Product Management 101

Product management is the practice of planning, developing, marketing, and continuous improvement of a company’s product or products.

The idea of product management first appeared in the early 30s with a memo written by the president of Procter & Gamble, Neil H. McElroy, where he introduced the idea of a product manager — a “brand man” completely responsible for a brand and instrumental to its growth.

Decades later, in the 1980s, modern product management started to take shape with the explosive growth of the software market. Since then, product management has been closely connected to and typically found in companies creating software.

What Is Product Management?

At its core, product management is about building the right product and building it right. For founders, this means two things:

• Making sure your product actually solves a real customer problem.
  
• Coordinating between teams (engineering, design, marketing, sales) so execution stays aligned with your business vision.

Think of product management as the glue between your technology and your go-to-market.

Inbound vs. Outbound Product Management

As a founder or marketer, you’ll find yourself switching between two modes:

Inbound (Product Strategy & Discovery):

• Researching customers and competitors
  
• Defining the business case and positioning
  
• Crafting the product roadmap
  
• Making tough trade-offs between features, costs, and timelines
  
• Writing clear product requirements for design and engineering
  

Outbound (Go-to-Market & Growth):

• Crafting messaging and launch plans
  
• Equipping sales with the right tools
  
• Running campaigns and PR
  
• Sharing success stories with the market
  
• Tracking how your product performs against competitors

In short: Inbound = what to build. Outbound = how to sell it.

Why Founders Should Care

In a startup, there may not be a “dedicated” product manager. 

Often, you as the founder are wearing that hat—deciding what gets built, how it’s launched, and how customers experience it. 

Even marketers step into product management when shaping messaging, launches, and feedback loops.

Key Responsibilities of a Founder Acting as a Product Manager

• Define strategy and vision → Where your product is headed and why.
  
• Communicate with stakeholders → Ensure your team, investors, and early customers all understand the plan.
  
• Oversee execution → Keep design, engineering, and marketing aligned so that what’s promised is actually delivered.

Think of yourself as the conductor of the orchestra—you don’t play every instrument, but you make sure the music works together.

Tools to Make It Easier

You don’t need an enterprise stack—just the right essentials to stay organized:

• User tracking & feedback tools (Hotjar, Typeform, etc.) → Know what customers love or hate.
  
• Prototyping tools (Figma, InVision) → Share early versions quickly.
  
• Roadmapping tools (Productboard, Trello) → Align your team on priorities.
  
• Collaboration tools (Slack, Notion) → Keep everyone on the same page.

Start lean. Use only the tools that keep you moving fast without adding overhead.

Final Takeaway

Product management isn’t a “job title” for early founders and marketers—it’s a mindset. It’s about constantly asking:

• Who is my customer?
  
• What problem am I solving for them?
  
• How do I get this solution into their hands quickly?

Master this, and you’re not just managing a product—you’re building a company.

Product Strategy

Before you start building a product, you’ll need to have a solid plan — or a product strategy.

Product strategy is the foundation of the entire product lifecycle. It should answer 3 main questions:

1. What are you building?

2. Why are you building it?

3. How are you building it?

Aside from being a plan for building the product, product strategy should provide direction to the product manager and the whole team and set out the steps necessary to turn the product into success.

As such, it involves all aspects of product creation:

• Development
• Marketing
• Sales
• Support

A great product strategy should define the following:

Product Vision

Product vision should determine the ‘why ’behind your product.

Why are you building this exact product and why should people care about it?

It should capture the essence of what you want to accomplish with your product, and how it will improve the lives of the people using it.

Target Market/Customer Persona

Next, it’s time to answer the question ‘who’ . Who is going to be using your product?

For this, you’ll need to determine the target market — the segment of people who will be most likely to use your product, and you’ll need to define your customer persona – your ideal customer, together with their goals, challenges, buying motivation, and objectives.

This will be crucial to decide how your product will look, how you will communicate with your audience, where you will reach them, etc.

Product Positioning

Product positioning means defining how your product fits into the marketplace. 

Rather than changing the product itself, product positioning focuses on the

messaging, the way you’re going to present your product to the world, and how your audience will perceive it.

