It's today's hot topic and 'must-have' skill to manage, organize and analyze the flood of market, product,
and organizational information ... make better product decisions ... and become more strategic. Wish
you could analysis the flood of information coming into the product management team and draw
accurate conclusions from all the market evidence gathered? Eliminate uncertainty when making high-
stakes decisions? Develop better product strategies?

Ok then, first thing to do is improve your Product Management team's analytical capabilities: make
the information work for you. You'll need to organize information from multiple sources and in
multiple formats. Part of the secret here is to use portfolio management practices. Categorize and sub-
categorize, keep dicing and slicing. Know what you're going to use as selection criteria, and slice to
optimize the results. Yes, that's right. You need to select what you listen to as a information source. I'm
sure your mother once told you something similar to that, but as we grow we just become too smart.

You'll need to put the information into a common format that can be analyzed together. It's hard to
have faith in your decision making ability when you know your comparing apples to oranges. I'm not
just talking about a common repository, or common data type. The more structure you put in your
very sentences, the easier it'll be to compare the information. You can't control the form market
evidence comes to you in, but from then on you can. Standardize on a common forms for the Problem
Statement, the Opportunity, the Feature, the Roadmap, the Requirement, and the Release. Any product
management asset should have a semantic and syntactic form which has been standardized across your
team.

You'll want to apply various methods to determine what information is relevant within a specific
context. Sensitivity analysis and correlation analysis are common methods to do this. That might sound
fancy, but it's really simple in most tools today. If all else fails, the law of gravitation still works. This law
states that information, properly categorized will gravitate to relevancy, as structural hierarchies are
formed.

Look for contradictory information in the correct perspective. Visualization methods are great here.
Even Excel can produce diagrams and charts that help identify opposing trends. I'd recommend the
monitoring of performance metrics that are systematically gathered and visualized. Human error and
biases can cover-up some types of opposition.

Determine out of all the information you could respond to, what should you respond to, to identify
the "best' opportunity. Nothing puts the team into the firefighting mode faster than reactive responses
to information. One of the quickest ways to diagnose problems in opportunity definition is the amount
of firefighting and heroics being performed by your product management team.

Take a look at your information, try to recognize patterns or trends and determine what they can
mean for your product management activities. I've found that taking a holistic look at your market
evidence can make all the difference in the world to your perspective of market needs, problems, and
opportunities. If your team is either idea rich or poor, or if ideation is a process constraint, then this
holistic view will work every time.

I sometimes wonder who would have discovered America if Columbus's communication channels were
as poor as the Viking's. We need to communicate the team's findings and suggestions with expediency
and clarity. That ability comes from having an expedient and clear message, which flows from a good
analytical capability within your team. Those without the information have a hard time communicating
it. Next, formalize your communication channels. Don't leave it to an ad-hoc association to carry your
team's critical information. If it's the Product Management Team's duty to discover America, why is
Development, Sales, Marketing, or Management the folks making all the discoveries?