Product management is a complex, dynamic function that helps companies meet their business goals by driving value to users, innovating product lines, and experimenting with growth levers. To have a thriving product management function, teams need a methodological approach that best suits their organizational needs and product managers.
Fortunately, there are many different product management frameworks to provide guidance to PMs on how to drive product growth. In this article, we explore the most popular product management frameworks, breaking down each methodology’s core principles, benefits, and challenges.
What Is a Product Management Framework?
Product management frameworks are methodologies that act as a blueprint for how to ideate, evaluate, build, and iterate on products, features, and user flows. Product management framework provide product leaders with:
- A general philosophy around product management that teams can operate according to.
- A specific set of steps to follow in the product development cycle.
- Rules and guidelines around prioritization, development cycles, and how to determine success.
Product teams tend to adopt a framework that best suits their organizational needs, which can be influenced by many factors, including:
- Company and team size.
- Available resources in product and development.
- The speed at which a company needs to grow according to its goals, defined by leadership, investors, and market conditions.
- Past experiences by company leaders and their general beliefs about how to build products.
- Their buyer persona or sector.
- The core offerings of their product or services.
11 Best Product Management Frameworks
If your product team still needs to commit to a specific framework, this section will help you and your team evaluate the best options according to your needs. Even if your company has committed to a specific framework, many product professionals find value in considering certain aspects of other frameworks to help them perfect their system.
Let’s take a look at some of the most respected, well-utilized product management frameworks in detail.
1. Minimum Viable Product
The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) framework is credited to Eric Reis, author of The Lean Startup, an influential book in the tech startup ecosystem. The foundational philosophy of the MVP framework is that product teams should build the absolute, most bare-bones version of a product or feature that solves a user problem – and then release it quickly, gather product feedback, and iterate fast.
Pros of the MVP framework:
- Teams avoid building unnecessary features and functionality that aren’t necessary to solve user problems. This saves development and design time and helps keep interfaces simple for users.
- There is a quick customer feedback loop. This helps teams know whether they’re on track to build the ideal solutions to their user needs rather than finding out after a long development cycle and wasting resources.
Challenges of the MVP framework:
- Defining an MVP is challenging: it’s not always clear how to define just enough; teams often struggle and debate what’s too little and what’s too much.
- Sometimes MVPs don’t delight users: since MVPs are so bare bones, sometimes teams run the risk of releasing something that doesn’t inspire their user base, which can affect things like acquisition, user adoption, or retention.
2. Working Backwards
Also called the Amazon Method since it was popularized by the tech giant, the Working Backwards framework turns much of what we take for granted about product management and reverses it, as its name suggests. The foundational philosophy is that every product or iteration begins by imagining that it has already been built, and documenting its effectiveness at solving user needs and outdoing competitors.
The exact Working Backwards documentation framework looks like this:
- Start with the customer in mind: draft a press release explaining the iteration or product and its value to the customer.
- Evaluate the opportunity: is it compelling? Why or why not?
- Find solutions: get detailed about what these product iterations will entail, and get the right approvals cross-functionally.
- Build the product roadmap: work theme by theme, dividing each aspect of the product or iterations into themes and action items.
- Create a backlog: this includes actual development tasks, stories for internal use (such as the marketing team), and the actual execution happens.
Pros of the Working Backwards Framework:
- It’s a truly user-centric approach. Since the entire product management process begins with a draft press release, it forces the product team to align on what the user value is from the get-go.
- Creates a cross-functional understanding of the customer and their needs: everyone on the team is aligned on what they’re building and why their customers need it, which leads to better product outcomes.
Challenges of the Working Backwards framework:
- Assessing customer needs accurately is a challenge: since the entire framework depends on defining the value to the customer early on if incorrect assumptions are made about user needs, teams risk moving through the framework on a doomed initiative without realizing it.
- Customer feedback can come too late. Since it focuses on building a narrative, and development comes much later in the flow, it’s possible to waste time building and iterating only to find out later that the solution didn’t adequately meet customer needs.
3. Design Sprint
The Design Sprint framework is based on the overall philosophy of Design Thinking, and its development and popularity are credited to Jake Knapp at Google Ventures. This methodological framework’s foundation is that the product team should go through sprints that involve ideation, evaluation, and iteration before releasing a product or feature.