However, the most important thing about positioning is to be realistic – positioning is not about how you describe your product, it’s ultimately how your users perceive it.

Product Differentiation

Product differentiation should answer the following questions:

How does your product differ from other similar products on the market?

What are its unique values that would motivate your customers to choose your product over another one?

To be able to do proper product differentiation, you’ll need to perform a thorough competitive analysis. This way, you can get to know your competition and discover how to outshine them. 

Goals and Initiatives

Lastly, product strategy includes product goals and initiatives. The goals should be clearly defined, measurable, and time-bound to help you and your team understand what you want to achieve with the product. We’ll talk more about ways to set SMART goals later in the guide.

After setting your goals, it’s time to define initiatives, which are high-level efforts necessary to achieve the goals you’ve set.

Product strategy will be your guide throughout the whole product creation process and essential for both inbound and outbound product management. That’s why strategy is important for the whole team and should be visible to the stakeholders.

In this chapter, we’ll define best practices for setting out product strategy and explain how to create a detailed, transparent strategy that will help the whole team know where the product is headed and how you’re planning to get there.

How To Define a Product Vision To Guide Your Team

Your product vision should capture the essence of what you want your product to accomplish. In one or two sentences, you should be able to explain where your product is headed and what its ultimate long-term goal is.

In other words, you’ll need to determine the “why” behind your product, the reason for its existence on the market. You need to ask yourself “why am I creating this exact product?”

Once you define your product vision, it will be like a compass for your whole team, guiding every aspect of the product creation process.

Creating a Product Vision Statement

When creating a product vision statement, you need to have your end user in mind. So instead of focusing on what the product should accomplish for you and your company, you need to shift focus to the end user.

What do you want your product to achieve for your users? As cheesy as it sounds — how are you planning to make the world a better place with your product?

Having this in mind, the product vision needs to also capture the essence of your audience — their challenges, problems, and goals — and the way your product is ultimately going to make their lives better.

Creating a product vision board will help you arrive at your vision statement. When it comes to the product management process, a product vision is a guiding light that will help you set up your whole product strategy.

The product vision should help you:

• Create a better product roadmap
• Give your team directions along the way
• Align your whole team while working toward the same goal.

Even though all stakeholders should participate in developing the product vision statement, the product manager should have the final say and polish the final

Product Vision Examples

Here are some examples of the product vision statements from the world’s most successful companies:

Microsoft: A computer on every desk and in every home.

Google: To provide access to the world’s information with one click.

Amazon: To be Earth’ s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online.

Samsung: Inspire the world. Create the future.

Instagram: To capture and share the world’ s moments.

Product Value Proposition 

A strong product value proposition starts with the problem being solved. Customers don’t buy features—they buy solutions to pressing pain points. Clearly defining the problem ensures the product directly addresses user needs and creates tangible impact.

Once the problem is validated, the market size must be assessed to determine if the opportunity is worth pursuing.

Understanding TAM (Total Addressable Market), SAM (Serviceable Available Market), and SOM (Serviceable Obtainable Market) helps in quantifying growth potential and justifying investment.

Finally, building the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) sharpens the focus. This involves defining the specific customer segment most likely to adopt the product based on demographics, firmographics, behavior, and pain points. A well-built ICP ensures go-to-market strategies are efficient, reduces wasted spend, and improves product–market fit.

In short, a clear value proposition links the problem, market opportunity, and ICP into a compelling reason why your product should exist.

Target Market and Customer Persona

Once you’ve created the product vision, you’ll need to determine who you’re

creating this product for.

For this, you’ll have to define your target market and then go a step further to define your customer persona(s). 

So what is the difference between the two?

Defining Your Target Market

Defining your target market will give you the segment of people you’re targeting, according to their age, location, education, industry, interests, gender, and similar demographic information. Of course, you don’t have to note down all these details, only those that are relevant to your product.

Although narrowing down your audience may sound counterintuitive at first, it’s a crucial step. The fact of the matter is that you can’t sell to everyone, and if your marketing scope is too wide, you’ll only be wasting your resources.

Marketing to everyone is like shooting darts in the dark — you will probably run out of darts before you even hit the dartboard once.

