4 charts for product managers
Product managers are the architects of product feature design, product feature functionalities, and planning for the product roadmap. The product managers also liaise with other stakeholders such as developers, UX, support, sales, customer success managers, and marketing for building a new feature, enhancing an existing feature, or fixing an existing product feature.
Product managers need to have a strategic focus not just on building the future product roadmap but also on how the end-users are using product features.
The below 4 charts provide insights to product managers on
1. Which feature to focus on for enhancement
2. Which feature to optimize for User Experience
3. Which bug to prioritize
4. Which product enhancement to be executed
Product feature frequency of use vs business value
As product features get added, product managers need to focus on how much business value is being delivered through a product feature or group of similar product features. The frequency of product feature usage is critical in helpful in cultivating habitual behaviors. Thus, changing UX drastically on those habitual features might give poor UX to existing users. As the product matures, a plot of all product features in this graph of product feature frequency of use and its associated business value will help product managers to focus on a product feature or set of product features for its enhancement.
Business value can be empirically derived based on cost savings, time savings, revenue generation, productivity gains, and so on. I recommend choosing one business value measure and applying it consistently
# of clicks vs time taken to accomplish a task
Plotting the engagement cost of a product feature (in terms of # of clicks required to accomplish a task in a product feature) vs the time taken to accomplish that task chart gives a perspective into optimizing UX for a better experience. The habitual product features should have fewer clicks and takes less time to accomplish the task.
You can optimize product features that take more # of clicks or more time to complete. Features that take more time and more # of clicks should be avoided in the design phase itself. However, if they exist think about moving them into background jobs and provide a banner message once the feature accomplishes the task it was designed for.
# of bugs/feature vs Business value of the feature
Once you start releasing features, the production bugs come and bite you! You cannot stop them but can slow them down. Product managers need to fix the root cause of the problems and strengthen the QA team to perform thorough feature testing before product release.
Practically most of the software that ships have bugs and it takes time to get rid of them to build a good quality product. A plot of # of bugs/feature and the feature’s business value will help you to prioritize the list of production bug that needs to be fixed immediately.
Time taken to fix a bug vs effort
This fairly easy one to decipher. Pick the list of bugs that takes less effort and less time to fix over anything else (quick wins). However, you also need to look at chart # 3 for the business value of that feature that contains a bug/bugs.
These charts are very different product prioritization frameworks such as RICE, MosCoW, Kano model, and so on. Combing these four charts provides a holistic perspective of the state of the product. In fact, if you add a time element to these charts, it shows you how these four charts are evolving over time. All elements in these charts (data points) are actually product features and they evolve over time. Thoughts?