It’s a five-step process that many teams opt to do in five-day sprints. The five steps are as follows:
- Empathize: understand user needs and challenges via market and user research.
- Define: Based on what you learned, define the problem and solution space that your product or iteration will address; specifically, define a wicked problem—or a problem that your user base does not currently have an adequate solution to.
- Ideate: Develop specific product solutions to what you’ve learned about the user and their needs.
- Prototype: Create working prototypes of the solutions that your team is considering, and use these prototypes to evaluate their potential.
- Test: Test your prototype internally and externally to evaluate its adequacy in solving the user problem you intended to solve.
Only after going through all of these steps do Design Sprint oriented teams release anything new to their user base at large.
Pros of the Design Sprint framework:
- Empowers the whole team to think like a user: since adequate time and space are given to developing genuine empathy for user pain points and needs, product teams who follow this approach often have sharp intuition about their users that serves them well throughout the product management process.
- Prototyping gives fast evaluative end-user feedback and saves development time: by understanding the effectiveness of a product or iteration through a quick design prototype, teams avoid sending something inadequate to development and wasting valuable technical resources.
Challenges of the Design Sprint framework:
- The evaluation before development relies heavily on qualitative data: generally, prototypes are tested with a small number of people, and if the team doesn’t choose the right scope of users and internal testers to give feedback, it could be that they draw incorrect conclusions before scrapping an idea and/or heading to the development phase.
- Teams can get stuck in the sprint cycle and not move to development fast enough: if idea after idea doesn’t make it to development and the cycle gets restarted, some teams can find themselves in a situation where they aren’t implementing product changes fast enough; at some point, the design process has to lead to building something.
4. North Star Framework
Developed by product analytics SaaS company Amplitude, the North Star framework is a hyper-focused approach to product management. This approach often suffers from competing priorities and endless debates about how to find success. In this framework, the team agrees on one key metric that will determine the success or failure of all product initiatives and inform roadmap prioritization. For example, a company whose top priority for a period of time is financial growth may choose monthly revenue as its north star metric. In practice, all iterations that result in higher monthly revenue are likely deemed a success, and iterations that result in lower monthly revenue are rolled back.
It also means that when the product team is prioritizing among different initiatives, it’s like to prioritize the projects that are most likely to influence revenue as opposed to projects that may influence other important metrics, but not revenue itself.
Pros of the North Star Framework
- The extraordinary amount of focus enables smoother decision making and faster work: when the team is aligned on the overall definition of success and has an objective measurement for it, it tends to limit endless debates about competing priorities.
- Being rallied around a specific metric is motivating for teams: watching a specific metric go up, and working with others to pursue its rise, is something that teams often describe as inspiring and motivating, which enables everyone to do their best work and inspires creativity and innovation overall.
Challenges of the North Star Framework
- Laser sharp focus on a particular metric means making sacrifices: most product teams want to see all of their KPIs go up and although that can happen, prioritizing a specific metric often requires losing some ground in other areas of the business for the sake of the north star, which can be difficult to accept and adhere to.
- Cross-functional alignment can be a challenge. For example, if your team decides to define monthly retention as your North Star metric, your user acquisition team may have to measure their success entirely differently to support your efforts since they likely have short-term revenue goals; the North Star framework requires a lot of effort when it comes to organizational alignment.
5. Business Model Canvas
The Business Model Canvas defines nine key segments of any initiative. It creates a framework for the team to think everything through and align cross-functionally before executing any major project initiative.
The key segments in the Business Model Canvas are:
- Key partners: who are the most important internal and external vendors, allies, and business partners for this initiative?
- Key activities: what are the most important projects or sub-initiatives that need to happen in order to deliver on your overall value proposition? What will various teams do if this proposal is enacted?
- Customer relationship: how will you get customers and manage the relationship so that your initiative is successful and your customers reap the benefits of the value that this solution provides?
- Customer segment: who is this initiative targeting? What are the specifications of the overall target audience poised to benefit from the project?
- Key resource: what are the internal resources, financial and otherwise, required to execute the key activities of the plan?
- Distribution channel: how will you reach your customer segment?
- Cost structure: what are the costs and expenses involved in the project?
- Revenue stream: how can you earn money from the initiative? What are all of the details surrounding monetization?
