- Fork the Github repository - http://github.com/WPOCanvas/Model/
- Find your knowledge area in the models folder
- Fill the given template (Included in each area document) with the following content
- Subtitle - (140 maximum words)
- Add a featured image representing the content - (Please check the copyrights using google image settings)
- Description - (160 maximum words) - Summarize the content added in the “What” section
- Why - (200 maximum words) - Summarize the content added in the “Why” section
- How - List of bullet points - Summarize the content added in the “How” section
- Further Reading - Name and the reference as shown in the template
- Send the PR
- As soon as the PR is merged https://www.winningproduct.com/models will be updated
- The contributors will also be updated under the post - Github image and name
- References should be from valid sources
- Don't add lengthy content, instead refer to references for further reading. Stick to Description, Why and How sections
- In the how section, if there are multiple methods, you should recommend one method.
Create a pitch deck (or equivalent) to present the idea to different stakeholders such as investors, partners and potential customers.
This is where you explore into different possibilities before locking down on a focused product concept
- Research into current market state, domain trends and study existing competition to understand the context
- Evaluate business/financial viability to ensure long-term continuity and RoI
- Gather information about potential target markets and customer segments and the pros/cons of focusing on each
- Analysis of related user personas to understand pains, gains and behavior of users
- List down the primary benefits to users in relieving their pains and providing gains
- Understand different paths a user takes to accomplish goals using the product
- Study current world & market trends to align the purpose for the product with a mega trend
Now that you have explored different avenues, start locking-down on a specific area with best potential
- Verify if the solution is technology feasible to implement with available resources
- Translate main features into a high-level prototype for stakeholders to obtain feedback
- Elaborate business context within the product operate and achieve the business goals
- Elaborate the purpose of the product’s existence from customer's point-of-view
- Identify the minimum set of features that can gain maximum learning and has low cost of implementation.
- Underline architecture of the platform, including hosting considerations, DevOps and tech stack selection
- Architecture blueprint for implementing functionalities, including product components such as licensing, SSO, business APIs etc.
- Validating if your solution effectively solves the customer’s basic problem
Analyze deep in to the focused area to elaborate details required for solving the problem
- Define the brand personality of the product including visual theme, logo, name, etc.
- Define the content structure, data entities, data relationships, storage formats
- Define a set of message to test against target market including a short pitch, tagline, ad messages, etc.
- Estimate the development efforts for functional and non-functional features
- Estimate for production implementation, training and running cost estimations in operation
- Build a detailed prototype to demonstrate how the final product would operate and obtain feedback
- Makes sure that our product is well tuned to solve the problem specifically for the identified target market
- Lay the features and releases in a product evolution timeline
Plan ahead to get the best our of next stages
- The tactical action plan that outlines the steps necessary to deliver the unique value proposition to customers and achieve competitive advantage.
- Detailed blueprint of software components and the blueprint of infrastructure which it runs on
- Logical view of the data in the product, initial plan to maintain data dimensions for analytics purposes.
- Exploring low cost and smarter options to gain a rapid market reach in a short time or to find the product market fit.
- Definition of the engineering process which outlines coding best practices and devops strategy. Team structure should define the key purpose of each individual.
- Quality assurance process, test automation strategy, verification strategy for feature development and in releases.
- Source control strategy, code integration process, test automation strategy, automatic deployment strategy and automated resource management strategy
- Process of defining, documenting and maintaining the product requirements.
- Strategy of moving a product from concept to customer online
- Offering a “single face” of the sales team rather than clients being having to interact with multiple agents across both sales and service throughout their relationships
- Coming up with a suitable product theme that suits your market preference
- Define key matrices which are quantitative measures that helps to estimate the progress, quality, and health of a software testing effort
Execute the plan
- List down the things you need to do before and on product lunch
- Start capturing and managing your potential customers. Invest on Customer Relationshpip Management system to track and manage customer leads.
- Establish process to ensure code quality. Think about static code analysis and peer reviews
- Look at the regression tests and start automating repetitive tests. Make the tests run ideally on each commit and as early as development deployments. At least do a nightly run.
- Build and evolve plans analyze the patterns of potential customers to your marketing sites.
- Build mechanisms to gather user experience statistics from users and be open minded to the required changes.
- Create a process to collect and manage technical debt during the product development. Think of non-functional requirements here.
- Understand the data protection policies in target markets. Device strategies for data anonymization and limiting developer access to production data.
- Build and evolve mechanism to track anonymous user behavior in the system with an aim of providing better UX.
