Win-Loss Analysis

If you can do only one thing, make it a win-loss analysis. With a proper taxonomy, this analysis will not only tell you why and to whom you win and lose, it will also yield a quantitative trend analysis of how your competitive position is improving (or not). Nothing tells you more about the state of your business.

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Competitive Analysis

A detailed competitive analysis helps you understand where your functional strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities lie. It gives your sales channels more confidence in competitive selling situations, as well. You can also use competitive analyses to monitor the velocity of competitors' engineering teams.

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Market Opportunity Analysis

Identifying revenue growth opportunities is one of Product Management's key responsibilities. A strong market opportunity analysis should include answers to four key questions: Who?, Why?, Why Now?, and Why Us? It must also size the opportunity, provide an assessment of the competitive landscape, enumerate any barriers to entry, and suggest some go-to-market strategies.

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Feature Request Prioritization

How do you decide what to put in your product next? I prefer to use customer input (with the understanding that we need new customers to maximize revenue growth). I like to use "spend $100" surveys and graph the results like the examples on the right. These tell you three things:

1. What should you build next?

2. Which of these will bring in the most incremental revenue?

3. Which existing customers are likely to become support problems?

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Product Requirements Document

The PRD is a deft legal document requiring the Product Manager to outline customer functional needs in enough detail that Engineering builds the right thing, but not in so much detail that it becomes a design document. He or she must always leave room for Engineering to innovate yet be precise enough for Quality Assurance (QA) to test against.

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Product Financial Performance

In my opinion, there is only one valid metric for measuring Product Manager performance - product revenue, product P&L, or product margin (depending on the nature of the business). Any Product Manager worth his (or her) salary MUST be able to do this analysis blindfolded. Good PMs may even understand product financial performance better than Accounting does.

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Revenue Growth Analysis

Where is your new revenue coming from? Where should new revenue come from? I like this analysis because it allows the CEO to set growth targets and establish strategies for meeting those targets. This is not always the easiest analysis to do, though, since "new" revenue can sometimes be hard to define precisely.

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Buyer and User Personas

Like win-loss analysis, these are foundational for a market-driven organization. Knowing who your buyer is and, more importantly, his or her internal customers helps Sales, Marketing, Engineering, Support, and Product Management align their efforts on precisely the same target and tell a better story than the competition. Significant productivity gains then ensue.

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Market Segmentation Analysis

Similar to market opportunity analysis, market segmentation analysis involves characterizing the opportunity of going up or down market. I point it out here because it's a more difficult macro-analysis that tends to draw from data that's more raw in nature and needs a more structured interpretation.

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Sales Training

All Product Manager plans are for naught if your sales channels are not capable of turning your product into money. A strong Product Manager will be able to energize and excite sales about the opportunities before them while ALSO making them more efficient.

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