Keep in mind that the target market and the target audience are two separate things. The target market are people who will be using your product, and the target audience are people you’re selling the product to.

Here’s an example: you’re making software that helps children learn to read. Your target market are children aged 5-8. But, since kids of that age rarely have money (or the desire) to invest in software, your target audience are their parents, grandparents, etc.

So, when making the product, you keep your target market in mind, but when selling the product, you sell it to the target audience. In most cases, these two are the same group of people or they greatly overlap, but sometimes they are completely different.

Creating Your Customer Persona

A customer persona (also known as a buyer persona) is the representation of your ideal customer based on market analysis and data collected from existing customers.

Aside from demographics, a customer persona should give you information about your ideal customers such as their typical buying behavior, their lifestyle, needs, problems and challenges, goals, and motivations.

Once you define your customer persona (or personas), it will help you further develop your strategy when it comes to the product itself but also marketing and sales. You’ll be able to know where to find your ideal customers, how to speak their language, create the features they need, deliver the content they’re interested in, and even predict their common objections.

Product Positioning – How Your Product Fits in the Market

The next step in your product strategy is product positioning.

Product positioning means defining where your product fits in the marketplace. So rather than changing the product itself, positioning represents the messaging — how you want your audience to perceive your product.

To be able to position your product, you will need to determine your target market first, which we explained in the previous chapter. Only after you have defined your target market, you’ll be able to figure out what kind of message you want to send to them, and the best channels for sending it.

Once you know the group of people you’re creating the product for and once you have your customer persona(s), you’ll be able to translate their core values and needs into the product benefits that will sound most appealing to them. And you’ll be able to create a message that resonates with them.

However, there is one important detail you need to keep in mind. No matter how you position your product, you need to make sure to deliver on the promise. Because at the end of the day, positioning is not what you say about your product, it’s how your audience perceives it.

If you have several audience segments, you will also need to adjust your messaging, since different audience segments may see different benefits from your product.

Aside from that, you’ll need to adjust your messaging depending on the channel you’re using. For example, your style will have to be completely different when sending an email, writing a Facebook post, or creating a banner.

Creating Your Product Positioning Statement

Ultimately, your positioning statement should define your target audience, the unique features that set your product apart from the competition, and the benefits that the users will have from it. 

According to the famous organizational theorist and management consultant, Geoffrey Moore, a product positioning statement formula should look something like this:

For (target customer) 

who (has a specific problem or a need) 

our product is a (product category) 

that (provides this key benefit/solves this problem/fulfills this need) 

Unlike (primary competitive alternative) 

our product (provides this unique value)

Don’t forget that product positioning is all about crafting a compelling message that resonates with your target audience. Once you do that, it will serve as the foundation for your product management strategy.

Product Positioning Matrix

To help you visualize your product compared to your competitors, it is a great idea to create a product positioning matrix. By using this method, you will be able to realize which product aspects are the most valuable in your product and how this makes your product stand out from the rest.

The product positioning matrix should have two axes, both representing an

important value in your market. Quality and price are the most common ones, but you can use any other values that are relevant to your product. 

Product Differentiation – What’s Your Competitive Edge

Although often defined as a marketing process, product differentiation is much more than that. It is related to every aspect of the product and every part of your team, which is why it belongs right here, in the chapter about product strategy.

Unless you have an incredibly unique idea for a product that nobody has thought of before, chances are you’re going to enter a competitive market with lots of similar products already available. 

Product differentiation should answer the following question — what does your product offer that other similar products on the market don’t? What is the unique value of your product that makes it stand out from the competition?

This kind of differentiation can be focused on any aspect of your product. Maybe you’re planning to offer a better, more beautiful design. Maybe you’re going to develop unique features that your competitors don’t have. Or, you’re simply planning to offer a lower price and better customer support.

All these aspects are an opportunity for product differentiation, and ultimately product differentiation should motivate the customer to choose your product over another one.

Ideally, product differentiation should explain to your target audience how your product offers everything similar products have and more.

Competitive Analysis

To be able to differentiate your product from the competition, you first need to know who your competitors are and what they have to offer. This is called competitive analysis.

