Product Management Process: Stages, Tips, & Diagrams

Originally published on May 31, 2022

The encompasses the steps to launch a new product or feature or iterate on an existing one. Implementing an effective PM process is key to creating the optimal product with features that meet your customers’ needs.

The product management process involves communication with stakeholders across teams, including engineering, design, sales, and marketing. To , it’s important that product managers create strong lines of communication between each team.

What is the product management process?

The product management process starts with the “why.” In other words, product managers start by understanding why the customer has a need and how their product can be a solution. Through a combination of tasks, meetings, and decision-making frameworks, the process ensures a smooth transition from to and from to product maintenance.

As a product manager, you are responsible for , business goals, and technical feasibility. The process involves solo work and collaboration with various teams and stakeholders, including customers, business leaders, designers, engineers, marketers, customer support, and more.

Product management vs. product development

Product management defines a product's strategy and direction, while product development executes its creation. Product management involves setting a product’s vision, strategy, and goals based on market and user research, customer feedback, and business objectives. Product managers prioritize features, create roadmaps, and ensure cross-functional alignment across teams to meet user needs and drive business outcomes.

Product development is all about bringing a product to life by designing, building, testing, and launching the product. During the product development process, product owners, engineers, designers, and developers work together to create the product envisioned by product management.

Who does what? Key roles in the product management process

The product manager is the central figure in the product management process. They lead by defining the product vision, prioritizing tasks, and ensuring alignment between business goals and user needs.

They also consult key stakeholders to gather insights and feedback during the product planning process:

• Business leaders, for strategic direction and company goals.
• Designers, to create user-friendly experiences.
• Engineers, to assess technical feasibility and timelines.
• Users, to understand pain points and validate solutions.
• Sales representatives, to gather customer insights and market feedback.

The product manager helps to keep different stakeholders aligned

They also inform stakeholders to maintain transparency and alignment:

• Business leaders, on progress and outcomes.
• Designers, about requirements and priorities.
• Engineers, on changing priorities or timelines.
• Marketers, about features, value propositions, personas, and messaging.
• Sales representatives, with updates to support customer communication.

6 steps of the product management process

Whether a new product is in the startup phase or has been successfully launched but needs fine-tuning, these stages of product management can guide you toward a successful product or feature launch.

1. Gather user feedback, identify customer needs, and manage product ideas

Identify customer and market needs through , , and competitor analysis. Observe how users behave online through , social listening, monitoring review sites, and analyzing user data. Understanding how users behave across channels is crucial to learning what they need and why.

Supplement this behavioral data by contacting your customers one-on-one for further insights. Once you’re confident in your research conclusions, you can begin brainstorming product ideas.

Observing user behavior

Ryan Hoover, founder of Product Hunt, and his team and noticed that users were building product lists of their favorites. As a result, the Product Hunt team developed a space within their site where users could build lists.

Competitor analysis

Great product managers understand that effective competitor analysis requires understanding which aspects of your product, roadmap, or goals you want to change.

Questions to ask in competitive analysis:

• If you want to improve your engineering and design: Do your competitors offer different language options, accessibility features, or a quicker response time?
• If you want to add updates or features: Are there features that your customers don’t even know they may want or need that will improve their user experience? What features are missing from competitors?
• If you want to gain attention through innovation: Have you done thorough market research? You might have an idea that you have never seen done before, but that actually existed and failed in the past. You can learn from those mistakes and tweak your ideas to become an innovative leader in your industry.

Managing ideas

Keep an organized list of product ideas and feature requests for future updates. Idea management is crucial so you don't get overwhelmed by your product backlog. Prioritize the most feasible features through team voting and discussions.

Ideas and feature requests can come from:

• Insights from
• Internal brainstorm meetings
• Customer feedback and focus groups
• Solutions to bugs and technical issues
• Product suggestions from internal or external stakeholders
• Your sales team

Take the time to talk to your customers, potential customers, and internal stakeholders to identify any problems to be solved and the “jobs to be done” for your user base.

