5 Proven Product Management Frameworks Successful Companies Use

Most of the leading companies, like Amazon and Spotify, have a strong influence on continually delivering great products across the globe. That can't be an accident or luck; it happens only with the consistent effort behind the screens. Those organizations will create and follow clear frameworks for how they organize and develop the products. Those product management frameworks will provide teams with a collective way to expand and build their products steadily.

If the product management framework is not framed, recurring the previous process that built the last right product would be problematic. For instance, let’s take baking a cake as an example. If you know about the recipe step by step and follow those correctly, you’ll have a great chance of making a yummy cake. You may even have seen it on Youtube or even memorized it. Now, you’re ready to make your delicious cakes in different varieties. But if you need to run a large bakery with various workers like bakers, buyers, cashiers, the product delivers, etc., you need that recipe to keep making out delicious cakes to have a successful bakery.

Likewise, if you want your organization to thrive better like our recent leading companies like Spotify, Amazon, Flipkart, and more, you need to create or utilize a product management framework extremely crucial for success.

I have researched the frameworks used by successful companies and thought of sharing them with you all. This article will discuss the product management frameworks from five successful organizations to create great products.

These frameworks give you great insights into how you should do

Product Discovery
Prioritization
Execution.

Grab a cup of coffee, and let’s see how you can use those frameworks effectively!

#1 Examine your product at each level to give the better user experience

User experience is the hero of your product. You should take this part very seriously, and the development team should test each feature they create that would suit the customer's needs and be easy for them to use.

That is why “Spotify” tests and measures all the deliverables that provide a unique customer experience.

Spotify has “Squads” the basic unit of the development team consists of six to twelve employees who collaborate about every nook and corner from development to production of the product. And, how to improve it in a better way, they work like a mini startup and find which suits them best. That allows various groups within the organization to work on the features that benefit them in a better way.

The best part is, these squads are autonomous, but they're highly organized in their way. Each squad has a lead, whose responsibility is to arrange the squad based on that one mission. Each mission keenly focused on improving the part of Spotify’s product.

Logically, this permits for sort, often, and decoupled releases. Each squad can concentrate on their particular goal without disturbing the work of others in any way.

This clear structure on what to work and how to deliver it also gives way to Spotify’s best delivering product experience. Their aim is not only to provide a better product but also to do it in a risk-free and less cost-effective way. It’s always a better idea to experiment on how it works and affects people before shipping it.

Their popular working model of

Think what works best
Build that in a better way that people loves
Ship it with the confidence
Tweak and optimize

Think what works best– At the stage of discovery, teams brainstorm ideas, evaluate problems, and test concepts. The crucial step where you need to sharpen your eyes because if they are released without proper vetting, it leads to unhappy customers.

Build that in a better way that people love – This stage, the squad develops their MVP. They test this MVP on a small subset of users to gather feedback. They also take valuable time in assessing the quality of their code and design.

Ship It with confidence– While shipping features, Spotify tests with the minimum number of Spotify users around their circle. Then, they take analytics on how those people enjoy that feature. If the feature hits success, they’ll roll it out to their whole broad user base. If losses, they will regenerate the plan from the beginning.

Tweak and optimize– This is the extensive phase of the development cycle. Squad spends a lot of time taking analytics, evaluating the data, and making tweaks and adjustments to the released feature. They also plan for improvement and optimize for even better performance.

#2 Amazon’s “working backward” method gains a lot of attraction

“Working backward,” the term refers to Amazon starting to focus on the finished product. Now you might have many questions revolving in your mind “what? How? How to do work with the finished product?”. Right? Read on.

Amazon starts any new process by explaining in short what they hope users and the media will react when they get their hands on it.

Amazon does not begin by outlining a new product’s infused features or capacities. At this point, they concentrate on the customer reaction they’re hoping to bring out.

When a product manager comes up with a new idea for a product improvement or product feature, they make arrangements for an internal press release that announces the completed product. No one will work on any development part at this stage.

The press release concentrates on customer issues and how the solution does not work for that problem. From there, they’ll explain how the new production workflow will blow away all the existing solutions.

These press releases are not just rough notes of an idea; product managers have a considerable responsibility to evaluate them until they understandably explain how the product will help a customer.

If a product manager failed to write an acceptable press release, they would scrap the idea. The standard rule is that if the press release is complex to write or daunting to explain, the finished product will not hit success. Amazon needs all of its products easy to know and simple to use. With those goals, it should be simple to write a press release that makes sense even without the finished product.

Once the top management team approves a press release, the product team utilizes it as a roadmap for their development process.

#3 The even-steven approach by Typeform’s product delivery

Typeform utilizes two equal parts of the product management framework.

The first half concentrates on product discovery.
The second half of their framework majorly concentrates on delivery.

Discovery is known for identifying issues, collaborating solutions, and evaluating solutions with an experimental product.

