Your Guide to Product Planning: Stages, Strategies, and Examples
Every great product starts with well-executed product planning. And every product plan starts with a confused product manager who has no idea how to make that plan.
No worries, we’ve all been there, and even the most seasoned ones among us have started planning our first product with the same uncertainty. But, we’ve all ended up understanding what it’s all about and how we can make an effective product plan that helps us reach our goals.
Let me guide you through the entire product planning process and provide you with all the tips, tricks, and best practices you need to succeed.
What Is Product Planning?
Product planning is the process of creating a blueprint for the different phases of your product's lifecycle. It is a high-level strategic exercise that gives you, your team, and your stakeholders a clear vision of the future steps you want to take to build and grow your product.
This process is quite versatile and can be applied to any new product you are planning to build—be it a refrigerator, a box of 2-inch nails, or an AI-powered SaaS marketing automation platform. Within software product management, product planning ensures that the resources and time you invest into your product (building, product launch, and growth) ultimately pay off.
Product Planning vs. Go-to-Market Planning
Simply put, product planning pertains to the decisions you make in order to build the product, and go-to-market planning is about the decisions you'll make when planning to launch a product to the public.
Here are some examples of decisions you'd make within each type of planning to better illustrate the differences:
Product Planning:
- Which features should we prioritize for development?
- What will our product pricing strategy look like?
- What are our targets for revenue, user adoption, and other key success metrics?
Go-to-Market Planning:
- What kinds of marketing collateral should we develop for the product launch?
- How will we train the sales team to sell the new product?
- What strategies can we use to promote the product after launch?
- What kinds of PR and marketing campaigns will we launch to boost industry awareness before the official release?
Why Is Product Planning Important?
Product planning is important because it significantly increases your chances of turning a (healthy!) profit. From my experience working with a variety of products (from ones in the ideation or product concept phase to more mature products), product planning has been one of the core determinants of success.
No matter the stage of the product, if it has no product plan or a flawed one, it’s more likely to fail than the ones with good product plans. In fact, research has shown that a sound plan can increase your chances of going beyond the startup phase by 129%.
Generally speaking, product planning is valuable because it helps you:
- Align Stakeholders: One of the worst situations that a product manager can find themselves in is when product stakeholders have conflicting visions for the product. No matter what path you take, at least one of them will think that you are going the wrong way. However, with a documented product plan, all stakeholders end up on the same page.
- Manage Risks: One of the key stages of product planning is identifying potential risks and defining strategic plans to mitigate each one. This way, no matter the risk you face in building and growing the product, you always know how to act.
- Optimize Time and Resources: Another key element of the planning process is having a clear understanding of the required time and resources. You know exactly when to start growing your development team, bring in a product owner, hire customer support, product marketing, and others.
Overall, product planning brings clarity, efficiency, and focus to your company and lets you get the most out of your resources.
3 Key Product Planning Principles
It’s quite easy to create a faulty product plan. Many of us (myself included) have had at least one story from our career (that we’re particularly not proud of) where we screwed up with our product planning.
Luckily, making a great product plan is completely doable. Follow the core principles of product management, and you’re good to go. Here are some of the key principles that I suggest you pay attention to when making your plan:
1. User-Centric Mindset
Great products are not the ones that simply make a gazillion dollars for their investors. Instead, they’re the ones that make the world a better place for their users and make a gazillion dollars as a result.
No matter what you do in product management, users should be the center of your processes. I love to use Slack’s “Catch Up” feature as an example of this mindset.
Looking at 50+ conversations each day and deciding to keep some of them unread so you can look at them later was a major pain in the past. Slack’s user-centric product planning, however, resulted in a Tinder-like swipe experience that lets you go over all of your unreads in mere minutes.
2. Adaptability and Agility
You may have heard the old military proverb, “No plan survives the first battle.”
No matter how well you plan, the moment you enter your product into the market, things can start changing rapidly, and your plans may become obsolete. So, great product plans should have the ability to change priorities baked into them.
I'll use Slack again as an example. It started as an internal tool for a company that was developing games. Their efforts in game dev failed, but the agile product plan their company had adopted allowed them to pivot and sell their internal messaging tool instead.
3. Strategic Alignment
A product plan without strategic alignment will result in you building something great for users that is meaningless for your business and long-term vision.
