Top 10 Product Management Frameworks

Did you know that one in five products entering the market fails to satisfy customer demands? How come some digital solutions succeed while others don’t? Well, product management is the key.

Effective product management is an integral part of any product development process. It ensures your software corresponds to users’ needs, your team works well together, and your business benefits as much as possible.

It’s also worth mentioning that PM is a comprehensive process. There are various frameworks for product management for it to go as smoothly as possible. Make sure to adopt one of them to create cutting-edge digital solutions.

For its part, Arounda will provide you with an ultimate list of the best product management frameworks. We’ll also explain why you need one and how to choose the right PM strategy for your product.

Being an experienced digital product agency, we can tell you more about PM frameworks. Our vast background helped us deliver over 130 successful projects and satisfy numerous customers worldwide. So, let’s get straight to the point.

Why Do Companies Adopt Product Management Frameworks?

Let’s first ensure you know what is product management framework. It’s a set of procedures a company undergoes to develop a product following its timelines, budgets, and business goals.

Why implement product management strategy frameworks? Here are the primary reasons:

Create a Potentially Successful Product

Using the PM framework, you have a precise action plan for creating your digital solution. You also have a good understanding of the market and user needs. All this significantly increases your chances of success and reduces the risk of failure.

Organize Your Product Management Process Better

The product manager’s responsibilities go beyond merely bringing the digital solution’s idea to reality. It also involves managing crucial business indicators, establishing the product’s strategic goals, communicating with customers, etc. The framework unifies all these duties, making the product management process smoother.

What Are the Main Types of Product Management Frameworks?

There are numerous framework examples available for a product manager. Yet, we can divide all of them into three main types:

1. Product management prioritization frameworks. These are frameworks that help you establish the procedure for product creation tasks.
2. Product management strategic frameworks. Thanks to these frameworks, you can collect data and analyze it, think over development strategy, and make critical product-related decisions.
3. Product management discovery frameworks. These are the frameworks you use in the discovery phase to test your idea, find the problems your product will solve, and discover opportunities for your digital solution.

10 Product Management Frameworks Used by Billion-Dollar Companies

Let’s move on to what we promised to cover. Take a look at the ten best product management frameworks:

1. Minimum Viable Product

This framework entails that only by studying customer feedback you can build a high-quality product. This strategy involves developing a basic product version, introducing it to the audience, and further reviewing user opinions. Based on that feedback, you make decisions about future improvements to your digital product.

2. Storytelling

It’s one of the basic product management framework examples. According to this method, your product is like a story with its beginning, body, and end.

The beginning is finding your target audience and ensuring your idea’s viability. The body is the realization of the product concept and its entry into the market. The end is the results you get, for example, the growth of your audience or profits.

3. DIGS

DIGS belongs to product management interview frameworks and is similar to the storytelling approach. This abbreviation can be broken down as follows:

• Dramatize the problem
• Indicate alternatives
• Go through the solutions
• Summarize your product concept

4. Think It, Build It, Ship It, Tweak It

It’s the framework used by Spotify. It works as follows:

• Think it. It is the stage where ideas are brainstormed and tested.
• Build it. This step involves creating a minimum viable product and pre-testing it among a small group of users.
• Ship it. At this stage, the team delivers the product to a wider audience and continues to study feedback.
• Tweak it. This step involves analyzing the feedback to implement any improvements to the product.

5. Working Backward

It’s an enterprise product management framework established by Amazon. It involves the reverse approach to the traditional product development process. You work as if you already have a finished product to determine whether it meets your customers’ needs.

You announce your project with a press release in which you discuss the value of your product and the solutions it can offer. You also compare your software to others on the market. When you are 100% confident in the viability of your idea, you can use this press release as a roadmap for product development.

6. CIRCLES

CIRCLES is a set of procedures you must follow to create a quality product. You can interpret this abbreviation as follows:

• Understand the situation. Here you have to study the market and determine your product requirements.
• Identify the customer. At this stage, you should define your typical user.
• Report customer’s needs. This step involves determining the reasons why users need your product.
• Cut through prioritization. Estimate the return on investment.
• List solutions. Identify possible solutions to problems.
• Evaluate tradeoffs. Be objective and determine what compromises you are ready to make.
• Summarize. Finally, comprehensively explain your product concept, considering the previous points.

7. Product Growth

The product growth framework is one of the approaches used by the eCommerce giant Shopify. Its concept is to promote the growth of product adoption. This framework consists of the following steps:

• Stage your company. It would help if you determined your business and product’s stage.
• Establish your strategic goal. In this step, you define the primary purpose of your product.
• Model your funnel. It would help if you also determined how users will connect to your product.
• Define your north star metric. Here you have to determine a point that will help you ensure you are doing everything right.
• Determine your priorities. At this step, you should determine which areas of your product are more significant.
• Set milestones. Determine the targets you should achieve, considering your strategic goal and north star metric.
• Work on implementation. Think through the product production process from its goals to writing the code and creating the design.
• Gather a multidisciplinary team. Make sure your team comprises professionals in development, design, project management, marketing, business analysis, etc.

8. 5 Whys

Each product is a solution to some problem or issue. The idea behind this framework is to ask the same question five times.

First, you define the problem that your product should solve. Then you come up with a question. For example, why is there still such a problem in the market? If your answer opens your eyes to a new issue, then ask the same question to that newly discovered problem. 

Asking five times is enough to get to the principal, the most critical problem that your product has to solve.

9. GIST

GIST stands for goals, ideas, steps, and tasks. This framework is excellent for agile planning and product development.

First, you define the purpose of your product. Then you come up with several ideas, choosing the most relevant one. Next, you define the steps to bring your concept to life and break them into separate tasks.

10. 5 Es

The 5 Es framework explores the user experience with your product. It helps to understand your customers better and create an effective development strategy based on this. Let’s see what these 5 Es are:

• Entice. Here you have to understand your customers’ requirements.
• Enter. This step involves determining how the user reaches your product.
• Engage. Here you need to figure out how user-friendly your product is.
• Exit. At this stage, you should determine how easy it was for the user to solve the problem with your product and if there were any obstacles.
• Extend. Here you should think about how to retain users after they have satisfied their needs with your product.

Choosing the Right Product Management Framework for You

We’ve listed only ten product management frameworks. But in reality, there are many more of them. So it’s unsurprising that you can get confused about choosing the most suitable one.

It all depends on the individual requirements of your business. Our advice is not to follow the most popular frameworks; but to research your needs, ideas, goals, and vision.

The best way to decide on the most suitable framework is to try several approaches that appeal to you. In this way, you can choose the most convenient one.

Final Thoughts

Product management frameworks are the best solution for creating high-quality and successful digital products. It’s a way to streamline development by having all the procedures at your fingertips.

If you want to adopt a product management strategy but are unsure which one, drop us a line. Arounda has extensive experience creating digital solutions and has tested numerous effective frameworks.

We’ll study your requirements and suggest what’s best for you.

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