What Product Planning Framework Should You Use? 🗺️
Lessons from Airbnb, Netflix, Dropbox, Amazon, and Intercom.
As a founder, or anyone in a product leadership position, one of the most pressing questions you regularly face is: "what should you be working on?"
Product decisions, famously, can make or break companies. This is true for companies of any size, the only difference being the speed at which such decisions have an impact. For a startup, a product mistake might slow down growth, jeopardize the next funding round, and do irreparable damage within a few months. For a bigger company, the same may happen within a few years.
Optimizing your workflow for making fast, good product decisions, and do this consistently, is one of the best investments you can make for your team.
The Three Stages 3️⃣
To make good decisions in the long run, you need planning. And for the sake of reasoning, I find it useful to divide any product planning process in three stages:
💡 Coming up with new ideas
⚖️ Evaluating such ideas
🔨 Creating a plan for executing them
These steps might not be strictly sequential, or isolated from one another, but they always exist at least at a conceptual level.
They are like meta-steps.
Whatever your process is, be it very standard or something custom you have refined over the years, you can always ask: am I covering these steps properly? Is there a reliable, repeatable procedure in place for all of them?
To answer such questions, enter frameworks 👇
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