Top visual frameworks for Product Managers

Overcoming writer's block - part 2

Photo by Denisse Leon on Unsplash

In my previous post on overcoming writer’s block, I touched on utilizing templates and frameworks to facilitate writing. In this post, I will share visual frameworks I often use to supplement my writing and to clarify, ideate, decide, and communicate.

Product Canvas

A product canvas offers a simple template to draft a 1-pager, back-of-the-napkin strategy for a product you want to validate or pitch.

The canvas forces you to answer critical questions: who’s the customer, what are their top problems, and how can the business benefit by solving the problem? This ensures you clarify the value proposition before falling into the build trap. There are plenty of templates available. Here’s the one that I use often:

Once you complete the canvas based on your research, you will get immense clarity to operationalize your strategy. The canvas also enables you to communicate the who-why-what-how through a single pane of glass to your team and stakeholders.

When to use this:

• Product-market-fit analysis

• Pitch a product idea to stakeholders

• Frame a sizeable problem space or a product opportunity

SWOT Analysis

A SWOT analysis helps you identify an organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It helps you understand your organization's internal and external factors that may impact your product strategy.

Here’s a SWOT for a sample e-commerce product.

Example SWOT analysis from https://asana.com/resources/swot-analysis

When to use this framework:

• When starting new product lines, entering new markets, and targeting new customer segments.

• During build/buy/partner decisions. Remember, the buy and partner don’t necessarily mean acquiring and partnering with companies. It could mean leveraging internal products, features, and APIs within your own company.

• Competitive analysis

User Journey Maps

A user journey map is a visual representation of a user's experience with a product or service. It outlines the steps a user takes, the touchpoints they encounter, and the emotions they experience along the way. User journey maps are powerful because they help you understand the user's perspective and identify areas where the user experience can be improved.

For example, if you are building a movie theater app, you could create a user journey map that outlines the steps a user takes before, during, and after watching a movie. This would help you identify pain points for that scenario and make improvements to create a better user experience.

An example user journey map from https://www.userinterviews.com/blog/best-customer-journey-map-templates-examples

When to use this:

• When building a new UX feature or product

• Improve the funnel of an existing product

• User search

Impact/Effort Matrix

An impact/effort matrix helps you prioritize tasks or projects based on their potential impact and the effort required to complete them. This framework helps you identify high-impact tasks that are relatively easy to complete, as well as low-impact tasks that may not be worth the effort.

For example, let's say you're a product manager for a fitness app. You could use an impact/effort matrix to prioritize new features, such as a calorie tracker or a workout planner. Features with high impact and low effort would be prioritized first, while features with low impact and high effort may be deprioritized or removed altogether.

Mind Maps

A mind map is a visual tool used to organize and generate ideas. It is a hierarchical diagram that starts with a central idea and branches out into sub-topics. This framework helps you generate ideas, organize your thoughts, and identify relationships between concepts.

For example, you're a product manager for a project management tool. You could use a mind map to brainstorm new features, starting with the central idea of the "Project Management Tool." You could then branch out into sub-topics such as task management, collaboration, reporting, and so on. This would help you organize your ideas and identify which features are most important for your users.

When to use:

• During brainstorming and ideation sessions.

• Building a multi-dimensional strategy for a product, your team, or your life. Here’s an example:

  

  Happy you = happy product

• When overwhelmed with random ideas, worries, fears, and concerns.

• Root cause Analysis (RCA) or troubleshooting scenarios where you start with a problem symptom and explore causes for the symptoms and potential solutions.

Opportunity Solution Tree

An opportunity tree, a subtype of a mind map, helps you identify and prioritize product opportunities. It is a tree-like diagram that starts with a high-level opportunity and branches out into sub-opportunities. I love this framework because it enables broad thinking anchored on a common goal. The first level typically includes a broad set of opportunities or customer problem areas; the second level includes the product features that can potentially achieve the opportunity. Once you have collaborated to build a broad spectrum of ideas, then you can start trimming the tree to keep the branches that can make the most significant impact towards the goal.

From https://www.producttalk.org/opportunity-solution-tree/

For example, let's say you're a product manager for a software company. You could use an opportunity tree to identify new business opportunities, starting with the high-level opportunity of "Expanding into New Markets." You could then branch out into sub-opportunities such as "International Expansion," "New Industries," and "New Customer Segments." This would help you identify which opportunities are most important and develop a plan to pursue them.

When to use:

• During product planning - you have identified a goal and want to explore opportunities and features that can achieve that goal.

• Setting OKRs. O is the root node, and KRs are the first-level nodes.

Vision story

When painting a vision or a north star, narrating the story from a customer's point of view is extremely powerful. A vision story is similar to Amazon’s working backward model, which starts with the ideal state for the customer, often narrated as a future press release which is mainly text. But with a story, you can get visuals with screenshots and mockups to picture the experience.

Psychologically, stories are an effective mode of communication. But more importantly, it helps you to clarify the target customer persona and build an experience from the user/customer’s point of view. This helps you envision a product without getting biased by the current state, a specific solution, or technological constraint.

Let's say you're a product manager for an e-commerce company, and you want to improve the checkout process. Instead of starting with the current checkout process and making incremental improvements, you can create an ideal checkout experience for the customer and then work backward to get there.

1. Start with the Customer Persona: First, you need to understand your customer's needs and pain points. Create a customer persona that represents your target audience. This persona should include demographic information, behaviors, and attitudes.

2. Define the Ideal State: Imagine a world where your customer's experience with the checkout process is perfect. What does that ideal state look like? What are the customer's goals? What are their pain points? Write down everything you can think of.

3. Write a Story: To bring the ideal state to life, write a story that describes how your customer persona interacts with your product in this ideal state. The story should be detailed and paint a vivid picture of the customer's experience. It should include specific actions the customer takes and the emotions they feel.

4. Work Backwards: Now that you have a clear vision of the ideal state and the customer's experience, you can work backward to identify the steps needed to achieve that vision. What features and functions are required? What changes need to be made to the existing checkout process? What resources are needed?

5. Prioritize: Once you have a list of potential changes, prioritize them based on their impact on the customer experience, the effort required to implement them, and the resources available.

When to use:

1. When building a north-star vision for your product

2. Products that demand involvement from multiple teams and stakeholders

3. Pitching a new product opportunity to the leadership team for funding and resources

In conclusion, visual frameworks are powerful tools for product managers to create clarity, collaborate on ideas and communicate effectively. By using these frameworks, you can better understand your customers, prioritize tasks, identify opportunities and threats, and improve the user experience of your product.