2. Develop your problem-solving vision

Once you’ve determined the problem to be solved or jobs to be done, develop a hypothesis or vision to share with the rest of your product team. Your vision is the narrative that informs how you build your product. According to Scott Belsky, the Chief Product Officer of Adobe, you should always .

Having a narrative gives you and your team a “why” and helps you shape your product strategy. It will also help you think through potential negative outcomes and roadblocks.

Tips to help you think strategically about your product:

• Consider the first impression you want to make with your potential customer and use this to guide your product decisions.
• Study behavioral design or work with an expert to design a product that people will find useful and love.
• Identify the consequences of your ideas. List out the top two or three net positive and negative consequences that could arise if you go forward with your idea. This can often lead to more ideation.
• Determine which conditions need to be met for your hypothesis to be true. These conditions can then be used as steps to get closer to your goal or as red flags that send you back to the drawing board.

Jackie Bavaro, former Head of Product Management at Asana, underscores that strategic thinking is about —it also involves persuading people of your strategy, communicating it effectively, matching the work to that strategy, and accounting for long-term implications.

3. Run experiments to test potential solutions

Once you’ve identified the problem to solve and formulated a vision, validate your ideas before committing significant resources. Set up small-scale or pilot programs to validate potential solutions.

For example, lets you quickly run A/B tests, measure user behavior, and determine which features or designs best meet user needs. By experimenting early, you can focus on what truly adds value—minimizing wasted effort and accelerating your product development cycle.

4. Implement a theme-based roadmap

Once you’ve solidified your vision for the product, implement your product strategy through a theme-based roadmap without concrete features. Oftentimes, product teams might create a roadmap of features or product requirements, but they A theme-based, is a series of high-level themes that support your vision and strategy. Each theme reflects the value you’ll be providing to your customers.

To help you stay on track, create specific and measurable goals at the theme level within your product roadmap. You can create a roadmap of succinct one-pagers for each of your themes.

You can also pair your theme-based roadmap with the North Star Framework. The North Star Framework sets you up to be a . By selecting a North Star Metric first, you can hold your team accountable for a specific outcome while optimizing your product and communicating the impact to the rest of your company.

The North Star Framework steps:

• , including your product vision and a metric measuring your product strategy.
• Highlight results and value. Explain the mid or long-term business results and customer value that the North Star Metric will provide.
• Identify Input Metrics. Identify the 3-5 key factors that directly impact the North Star.
• Outline “The Work”. Lay out the tasks your team will complete (such as research, design, software development, refactoring, prototyping, and testing). These should align with and support the North Star Metric.

Check out the to walk through step-by-step prompts to help you identify your company’s North Star.

According to Alexis and Adrienne of the newsletter, the most effective North Star goals tend to be Aggressive goals cause you and your team to think more creatively. A good rule of thumb: if the goal scares you, it’s probably a good one to have.

Implementing a theme-based roadmap paired with a North Star Metric can result in more receptive stakeholders. High-level, strategic themes and a shared goal tend to be better for those who are less involved in the details of the project. Design a roadmap and choose a North Star that is easy to digest and highlights how you’ll be adding value to your customer and the business.

5. Prioritize product features according to impact

Prioritize your backlog of features according to the ones that will most impact your strategic goals. This can be one of the most challenging aspects of the steps to product management as it may require you to say “no” to stakeholders or customers.

To help with this challenge, In this framework, you and your team can use the image and metaphor of a tree to determine how you plan to grow your product. The branches are your product functionality, the trunk is your core features, the leaves are ideas, and the roots are your infrastructure. Once you’ve laid out all the features, you can begin to “prune the product tree” of ideas.

