From Concept to Product: A Step-by-Step Framework for Product Managers

A framework with actionable steps to build a solution that delivers value.

Many of the products we all know and love have been built by companies that use product management frameworks. Products that look very simple often take many months or years to build - which is largely due to companies spending time on product discovery, planning and testing prior to building. It’s no coincidence that companies that invest time in these additional steps build some of the most successful and loved products, and in this article, we’ll look at why these steps will improve the chance of your product being successful.

There’s no shortage of product management frameworks, and there’s no one framework that rules them all. You can use any framework that resonates with you, or even develop your own framework. The important thing is to recognize that frameworks provide a scalable process to build and improve your products in a consistent way.

In this article, we’ll introduce the concept to solution (CTS) product management framework. Like the name, this framework provides actionable steps you can follow to take your idea from a simple concept all the way to a real product solution.

The CTS product management framework includes six key phases:

1. Discovery, Market and Competitive Research.

2. Mission, Vision and Strategy.

3. Product Design and Roadmap.

4. Prototype, Test and Iterate.

5. Execution and Delivery.

6. Measure and Evolve.

Let’s unpack each of these.

Phase 1: Discovery, Market and Competitive Research

The objective of this first phase is to understand the business or your target user’s problem, quantify the magnitude of the problem and get familiar with any existing solutions that exist to address the problem.

More specifically, in this phase, you’ll seek to understand the problem space through qualitative and quantitative research. Qualitatively, you’ll conduct user research with external users and internal stakeholders, and quantitatively, you’ll analyze data available to you to form insights about the opportunity. Here are a few sample questions that you can start with to learn about the problem, the market and competition.

• How painful is this problem? Does this only happen on occasion, or is it happening many times a day? Is this just a minor annoyance or a deep source of frustration?

• How many users are experiencing this problem? Is this a unique situation faced by a niche group, or something an entire industry struggles with? Is this only an issue in a few places, or is it happening all around the world?

• What solutions exist today that try and address the problem? Are users satisfied with these existing solutions, or is there an appetite for a better one?

• How feasible is your solution? Is it technically possible to be implemented? Would your solution add immediate value, or would an entire ecosystem shift — like the creation of a two-sided market — need to happen? Can you pursue this incrementally, in a smaller space, like a specific city or narrow vertical?

Note: This is not an exhaustive list of discovery questions by any means. These questions are intended to spark curiosity for your own discovery needs.

There’s no set rules for how many interviews you should conduct, or how much time you should spend reviewing competitive products. This is largely based on your own intuition. When you feel like you have enough information to summarize a concise problem statement with supporting rationale and data, it’s time to move onto to the next phase.

Phase 2: Mission, Vision and Strategy

Now that you’ve defined a problem statement, you can craft a mission, vision, value proposition and strategy for how you intend to solve that problem. Let’s start by defining what each of these mean.

• Mission: Why does your company or product exist? What is your purpose? And, what are you hoping to achieve (with regards to addressing the problem statement)? As you craft your mission statement, it’s important to think about your motivation for addressing the problem. A few things to consider:

  • Consider Trends: Is the space growing or declining? Who are some of the existing players in the space and do we have the resources and expertise to compete?

  • Consider Opportunities: Can we build a product or solution to the problem, that aligns with our company’s mission?

  • Consider our own Strengths & Weaknesses: What are our company's strengths that we should leverage in building in this space? And weaknesses that we should avoid?

Once we have crafted a mission statement, the next step is to define our vision.

• Vision: What does the future direction of your product look like? Your vision statement is essentially an inspirational prediction of what the world looks like assuming your product or company is successful in achieving its mission. Your vision should be compelling and motivate your team to work towards this future direction of your product.

Next we explore our product’s value proposition.

• Value Proposition: This illustrates the unique value your product delivers to your users and the company. It should answer why your users should use your product (over a competitive offering)?

Now, that we’ve crafted a mission, vision and value proposition, the next step is to define a strategy.

• Strategy: This illustrates how your product will realize its vision. In other words, what is your plan (typically within 3 - 5 key investment areas you will make) to achieve your vision.

And finally, you should define key goals and success metrics to measure the progress of your strategy in achieving your vision. Your success metrics can take the shape of multiple objectives & key results (OKR’s) or a single north star metric. In either case, you want to ensure that a positive impact to your success metrics correlates to value delivered to your users.

Phase 3: Product Design and Roadmap

In this phase, you’ll start to ideate on what your product will look like and what will be its initial feature set. As you think beyond the initial feature set, you’ll build out your product roadmap.

Your roadmap should illustrate key outcomes your product is intended to deliver over a period of time. This time period can be specific (with targeted feature release dates) or it can be relatively vague (with your product features bucketed into now, next and later).

The goals and success metrics you defined (in Phase 2) will inform key decisions you make when building your roadmap. As you prioritize one feature over another, you’ll want to consider how a particular feature will impact your goals and drive your success metrics in the right direction.

Phase 4: Prototype, Test and Iterate

In this phase, you will take the first step in developing the first version of your product that you can test with real users to validate if you are heading in the right direction. This is your MVP (Minimum Viable Product). The primary objective of your MVP is to get data from users to understand if your product has potential, or if you should consider a different solution.

Phase 5: Execution and Delivery

In this phase, you will continue developing your product. You might utilize an agile development process, which includes creating a product backlog, refining your backlog regularly and working with your development team to deliver increments of business value.

As you develop subsequent versions of your product (v2, v3, etc.), you should also continue testing and learning by presenting these to your users to gather feedback and iterate. You should be open-minded to making updates to your product vision and roadmap as you continue to gather data from real users about how your product is taking shape.

Phase 6: Measure and Evolve

At this point, you have delivered your product, but how do you know if your product is delivering value to your users and the company (business)? This is why measuring and evolving your product is important to ensure your product is making a positive impact, and realizing its value proposition.

You might choose to measure the impact by conducting user interviews, conducting A/B (multivariate) testing, analyzing data and/or conducting internal reviews. There’s no wrong answer here. The key takeaway is to measure your product with users, gain insights and use these insights to continuously make improvements to your product.

In Summary

This is just one framework you can use to take your idea from a concept to a real product. In summary, we walked through (1) Conducting discovery, (2) Defining a mission, vision and strategy, (3) Building a roadmap, (4) Developing an MVP and testing it with users, (5) Continuously executing and improving your product, and (6) Measuring your product to ensure it is delivering it’s intended value to users and the business.

There’s so much more to say about each of these phases individually, but consider this a directional map for how to get started. All the best.