When Elon Musk was building Falcon reusable rockets, it focused heavily on the factor of reusability because it would later let him build reusable Mars shuttles (a.k.a. The Starship).
If his focus had been to win contracts to take satellites to low-earth orbit, he would have focused on building traditional rockets that were slightly cheaper to operate than the competition and not spent billions on developing the (unbelievable) first-stage landing tech.
The 7 Stages of Product Planning
The way you do product planning will differ depending on your industry, market, users, and many other factors. However, there are some key steps that you need to follow in any case:
1. Define The Vision
Create a clear definition of what you want to achieve in the long term. A great product vision describes a future where people solve their problems with the help of your new features. Musk’s vision is to travel to Mars as easily as you take a plane ride to visit your relatives in another state.
2. Conduct Market Research
Take a look at the needs in the market and at the competitors who cover them. Ideally, you would find gaps in the market that you can fill yourself. Mattermost, for instance, is a locally hosted Slack alternative that is popular among security-sensitive enterprises who would never send their data to Slack’s servers.
3. Talk To Your Users
You can’t be user-centric if you don’t get to hear what your users say and what challenges they face in their day-to-day. Customer feedback, for instance, let AirBnB significantly simplify its property review form and drastically increase review quality.
4. Create an Agile Roadmap
The keyword here is “agile.” Never stick to your roadmap or backlog items dogmatically. Roadmaps are living documents that can change along with the changes in the market.
5. Build an MVP
Next, it's time to put together your minimum viable product—ensuring that you're building it with iteration in mind. You’ll never get a perfect product on your first try. Nobody does. Instead, people build, learn from their mistakes, and fix the product with small, incremental changes. The original version of Google Docs, for instance, was so terrible that you would never replace Microsoft Word with it. Now, however, it has become Office365’s biggest adversary.
6. Launch the Product
Product, meet world. This is the exciting (and a little nerve-wracking) period when the public can actually buy and experience your product. Your go-to-market plan will do a lot of the heavy lifting in this stage.
7. Manage the Product Lifecycle
Even after the product has been launched, you're not off the hook. The work required on the product will change as it gains maturity in the market, user needs shift, and market conditions ebb and flow. This stage continues until it's time to 'sunset,' or discontinue, the product.
3 Real World Product Planning Examples
So far, my praises of product planning have been purely theoretical and based on personal anecdotes at best. I do, however, want to prove to you that this process is quite popular among famous companies and has been responsible for some of their most successful products.
So, here are 3 products that have succeeded thanks to effective product planning:
1. The Evolution of Booking.com Using Agile Development
Booking.com is a popular platform for booking and managing travel accommodations. But what you might not know is that they’re one of the most prominent users of agile development. In fact, it’s a core part of their product growth strategy. Their original product plan relied heavily on the agile philosophy and assumed the creation of early prototypes that they would evolve based on empiric user data.
They built two versions of their product as prototypes and conducted a series of tests with focus groups created from a pool of potential customers. Apart from testing their personas, they also heavily relied on data analytics by measuring the performance of core metrics for the features, functionality, and product ideas included in these prototypes.
As a result, they ended up picking the best-performing version, and then continued improving it based on user feedback and research data. Thanks to this strategy, Booking.com still retains a significant market share despite facing fierce competition in the industry.
2. Verizon’s Development of 5G Technology
Verizon is known as the first company to introduce 5G technology. Although the theoretical framework and the technology for 5G have been around for many years, no company was bold enough to start rolling it out, considering the massive costs associated with it.
Verizon, however, had a clear product plan where the success of the company would be the result of technological supremacy. Despite the significant costs of making 5G available to consumers, Verizon knew that it would open up new untapped markets for them, including IoT, augmented reality, and more.
As you can guess, the product plan worked and Verizon achieved a significant competitive advantage over AT&T and other ISPs.
3. Microsoft’s Shift Towards Cloud Computing
In the minds of millennials like me, Microsoft will always remain the provider of desktop software that you buy once for a flat fee and use indefinitely.
This model, however, has become heavily outdated and is problematic in terms of cash flow sustainability. So Microsoft’s leadership adopted a new product plan that assumed a cloud-first approach with subscription-based pricing models.