. In this model, you quantify and measure the reach, impact, confidence, and effort of each feature or idea to determine the ones that should be prioritized. Based on the context and timeframe you choose, set specific metrics to monitor the benefits and costs of each idea. For example:

• Reach (benefit): Determine how many new customers or conversions you’ll achieve. For example, you set your quarterly conversion expectations to 100 new customers.
• Impact (benefit): Identify which aspects of your product or business have more or less impact.
• Confidence (benefit): For aspects of the project that rely on intuition rather than data, assign a confidence score of low (0-50%), medium (51-80%), or high (81-100%).

Effort (cost): The effort score can be calculated in months. If a project will take 4 months to complete, it receives a score of 4.

6. Release your MVP, measure, and iterate

Once your design and development teams have built a minimum viable product (MVP) or new features, it’s time to release it as a beta or a public launch. Prepare clear milestones and goals to track product performance, user behavior, and customer feedback from the start.

To help you out, here are some data analysis best practices:

• Determine and measure KPIs. Identify your top metrics (like conversions, feature usage, and time to value) and track them with a .
• Monitor and request feedback. G2 Crowd, social listening, and post-launch surveys can provide direct user insights about your new product or features.
• Create a metrics dashboard. Tools like Amplitude Analytics give your team a self-service view of how users interact with the product, helping you turn insights into actionable improvements.

An example product dashboard in Amplitude.

To further improve your product, use a to understand user segments. For example, you may find that a new feature is used by new customers, but not by existing ones, which could indicate that you need to increase awareness of the feature outside of your onboarding flow. You could then a notification for existing users alerting them of the new feature and see whether this experiment drives more feature adoption.

Common product management process challenges (& tips to overcome them)

Below are three common challenges product managers face and actionable solutions to address them.

Challenge #1: Leading cross-functional teams effectively

Bringing together engineers, designers, marketers, and sales teams under one cohesive vision can be difficult. Everyone has different perspectives, priorities, and timelines.

How to overcome it:

• Clarify roles and responsibilities. Make sure each team member knows exactly what’s expected of them and how their work contributes to the product vision.
• Foster open communication. Hold regular check-ins to surface issues quickly and encourage team members to share progress and roadblocks.
• Set and maintain a shared vision. Keep your product’s North Star Metric and strategic goals visible so everyone stays focused on the bigger picture.
• Give context behind decisions. Explaining why you choose one direction over another builds trust and engagement.

Challenge #2: Managing scope creep and conflicting priorities

Between stakeholder requests and unexpected technical requirements, your product backlog can grow quickly—sometimes drifting away from your original strategic goals.

How to overcome it:

• Use a prioritization framework. Lean on methods like RICE or the Product Tree to rank features by impact, effort, and user value.
• Document and communicate trade-offs. If adding a new feature delays another priority, communicate the impact so stakeholders understand the implications.
• Regularly revisit the roadmap. Check your theme-based roadmap against new requests to ensure changes align with strategic objectives.

Challenge #3: Balancing short-term wins with long-term strategy

Pursuing immediate gains at the expense of strategic growth is tempting, but focusing too heavily on quick fixes can undermine your product’s bigger picture.

How to overcome it:

• Identify ‘quick wins’ that support your overarching vision. Choose fast-to-implement features that also advance long-term goals.
• Plan in stages. Use theme-based roadmaps with both short-term milestones and long-term objectives, so teams see how each iteration supports future growth.
• Revisit your North Star Metric frequently. Ensure short-term experiments and product tweaks still contribute to key strategic outcomes.
• Communicate the journey. Show stakeholders and team members how today’s incremental progress moves you closer to tomorrow’s vision.

Tools and templates

helps you streamline the product management process. Its all-in-one, self-serve solution offers behavioral analytics that provides customer and product insights to inform product strategy. It also includes tools that make it easy to experiment, share learnings with teammates, and iterate and improve your approach.

Here are some Amplitude chart templates and worksheets developed by industry experts to help with the product management process:

• (Created by Dan Schmidt, Co-founder @ DoubleLoop)
• (Created by the Amplitude team)
• (Created by Kyle Poyar from OpenView)
• (Created by the Amplitude team)