There are only three basic techniques of approach product planning.
They cover almost all the key scenarios. Clearly, between them, they have several variations and branches but the high-level concepts are almost invariable unless you are doing something completely off the reservation(which I recommend you do if possible!)
Top down
- This starts at the C-level. Goals are set. Expectations with investors are set.
- The CEO/CFO might direct the company for a 30% growth in the top line. Note this is very different from a 30% in net revenue, much less net income. Net revenue is net of traffic acquisition costs, broker fees etc. depending on your business, so be specific here.
- This immediately translates into team level goals. If you are an ops heavy startup you’ll need to ask
How does the world look like, at 30% more gross revenue? Whats my current GR/HC? Can this be extrapolated? Can I assume I have this budget? What else will need to be true? Would product need to ship some enhancements for this to work
At this point you need to start planning beyond your team. But as Andy Grove said
“As a middle manager, you are in effect a chief executive of an organization yourself… As a micro CEO, you can improve your own and your group’s performance and productivity, whether or not the rest of the company follows suit.”
Bottom up
This is based on solid UXR.
You build hypothesis on where you see the market going, or ideally, where do you want to take it?
At a startup I led product at, we experimented with video cameras on cars to generate foot traffic street-level insights. We ran this past media buyers in NYC and elsewhere to get their point of view. This takes time and more than that commitment.
But there are simpler forms of bottom up planning too
- You could simply state foundational product improvements you want to make
- You could talk about existing commitments to customers or experiments you want to run
- All of these are different from top-down but, they need to have metrics tied to them that leadership can get behind, else getting funded will be hard and it’ll be an uphill battle
One thing to note here is you can still use solid UXR (whether its surveys or customer interviews to shape the narrative, and ideally shape your own assumptions)
Course correction
This is the wild card.
- Market trends change
- New competitors emerge, with novel business models
- Regulations change , leaving you with no options
You need to reflect this in your roadmap, knowing this will always be a wild card.
Use data science as your friend here. The more data you use the better your decisions will be in each of the three cases
