How To Use The Situational Awareness Concept In Early Stage Product Management
It's not just for mature products
So, you took a peek at the Product Awareness dashboard and thought, “Hey that looks great, but my product is not yet live.”
Recall the philosophy that underlies this methodology - awareness of anything that can hinder your strategic objectives, tactical goals, or operational excellence.
If your product hasn’t launched yet, you won’t have any revenue to measure, usage to evaluate, customer ratings to digest, or operational effectiveness to monitor. Still, there will be indicators to monitor that will contribute to these goals. Here are some to consider:
Have you conducted market research, developed a hypothesis, and created and validated your use cases? What deadlines have you set, and where do you stand against these dates?
What goals have you set for creating your product roadmap? Have you broken them into separate phases with dates you can measure against?
Who needs to sign off on the feasibility and acceptance of your product roadmap so that the organization is aligned with its vision? What are the expected dates? Where do you stand against those dates?
Have you developed an operational plan? On what platform will you deploy your product? What technologies will you use? How will you manage issues? What is the workflow for dealing with customer complaints? Will you need to implement SLAs with customers or with internal teams? What is the percent complete on each of these tasks and when is the deadline to complete them?
These are just a sampling of indicators you can track to maintain up-to-the-minute awareness of everything that can affect the success of achieving your product vision, meeting tactical goals, and delivering operational excellence. Even if you lack the advanced tools to capture all this information seamlessly, you can still set up a simple database and devote 15 minutes a day to updating your metrics by hand, if necessary. There’s no excuse not to start.