Once a feature idea clears the Discovery process, then it moves to the delivery process, which undergoes these four steps:

Scope
Execution
Measurement
Iteration

What sets Typeform’s framework apart is its exceptional approach to MVP’s. They don’t depend on just one version. Instead, they categorize the MVP into three stages:

Experimental product – The experimental product is the quickest way to get pieces of information on an idea. To not pay huge time on building an MVP, the earliest experimental product might be something as simple as a precaution test.
Existing product – A “existing” product is an original product that early adopters will utilize without incentivizing. In this phase, the product has basic functionality and may lack full complete implementation, but the primary purpose is to gather data and feedback. Typeform does this to figure out whether it’s worth spending hours building the entire product.
Lovable product – This is the product that users will love. They’ll refer their friends about it and are planning to take up a premium plan. It’s still not fully completed, but it’s the nearest stage to meet the product at this stage.

Categorizing your MVP will guide you and get useful feedback and data during every phase of the cycle. In this way, you can utilize a much more evaluated approach to providing your customers’ needs.

#4 Understand your users and fix their problems ASAP

Did you know? GoGoVan’s most significant advantage is that they listen to their customers and quickly respond to their issues. Yes, they do a great job here and are thriving as a better product in the market.

GoGoVan aligns its product teams into various business objectives. Each team works on one objective, which permits the member on each team to get deep insights into their vision and goals.

They initiate the product discovery process based on three pillars:

User interviews
Sales interviews
Usage data

Product managers pay an ample amount of their time for collaborating with users and analyzing what they need on sales calls. They aim to get the most in-depth understanding of their customers. They also take usage data to explore where the blockers exist. They utilize all this information to build a better solution to address each problem area.

Once they’ve determined the problem and find the solution for it, GoGoVan categories which features will have the highest demand on their users and then starts building the right feature.

Before they begin the development process, GoGoVan checks from the customer’s perspective one more time. They review the solutions to iterate if it’s the simplest solution or it can be improved better. Once they conclude that they’ve found a simple solution, they still don’t begin developing anything. There’s one last step to go, and that is more important.

Before GoGoVan pays any time to develop a product, they analyze success metrics, which must link back to the single vision for their team. Evaluating these metrics prevents any instant reactions when the data begins pouring in.

At this stage, GoGoVan takes the solution into development. Once it’s completed and released to customers, they go back and start evaluating the success metrics. If the product feature isn’t hitting their expectation, it’ll be regenerated with improvement ideas.

#5 Thrive as a better product with Shopify’s growth framework

Shopify utilizes various frameworks and alignments across many of its teams. The most crucial is the product growth framework. Its goal is to develop the adoption of a product, not just to leave by building it.

The product growth framework extensively has famous eight steps:

Align your company – First, you need to know your company’s stage and your currently undergoing product.

Is your product works well in the product/market fit
Have you launched an MVP?
Whatever it may be, analyze it.

Determine your goal – This is also the crucial one that you have to analyze ahead of time.

What's the strategic goal of your product?
Have you defined profitability, new users, or something else?
Structuring all these ahead of time will help you determine what your product’s exact needs to do to drive growth.

Structure the funnel – Never forget to take a comprehensive look on

What’s the process that customers will take to begin using your product?
Are they going to be current or new users?
Modeling your funnel will also help you know in-deep of what areas you need to grow yet.

Define your metrics – You need to fix a metric that helps you know whether you’re moving in the correct direction. Sometimes, your measures improve immediately, or at least vertically, check this out.

Develop a prioritization flow – Get insights from each employee working on this product about what features they think will create a more beneficial impact for your customers. Everyone in your team will have various ideas about prioritization, which is why it’s crucial to hear from multiple people.

Set a defined target – Targets will not come under your goals or deadlines, but they’re the crucial milestones to complete in the near term that you decided. They help keep your team on track and working toward your metrics and your strategic goal.

Step to product growth execution – Effective execution accelerates each phase of product growth. You want to work closely with your team to build a robust process for all stages of product development, from development to delivery.

Build a multidisciplinary team – To make all the above points effectively, you need strong team skills in product, engineering, design, data, and marketing, covering all the areas. It doesn't mean that you compulsorily want one person dedicated to a single task, but your entire team should cover these crucial skills.

Utilizing this practical framework will give you a systematic way to thrive your product. Product leaders used this framework at various companies, which means it’s simple to adopt, and you can use it at your company.

Grow consistently

Consumers will keep on noticing if you create one great product that helps them in some way to do their job effectively. But if you take a look at your product rarely, they’ll forget about your product and move on to the similar thing that comes along.

Constant Growth is the only choice to develop your brand, which creates not only loyal users but also creates a strong relationship with you. It’s one of the best reasons why Spotify, Amazon, and the others are so popular. They continuously deliver great products by following their frameworks.

I hope the Product management frameworks mentioned above will help you deliver great products like most successful companies thriving better now.