Pros of the Business Model Canvas
- It ensures that teams think everything through: in this framework, a project won’t move forward without considering a marketing plan or monetization.
- Its simple format facilitates cross-functional alignment. Like some other frameworks, it provides a precise structure for communicating all aspects of a product initiative, helping different teams understand what you’re doing, why, and how.
Challenges of the Business Model Canvas
- It doesn’t necessarily address pivots or setbacks: the plan can look quite nice on paper, but what if things don’t go as planned? Sometimes the canvas can be simplistic in the face of market realities.
6. Job to Be Done Framework
The Job to be Done framework (JTBD) uses the scenarios that your customers face to do product work, in sharp contrast to a lot of frameworks that rely on personas or user groups. JTBD offers a specific framework for both product management in general and writing relevant scenarios for use on the product team.
The basic steps of the framework are as follows:
- Define: what are your customers’ needs in relevant situations? Define a product solution for their end goal.
- Locate: make certain that your product is easy to use and to find.
- Prepare: build your product, specifically focusing on a simple, intuitive experience for users.
- Confirm: double check the customer need that you defined and the adequacy of your solution with market or user research.
- Execute: release your product or iteration with timing that matches your customer scenarios.
- Monitor: keep track of user behavior and all relevant product adoption metrics to understand whether or not you’re meeting customer in needs in a way that serves your business goals.
- Modify: make changes based on what you learn from monitoring user engagement and product usage.
- Conclude: settle on the best version of your product and iteration, and move forward to the next.
Perhaps the best-known aspect of JTBD is the concise situation statements that fuel product development in a customer-centric way. These statements define scenarios and why, in JTBD lingo, customers hire a product to get a specific job done.
Here is an example:
- When I order food to my house for dinner.
- I want an accurate delivery time estimate.
- So that I can plan the evening with my family and not waste any time.
Here is another example:
- When I send an email campaign to my mailing list.
- I need to make sure that I can easily see what the email looks like on various devices.
- So that I can ensure that I’m communicating professionalism with my email and making it easy for my subscribers to take action.
Each of these statements defines when customers face certain situations, what their goal is, and why. Product operation teams can use these statements as guidance to ensure that products and features align with the precise nature of the scenarios their customers experience.
Pros of the Job to Be Done Framework:
- The foundation of JTBD involves empathy for the customer: this type of in-depth understanding of what users want to accomplish and why is likely to fuel product development that genuinely answers user needs.
- JTBD doesn’t involve generalizing about groups of people and keeps a target audience as dynamic as possible. Many believe that using personas is outdated since people often behave outside of our expectations. JTBD drives product management based on situations that anyone could encounter rather than general information like demographics that may not reflect the true diversity of human behavior.
Challenges of the Job to Be Done Framework:
- JTBD doesn’t always address factors other than a goal in a given situation. Many have pointed out that things like customer identities, longer-term aspirations, and ingrained habits also greatly affect the products that customers choose, and so JTBD statements alone may be too simplistic.
- JTBD doesn’t offer much guidance about future customer needs: the scenarios focus on identifying and validating the scenarios that customers face now, but to be innovative, companies often have to make an effort to foresee future customer needs.
7. RICE Prioritization Model
The RICE Prioritization Model is designed to streamline the evaluation and prioritization of product initiatives and new features – a notoriously complex process. The model takes into account four different factors:
- Reach: what is the potential customer base for this initiative?
- Impact: what amount of users do/will take action on this initiative within a given period? For example, 1000 customers within a 30-day period.
- Confidence: do you have data or market research to support reach and impact? To what extent are you confident in the overall initiative?
- Effort: what level of internal resources are required to execute the initiative successfully?
The general formula that the RICE method utilizes is as follows: Reach + Impact + Confidence / Effort = RICE Score
Each RICE element is assigned a numerical value, and the final number allows you to prioritize various initiatives based on their scores.
Pros of the RICE Prioritization Model:
- The numerical approach simplifies the prioritization process. Product teams are accustomed to using numbers to make decisions, which makes a notoriously wordy and lengthy process faster and more intuitive.
- The numerical approach also decreases biases: sometimes, product initiatives can be prioritized because they have the highest-ranking evangelists or for other factors that don’t necessarily lead to the best product decisions; making the choice based on actual numerical rankings helps decrease the chances of this happening.
