Technical Product Management

Last updated February 27, 2023

Below are a set of questions to help think through how well a product is performing and what the future of that product will look like.

Product Vision

• Why is the product important?
• Who are our users?
• What is the vision for the product? If you could have exactly what you want, right now, what would it look like/do?
• What features/use cases does this product expect to support? What features/use cases are out of scope for this product?
• What features would need to be developed and what ideation or iteration would need to happen before it looks like your vision? Are there dependencies between those features?
• What is the value of each feature? What types of use cases would require us to deliver that feature?
• What does the product roadmap look like? In what order should those features be added?

Is the product good? (Key Performance Indicators (KPIs))

• Does it solve our users’ use cases? Is it easy to use? What use cases does it not solve that maybe it should?
• Is it fast enough? Where would we need to invest to make it faster?
• Is it reliable enough? Do we have the right level of visibility into what’s happening? Do we know when anything goes wrong, and do we get alerts if and only if we can do something about it?
• Is it maintainable? What investment would be required to make it maintainable?

Tactical/Implementation

• Where are we in the product life cycle/maturity? Development/growth, Maintenance? How much more are we planning to invest in this product before our focus shifts elsewhere?
• How does the product roadmap realistically fit into the team’s backlog? How does the importance of the key features for this product compare to other products this team owns? When are we likely to deliver key missing features?