- Think about which features should go first, revisit the product roadmap if needed. Consider user feedback
- Define the strategy to bill users. Think about strategies such as price/feature tiers, pay as you go, etc...
- Define what kind of code quality, load testing matrices which qualifies ok for a production release. Either have automation or manual verification in place to check them.
- Build mechanisms for billing. Track usages for different features. Think about feature toggles for different users. Think about restrictions based on price tears and usages.
- Create a quick ramp up guide on both domain, technical and process knowledge for new team members. Make them aware of their purpose in the team.
Focus on stabilizing the product after the previous rapid development cycle
- Bolster the architecture to support future features and technical improvements without changing the core. Keep investing on the architecture in each iteration to keep it up to date and ahead of feature development.
- Increase ‘quality’ traffic to the web site by pushing relevant content to the right minded people via digital marketing channels such as search engine optimization and social media Continue to help, support and maintain a relationship with both potential and existing customers.
- Go through continuous improvement cycles of identifying, classifying, prioritizing, remediating, and mitigating of software vulnerabilities.
- Make sure your application scales as users grow. Explore scale up and scale out strategies. Think of geo scaling and inherent eventual consistency and fault tolerance mechanisms.
- Build support in your architecture to extend your product into portfolio of products. Consider things like creating a common platform and single sign on.
- Start educating prospects, build awareness of your organization and its products, build trust and build a good relationship making it more likely that the potential client will choose you when it's time to buy.
- Extract unique intellectual property from your business and technical strategy. Make sure that they either patented and non-disclosure agreements are in place with relevant stakeholders.
- Strategize on enhance the image of the company and focus on positive media coverage
- How to handle errors and exceptions in the application. How to inform users on such events without making them panic? Analyze the error and exception statistics.
- Plan, manage, schedule and build a process to develop and release through different stages and environments. Consider testing and deployment as well.
- Create a budget for a specific time considering the knowns and also consider historical data, known unknowns and a buffer to create a financial projection.
- Create a plan B if things go south. Consider technical, market and environmental factors. Do various drills to make sure the readiness.
- Do a win loss analysis on your leads to understand why you lost and what are the strong points in your application. Analyze these results with different demographics in mind.
- Hotfixes are inevitable. So, define a proper process and a deployment mechanism to handle hotfixes.
Fine tune the product to achieve the maximum output
- Roadmap on how to organize and analyze data (i.e. system usage etc, client survey) to enable R&D and decision making
- Detailed strategy for marketing the product.
- Discuss the importance of product documentation and user training. What is the difference between documentation and training?
- Adapt industry standards and certifications to design stronger, safer, more reliable products and bring those products to market as quickly as possible.
- How to correctly manage contracts with customers
- Defining a brand of the product team to have a powerful impact on team's alignment, effectiveness and engagement with each other and the rest of the organization.
- Articulate market segment specific messages to be published via SM in order to generate call to action traffic from buyer personas
- How to optimize system pefroemance for best user experience, based on performance requirements and analysis on existing performance
- Paint a clear picture of what has happened across the infrastructure from organizing and analysing system generated logs. This provides an insight to spot product issues that might impact performance, compliance, and security
- Structure the customer support team with correct strategies, tools and frameworks for smoother operations with product's growth
- Improving your user experience so that people will be more likely to convert on your website
- As the product sclaes to meet a growig customer base, how to manage and maintain customer support cases effectively
Your product is now cash cow. Milk it the maximum while you can.
- Strategize product 'invent or improve' decisions aligning with business goals and timelines.
- How to make build vs buy decisions: cost, risk, and the problem you are trying to solve
- How can you calculate feature usage so that you are left with clear, actionable insights.
- How to monitor application health in order to analyse its operation and performance, and to detect and alert about possible errors.
- Marketing plan that makes use of recommendations and word of mouth to grow the product's customer base through the networks of its existing customers. Also how to market higher sales to existing customers (upsales).
- Identify under which circumstances the stakeholders will agree to retire the product, and support model for EOS
- Roadmap moving data from one location to another, one format to another, or one application to another to optimize data handling as the product grows with its user base.
- Roadmap for moving to better technologies to improve customer experience and reduce costs, while boosting security, availability, performance and agility
The product's time is up. Move to a better platform to leverage on new technologies
- Systematic plan to smoothly migrate users from the old platform to new platform without loosing users’ data.
- Destroy the data that you don’t want and return the data that belongs to users.
- Create a plan to document both tacit and implicit knowledge and create knowledge ramp up materials to transfer knowledge to new team members.
- Create a strategy to both migrate users to a new platform while running the old platform in parallel. This gives users time and ease of mind to upgrade with a failsafe.