Challenges of the RICE Prioritization Model:
- The numerical system is necessarily rigid: ultimately, you have to assign number values to topics that have a lot of nuances – for example, the potential customer base could depend a lot on the amount of effort your development team will put in, and so executing the RICE equation can be challenging in cases like this.
- Ranking by number can bury small but important initiatives: since reach and impact are big factors in the equation, smaller product iterations that could delight the user may never get prioritized over potentially larger projects.
8. Opportunity Solution Tree
The Opportunity Solution Tree (OST) framework was developed by Teresa Torres, product pro and author of Continuous Discovery. Torres recommends starting with an user-oriented outcome, conducting user research to find opportunities, and then ideating and testing various solutions.
Here’s an example of a typical OST flow for a fictitious recipe app:
- Outcome: Double the amount of users who review recipes that they’ve tried.
- User Research: Conduct user interviews to understand who does add reviews, who doesn’t, and why.
- Define Opportunities: Based on user interview data, figure out how you can highlight the reviewers’ value propositions for others and create new value propositions for those who don’t see the value.
- Solutions for Each Opportunity: For example, let’s say that you found in your interviews that many people who add reviews do it because they know that their friends and family who also use the app will see it, and potentially find new recipes they recommend. So in your OST, you might define an opportunity as helping users build their foodie networks on the app and ideate solutions – ways to encourage users to connect with friends and family on the app.
Embedded in this method is not only going through the steps, but creating a tree diagram that starts with the desired outcome, lists all of the opportunities, and branches off into different potential solutions.
Pros of the Opportunity Solution Tree Framework:
- The emphasis on continuous user interviewing connects the team to its user base: since OST oriented teams are always talking with their users, they typically initiate product ideas that are very user-centric and likely to provide value while driving desired business outcomes.
- The visual nature of the trees are great collaborative tools: OSTs work well as a framework for ideating solutions to opportunities; teams often put the trees up on a screen and use it as a tool for workshopping with cross-functional teams.
Challenges of the Opportunity Tree Framework:
- The framework large searches for opportunities within a product’s existing user base, potentially leaving growth opportunities on the table: some teams may stay ‘inside the box’ in terms of brainstorming if they follow this method too closely and don’t extend their user interviews to include less intuitive, not–yet-acquired user types.
- OSTs depend on testing many different solutions, which can be time consuming: testing various solutions, particularly with more involved product initiatives, can take a lot of time and this framework doesn’t give much guidance around how to prioritize when you can’t realistically test something in the wild with users.
9. Weighted Impact Scoring
The Weighted Impact Scoring method is popular among product teams and is considered a relatively standard way to help make prioritization decisions. This framework involves taking each product initiative that needs to be prioritized and defining:
- The main objectives for each initiative are often metrics, like conversion rate or monthly retention.
- A ‘weight’ for each objective in the form of a percentage for a total of 100%: for example, if your conversion rate is your top criteria or objective, you may give it a weight of 50%, and then give the other objectives less – all of which add up to 100%.
- A score for each objective: based on the data you have, you score the potential impact of each objective, generally using simple numbers, like a scale from 0-5.
Then, you calculate the score for each initiative as follows: Final number for each objective = weight X impact score
Once you have a score for each potential product initiative, you can order your initiatives according to their scores and prioritize them accordingly.
Pros of the Weighted Impact Scoring Method:
- Similar to other product management frameworks, this method gives certainty by relying on numbers. Once the team goes through the steps and calculates the individual scores for each initiative, it’s simple to prioritize concretely.
- Qualitative and metric-based scoring are factored into each initiative’s overall score, making each score more nuanced. Teams weigh the importance of metrics and choose their impact score based on many factors, such as the current market conditions, which can be hard to quantify objectively.
Challenges of the Weighted Impact Scoring Method:
- The flip side of subjective impact scoring is that it is subject to biases: since there is no precise method for choosing an impact score, the team member who chooses it is still left to their perspectives and biases that could affect the overall score and resulting prioritization.
- The score doesn’t take into account practical factors, such as internal resources: Some of the highest-scoring initiatives could require a lot of resources, and therefore, prioritizing by number may not be as simple as it seems.
10. Kano Model
The Kano Model is a unique model that prioritizes and groups product initiatives according to customer needs and satisfaction. It is based on the assumption that providing value to users will help a company reach its goals.
