Product management on the example of relationships

Relationships are the product you are supposed to work on to receive good metrics and qualitative feedback. There are at least 3 product stages you can apply to the relationships: discovery, development, and delivery.?

Discovery

There are many stages in the discovery process, but we take only some of them.?

When you’re looking for a great partner, one-night stand, boyfriend, or future husband and father of your children, usually you go through the discovery process. You identify your goals and objectives to understand what kind of problem your future partner has to solve in your life. Maybe, you feel lonely and need someone to spend a lovely time together, or you just want to have fun in BDSM style. Then you move to the next stage - market research. This is about conducting comprehensive market research to understand the target audience, market trends, competitors, and potential opportunities. Understanding the target audience starts with the description of your perfect partner. For example: my future husband looks like Ragnar Lothbrok, but in a lovely $5000 suit, and he’s working in the bank. He is tall, he doesn’t smoke, and in the future, he wants to have at least 2 children. Also, he must live in Sweden. Then the market trends. You go to Tinder, Bumble, Badoo, or any other dating apps and websites and read and research profiles of the users who apply for your Ragnar Lothbrok picture. In these profiles, you look at the demands, wishes, values, and cultural background. Shortly speaking, you research consumer behaviour and demand to find out if is there a demand for marriage, or only a one-night stand. I think we can skip competitors and move to potential opportunities. Potential opportunities go to which app or website provides you with the wider choice.?

Delivery (when the choice is made)

Here we also take some of the steps.?

In product management, delivery is about bringing your product from the development stage to its final release and deployment. In relationships, it can be like moving from friends with benefits to becoming a couple who lives together. Or from a couple who lives together to a married one. The first stage of the delivery is planning and road mapping. Before starting it, you point out how your product should look in the end and what can you take as a result. It can be moving in together, marriage, having a child together, having some fun and then finishing a story and staying friends, etc. The choice is yours=) In our case, let’s take “moving in together”. You outline the scope:?

• Features. What do you need to improve or implement to get closer to the result you wanna have? The feature can be to learn how to cook, or dance, or maybe it’s about some personal upgrade.?
• Timeline. How much time do you need to achieve your result? For example: you plan to take 3 months to learn how to cook, which means that in 3 months you have to be ready to move in with your partner and actually do it! It is like launching MVP and then testing the product=)?
• Resources required for product delivery. What do you need to achieve in the final step? For example: you need money to learn how to cook because for that you must take some paid courses. Or if it is about personal upgrading, you might need to read some books or join some meetings.?
• Cross-functional collaboration. Collaboration among cross-functional teams is crucial, which means you have to work with your partner to ensure that both of you are involved in the process and aligned with the relationship's vision, goals, and timelines.?
• Quality assurance and testing. This is the stage when you conduct thorough testing to ensure the product meets quality standards and functions as intended. In our case, it could be cooking the dish and making your partner try it.?
• Then you are supposed to gather feedback from testing and your partner's insights to make necessary iterations and refinements to the dish (our product).?
• Pre-Launch preparation. It’s when you’re discussing with your partner all the conditions before moving in together. For example, on which side of the bed do you want to sleep, who’s in charge of the laundry and who’s of the rubbish, etc.?
• Launch and deployment. The day when you’re actually moving in.?
• Post-launch monitoring and optimization. You’re continuously monitoring how it works. You gather the feedback, and metrics post-launch. At this stage, you allow for ongoing optimization, of something that needs to be improved. For example, how you communicate with your partner. You also fix the bugs. Quite often I hear that men like a kind of floor drop style for the clothes, so if you don’t like it and consider it as a bug, then you should fix it. You work on feature enhancements, which means both of you work on your relationship improvements and address any concerns or issues that surface to each other.