Product Planning – What Is It, How To Do

Understand what product planning is and why is it important for all businesses.

What is Product Planning?

Product planning, as the name suggests, is all the internal focused steps, decisions, and tasks involved to successfully create and develop a product. Any decision made that affects the development of the product in any way is considered product planning.

This is a broad term that consists of so much. On the other hand, go-to-market planning is everything external-facing steps and consists of things you’ll do to introduce and then market your product.

Product planning consists of the following things:

• What features should we prioritize for the product’s development?
• How will we determine the price points for our product?
• Which vendors will we work with for manufacturing?
• What will be our revenue targets, our goals for new-customer adoption and other metrics that we can track to determine the product’s level of success?

 To bust the common myth, product planning is something that just happens in the early stage of product making. It is in fact the continuous process of planning, strategizing, making changes, and creating new things to make your product better. 

Good product Planning Strategy

So, what does it take to have a good product planning strategy? Let us take a look.

Creating A Culture Where Product Planning Is Considered An Ongoing Process

There are various stages of product planning that are based on the different development of the product life cycle. This never-ending process is essential and must be done time and again to make sure that the product survives all kinds of demographics and scenarios. 

This would require a major change in the thinking of any company but it is required to make your product successful among all users and situations. 

Frequent meetings should have discussions around the current status of the product, challenges etc, strategic planning, new changes etc.

Culture Of Frequent Communications Throughout The Product Development Process

One of the most important changes that you can bring to an organization during product planning is bringing the culture of frequent communication throughout the early developmental process rather than just a few pre-decided meetings.

While product planning, you would be making several decisions but they all might not work, hence it is essential to keep coming back to the meeting to talk about the current scenario, what is working, what isn’t and what the next step should be.

Your team should come forward to have an open discussion and suggest new ideas for your product, look into data, insights etc. For all these reasons it becomes of utmost importance to have a healthy culture of frequent meetings.

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Summarizing data With Takeaways And Conclusions

While making or suggesting changes in your plan, it is better that you do thorough research on your suggestions and backs them up with data. This does not mean throwing numbers at your team but also making them understand why this would work. 

Don’t just suggest to the team ideas and then expect them to come up with ways to do it but help them by showing them supporting data that helps them understand your ideas and the research forward.

Have Product Planning Ceremonies So That The team is Up-To-Date About Everything

If you decide to follow all the above-mentioned steps, you for sure would not surprise the stakeholders, involved team, and key players with all the changes that you are making. 

A team that does not keep key stakeholders in loops can have very risky meetings once they decide to have a meeting with them. Some people might feel blindsided by this and might just be completely shocked by the new information you are throwing at them.

You need to have timely meetings with all important stakeholders and other team members to keep them on the same page as you and make them feel valued and an equal part of the product planning process.

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How Lio Can Help You In Product Planning

Lio App can help you big time. The app lets you keep all sorts of data together in a more organised manner. You can keep records, and create tables and lists while working solo or with a team.

You can work on one of the many templates that are offered based on your needs or create a template of your own. No matter how big your team is, you can share the files with them so that you can all collaborate together and work simultaneously with real-time changes.

One can take control of how much one can see or edit in a file. You can upload documents and create all kinds of tracks on your product planning.

Step 1: Select the Language you want to work on | Lio for Android

Step 2: Create your account using your Phone Number or Email Id.

Verify the OTP and you are good to go.

Step 3: Select a template in which you want to add your data.

Add your Data with our Free Cloud Storage.

Step 4: All Done? Share and Collaborate with your contacts.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Conclusion

Product planning is one of the best things that you can do while planning for a new product. Good product planning would help upi create a solid plan for your product with the help of which you would be able to deliver something that all customers would love.

This is an important step for any product and should not just be a one-time thing. The team should keep coming back together to analyse the product and how it is doing to make appropriate and beneficial changes.