To utilize the Kano Model, teams put product initiatives on two axes:
- X-axis: the extent to which a specific customer need is fulfilled.
- Y-axis: the extent to which a customer is likely to be satisfied – from not satisfied to delighted.
The central idea is to prioritize initiatives that meet real customer needs and come as close to genuine delighting your users.
Pros of the Kano Model:
- The model directly challenges the MVP approach, prioritizing customer delight: though teams may still try to release the minimum viable product, Kano encourages teams to factor in customer delight, which may very well have a positive impact on user value and internal KPIs.
- Kano is a very visual approach, which helps with cross-functional alignment: looking at different product initiatives on the two axes is a potent internal tool for communicating the logic behind specific projects, increasing cross-functional excitement and motivation to the benefit of work quality.
Challenges of the Kano Model:
- The model doesn’t factor in the resources required or specific metrics: some product professionals feel that this method is too reliant on perceptions of customer reactions and ignores other important factors, like development and design resources and/or monetization challenges.
- Kano involves a lot of subjectivity: for example, the team could very easily miscalculate the extent to which something meets a specific customer need and/or that it has the potential to delight the user base.
11. Spotify Squads
The structure of product teams at Spotify is legendary, and for good reason. Spotify popularized the concept of Squads, which are small, autonomous, cross-functional teams that own their area of the product from beginning to end.
In this framework, each squad has product people, technical leads, and any other representation needed to get actual product work done from beginning to end (for example, organizations that have QA may have a QA person on each squad).
The product team has multiple squads, and each one is responsible for ideating, planning, and implementing product initiatives in accordance with its long-term goals for its area of expertise.
Pros of Spotify Squads:
- Small, autonomous teams move fast: by giving each product area adequate expertise and resources in the form of a squad, an organization allows product teams to move quickly without having to coordinate resources and planning with people working on other areas of the product.
- Squads inspire nuanced cross-functional collaboration: since tech leads and product leads are all sharing the responsibility for moving forward as a product team, squad leaders often work together closely rather than operating in their silos – to the benefit of product development and innovation.
Challenges of Spotify Squads:
- It’s a challenging structure when different areas of the product are interconnected: the autonomous, small teams that Spotify Squads are famous for may find it challenging to be genuinely autonomous when product iterations in one area significantly affect another area.
- Each team requires senior-level expertise. In order for squads to be independent and move quickly, each squad needs to have both senior tech and senior product representation to ensure that the required expertise is present.
Now that we’ve reviewed some of the best product management frameworks, you probably noticed that no matter which framework(s) a team chooses, monitoring user behavior and engaging users are key elements of all product management methodologies. With Whatfix, you can streamline many aspects of your product management.
Let’s look at exactly how Whatfix can fuel product management on your team.
Whatfix Product Analytics is a no-code event tracking solution that helps your team visualize and analyze user behavior. Your team can use Whatfix Product Analytics to:
- Identify friction points with Funnels and User Journeys.
- Collect customer feedback with Surveys.
- Segment your users with Cohorts to understand user behavior in a more nuanced way.
- Compare feature usage and other user behavior between different groups, or over a period of time, using Trend Insights.
- Extract AI-powered insights based on your user behavior, trends, and product.
Whatfix Product Analytics gets you the nuanced data points that your product team needs to give value to users and meet your business goals – fast, without ever writing a line of code.
As discussed, choosing the right product initiatives with a great framework is at the cornerstone of product success. However, sometimes even when you do great product work, your team has to work hard to create awareness around new product initiatives and drive users to adopt something new.
With the Whatfix DAP, a no-code digital adoption platform, you can increase user adoption of your product iterations – and your chances of success by:
- Creating personalized user onboarding experiences for users that give them an overview of what you offer.
- Easily update your knowledge base with Self Help as you make product changes to make sure that users can find the help that they need when they’re navigating something new.
- Use tooltips and other in-app guidance to give users tips and knowledge exactly when they need it in every product flow.
- Alert customers and end-users of new features, product updates, upcoming webinars, new resources, and more with Pop-Ups.
- Use Surveys to get quick feedback on new product initiatives and better understand the extent to which you’re meeting your customers needs.
Ready to power your product management with Whatfix? Schedule a demo today!
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