IPM Innovate Products

Innovate Product Solutions

Select Product Roadmap
 By selecting product roadmaps we can focus our development efforts, and realize our innovation strategies. Based on the selection criteria defined and the innovation strategy for your product, select the roadmap that will be used for product development. Make sure the innovation types of the features in the roadmap are in line with the overall strategy of the roadmap. This will increase efficiency through a focused product development effort and increase product sustainability through the built in product differentiation.

Define Market & Acceptance Requirements
Market requirements give specifics on how a feature should be implemented or what the feature functionality really is. Defining an acceptance requirement enables the product manager to clearly articulate when development can say a requirement is complete. Using the roadmap to determine which features need to be implemented, begin defining market requirements that will implement the features, or that are needed in order to implement the features. Define the acceptance requirement for each market requirement in order to validate that the correct solution is being developed. By defining the requirements in gives a more focused development effort to feature implementation which increases efficiency, decreases implementation risk, and decreases costly rework.

Validate Requirements
For a product feature to reach potential revenue, you must ensure that it is implemented in the way that end users want. Validating requirements through surveys to lead users or customers enables the product management team to ensure they have the right requirement set. Ensure that you are working on the correct set of requirements by validating with stakeholders and customer base, that the requirements will indeed implement the features in the correct way. Use a survey to poll customers and find out if the requirements implement the feature in a way that works for them. This will increase client endorsement, and also decrease launch risk.

Create Requirement Estimates
In order to perform any release planning, we need to get at least a high level estimate of resource needs for the requirements. Every organization has limited resources and must make tradeoffs; estimates make those tradeoffs possible. For each requirement, development needs to provide a high level estimate. This can be done by estimating actual costs, level of effort, or complexity. This estimate will be used for release planning. This enables you to decrease cost and cost risk, it also increases efficiency by being able to filter out requirements that can’t be finished on time.

Define Release & Marketing Plans
A release plan defines the purpose of a product release. It includes all things that need to be planned in order to have a successful product launch. Without this there would be no timeline and coordination among the many groups and activities that must be on the same page to successfully launch a product. The first step is to define a release schedule for the product. Identify the theme, development milestones, targeted market segments and user personas, and market requirements for the release. The requirements will be assigned based on resource availability and importance. A market launch plan will also be developed for this product release; including campaigns, marketing webinars, and training events. The release plan will increase efficiency, reduce risk, increase revenue by providing a coordinated and efficient effort for releasing a product that leverages all the activities together.

Validate Plans
Validating your release and marketing plan are essential to make sure that they will address all concerns of users, sponsors, and other internal stakeholders. It also allows us to make sure that the target segments and personas want the things we’ve included in the release. Take the release plan and talk with lead users, or customer base to validate that the release will bring the expected value to the customer, and result in the estimated competitive advantage and ROI. The will increase product sustainability by ensuring we maintain the correct margin between actual and perceived value. This will also increase client endorsement of the product.

Execute and Monitor Plans
Execution is the key to success of any product release or launch. If we don’t execute on the release plan or marketing plan, we’ll have a product nobody wants, that doesn’t work, that’s not aligned to the product roadmap, or that the people who could use it don’t know it exists. Carryout and implement the release plan. Development will develop detailed technical requirements and product specifications to implement the functionality described in the release plan. The complete market launch plan will be executed including post launch review. Monitor and update release plan based on engineering changes. Monitor established KPIs and overall performance. Maintain alignment between product launch roadmaps, such as testing roadmap, product roadmap, marketing roadmap, technology roadmap, etc. Executing your release plan will increase efficiency and sustainability.