With this new product plan, Microsoft consistently improved its products and eliminated the hassle of supporting old and outdated versions. Moreover, the subscription model allowed Microsoft to create a predictable and sustainable cash flow that was much easier to manage and reinvest.
Top Benefits of Product Planning
Now that we have the success stories of successful product planning covered, let’s look at the tangible benefits that you and your company get by building out a solid plan:
- Strategic Clarity: With a sound product plan in place, you have a clear understanding of what’s coming next and how you should act at each phase of your product’s lifecycle.
- Faster Response to Market Changes: A great product plan is an agile one that embraces change. It should describe the list of actions your product team needs to take to adapt quickly to market changes.
- Better Team Motivation: By sharing your strategy with your team members, you boost their motivation as they clearly understand the end result of their work and its impact.
- Easier Prioritization of Product Features: As you know your next steps and your end goal, it’s much easier to identify features that don’t align with your strategy and deprioritize them.
- Alignment with Target Customer Needs: Product plans are always built with customer needs in mind. So, by following your plan, you ensure that whatever you build can solve pain points and drive customer satisfaction and retention.
- Easier Navigation Through the Competitive Landscape: Product plans also include a competitive and market strategy that lets you easily create and maintain your competitive advantage in the industry.
Product Planning Pitfalls
Just like any process or framework in product management, product planning also comes with risks. While the pros clearly outweigh the cons, it’s still important to be aware of potential problems. Here are a few to look out for:
- Plans Can Break Apart: I have never seen a project with a perfect plan. No matter how well you plan, unexpected changes will always occur, making your plan irrelevant.
- Lack of Flexibility: Product plans sometimes lack the set of actions that you need to take in case the plan fails. I’ve seen very few plans that describe how you’re going to pivot if you fail to reach a PMF.
- Resource Underestimation: Humans are terrible at estimating their work capacity. No matter what estimation technique you use, you will most often underestimate your resources and request more time and money to continue building the product.
The good news is that all three of these drawbacks are relatively easy to mitigate if you follow the core product planning principles outlined below.
Tools for Product Planning
Gone are the old days of making product plans as boring (and horrible-looking) PowerPoint presentations. The current product planning software landscape is full of solutions that handle ideation, brainstorming, product strategy, marketing research, product roadmap building, milestone management, and everything else required for your product plan.
Here are a few of the solutions I use in my day-to-day:
You can also find detailed reviews in our curated list of product planning software.
Product Planning Strategies
We have reached the final aspect of product planning that you need to consider when building one: strategies and frameworks. There are many of them out there. But, I would recommend you to begin with mastering these three:
1. The Lean Methodology
Lean product development is among the most popular ways of building new products from scratch. It relies heavily on the notion of iterative and incremental development and suggests product leaders start small, and gradually expand the product based on the market feedback.
The process used to achieve this is called “build-measure-learn”.
As you can see, it’s an infinite loop of creating a new feature, seeing if it solves users’ pains and achieves your business goals, learning from your mistakes, and building something better.
2. Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
MVP is the smallest version of your product that addresses a real user need and is ready for a launch.
Contrary to widespread beliefs, the goal of the MVP is not to earn early revenue or simply serve as a starting point for your product. The real reason you build an MVP is to get early feedback from your users and understand what needs to be improved. Hence, it’s one of the best ways to manage the “measure” step of Lean’s “build-measure-learn” loop.
3. Jobs To Be Done (JTBD)
The JTBD framework lets you define and document user needs in an easy-to-understand manner. Essentially, the framework suggests that users are considering “hiring” products to solve a certain need for them. The famous quote describing this thinking says:
So, they buy the drill or rent it to make the hole.
More Resources and Further Learning
To be great at product planning, reading this ultimate guide would not be enough (although it’s a great starting point). So, let me recommend a couple of great resources and books for you to further deepen your knowledge in this area:
- Innovation and New Product Planning by Kenneth B. Kahn for a more detailed explanation of product planning.
- The Lean Product Playbook by Dan Olsen to better understand the notion of Lean management.
- Lean Customer Development by Cindy Alvarez for improving your skills at interviewing customers and discovering their needs.
Finally, consider joining our product community and ask our seasoned members how they’ve built their product plans.
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In this guide, we covered most of the core aspects of product planning for you. By following the core principles described here and taking advantage of the extra knowledge in the books I shared, you will be able to make great product plans in no time.
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