries, and career progression path.
The Lifecycle of a Digital Product
In order to create innovative digital products we first must outline the phases of digital product. Digital products begin with Innovation. Once shipped they Evolve and Scale. Eventually they Decline and finally are Sunsetted. These four phases;
make up the birth and eventual death of a digital product. The ADVANCE? framework focuses on the Innovation phase and does not cover how to Evolve and Scale existing products, identify Declining products, or how or when products should be Sunsetted. A subsequent framework will be released at a later date to guide product teams during the Evolve & Scale, Decline and Sunset.
Innovation Phase:
During Innovation, the ADVANCE??Product Team focuses on researching viable product hypotheses, prototyping the product hypothesis, validating the prototypes with users, pitching a viable product to stakeholders, defining an approved product's requirements to build, and shipping an Minimum Viable Product, or as we call it Alpha to users .
The key activities are identified by the letters in the A, D, V, A, N,C,E of the ADVANCE? acronym, and can be completed in one week during a design sprint.
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Alpha - After a product vision is set, the pitch has been delivered and approved, the?ADVANCE??Product Team refers to the requirements outlined in Empower your Team to build an Alpha version of the product based on the artifacts created above.
The Composition of an ADVANCE? Product Team
Building successful products takes a team of highly skilled professionals. Yet, I have found that most product teams do not have clearly defined roles. As a result, I see that many product managers often experience burn out and or “step on toes” of other team members.
ADVANCE? Product Teams are collaborative. Everyone’s voice matters. Still boundaries exist. Every team member knows exactly where their responsibilities begin and end and where they might overlap with each other. In the section below we will identify the roles, responsibilities of each member in ADVANCE? Product Team.
Product Manager?(sometimes multiple Product Managers including specialities like AI Product Manager, Data Product Manager, Growth Product Manager, and Technical Product Manager) -are accountable for the overall product's success as it relates to business objectives. They outline the product vision, and roadmap, and align the team by facilitating communication and cross collaboration. They ensures that the team has the resources that it needs, and removes any impediments to the team in a timely manner.
Program Manager - identifies and coordinating the interdependencies among projects, products, and other important strategic initiatives across an organization to ensure successful execution of shipping the roadmap.
Product Designer - Responsible for interpreting the requirements of user experience and user interface for the product. Product designers are user experience experts with a keen eye for design. They research user needs and synthesize those needs into shared team artifacts. Afterwards they translate user needs into prototypes which are tested and refined until users find the experience desirable and usable.
Business Analyst- extracts, and interprets the macro forces, user metrics, and other external and internal data sources to identity changing market trends, barriers to user adoption, or friction in the organizations desired user behavior. BA's conduct competitive analysis including competitors users reviews, trade publication findings, and other sources to identify weakness in competitive threats. Furthermore, BA’s will collaborate with an organization’s Finance, Marketing, and Sales teams to procure product performance data. They will then analyze, and summarize this data to create product performance reports and socialize them with the team.
Full Stack Developer?(sometimes multiple Developers such as Front-End Developer, API or Integrations Developer, and Backend Developers) - collaborates with the team to determine technical feasability during research and prototype phases. Later one or more developers will be responsible to build, ship, and maintain the product based requirements and deep collaboration with the product manager and product designer.
Product Marketing Manager - is responsible for communicating the value of the product to the user. They facilitate focus groups, create case studies, generate blog posts and other web content used to promote new products and features, author press releases and briefings, conduct user acceptance testing, and liaise with the marketing team to promote the product to users.