First of all, you’ll need to create a list of your ten biggest competitors. After you compile that list, it’s time for a thorough analysis. You’ll need to define all relevant factors in your niche such as:

• Feature segments
• Design
• Company size
• Prices
• Website traffic
• Number of users
• Customer support
• Other

One of the most important things to analyze when it comes to SaaS products are the feature segments. Feature segments are groups of features that are commonly found in your niche. Defining them will help you create initiatives and build your product roadmap.

To define the feature segments in your niche, you’ll need to do the following steps:

1. Find and note down all your major competitors

2. List all the features these tools have

3. Group those features into segments

How To Set Smart, Measurable Product Goals

Product goals are the highest-level objectives regarding the product — the big, bold ideas for your product and business in the future. These goals should be the crucial achievements that need to happen to turn your vision into reality.

By always keeping product goals in front of you and your team, you will make it much easier to focus on what needs to be done and when.

Although product goals are abstract, they should derive from KPIs. In other words, they should be measurable and achievable within a certain timeframe.

Product Metrics 

​In today’s competitive landscape, product teams are surrounded by data.

From user sign-ups to click-through rates, from feature usage to churn, the numbers are endless. Yet, not all metrics are created equal. Some provide real insight into product success, while others are mere vanity.

This is why understanding product metrics—and more importantly, learning to measure what matters—is central to effective product management.

Why Product Metrics Are Important

Product metrics are the compass that guide decision-making. They help answer critical questions:

• Is the product solving the intended problem?
• Are customers engaging with it as expected?
• Is the business achieving sustainable growth?
  

Without metrics, teams operate on intuition alone, risking misalignment and wasted effort. With the right metrics, teams can:

• Validate assumptions – Prove whether hypotheses about customer behavior hold true.
• Prioritize features – Identify which initiatives move the needle versus those that don’t.
• Demonstrate impact – Show leadership and investors the measurable value being delivered.
• Drive continuous improvement – Spot bottlenecks and opportunities for iteration.

In short, product metrics turn abstract vision into concrete evidence of progress.

The “Measure What Matters” Philosophy

The biggest trap in product management is chasing vanity metrics—numbers that look impressive but don’t impact business outcomes. For example, downloads may look great on a dashboard, but if users abandon the product after one session, growth is unsustainable.

“Measure what matters” means focusing on metrics that tie directly to customer value and business outcomes. It’s about filtering out noise and aligning measurement with goals.

Some guiding principles:

• Tie metrics to outcomes, not outputs. For example, don’t just track “features shipped”—measure how those features improved retention or engagement.
• Choose leading indicators over lagging ones. Retention is a lagging metric; onboarding completion rate is a leading indicator that influences it.
• Balance customer and business metrics. Satisfied customers (measured through NPS or CSAT) often correlate with business success (measured through revenue, CLV, or conversion).
  

Examples of Product Metrics That Matter

• Acquisition: New users gained, but more importantly, where they come from and at what cost (CAC).
• Activation: Percentage of users reaching the first “aha” moment, e.g., creating a profile or completing onboarding.
• Retention: DAU/MAU ratio, churn rate, or cohort retention curves that reflect product stickiness.
• Engagement: Frequency of sessions, depth of feature usage, or time spent delivering core value.
• Monetization: Average revenue per user (ARPU), lifetime value (CLV), and conversion from free to paid.
  

For instance, if the goal is increasing retention by 10%, measuring active usage and churn reduction is far more meaningful than tracking total downloads.

Product metrics are not just numbers—they are the story of your product’s performance. But with an overload of possible measurements, clarity comes only when you focus on what truly matters.

By adopting the “measure what matters” mindset, product teams can align metrics with outcomes, drive smarter decisions, and build products that deliver both customer value and business success.

How To Set SMART Goals

Setting goals might turn out more challenging than you expect. The SMART

methodology provides one of the best guidelines for coming up with the right goals and for defining them the right way.

Here’s what the acronym SMART stands for:

S = specific, significant, stretching

M = measurable, meaningful, motivational

A = agreed upon, attainable, achievable, acceptable, action-oriented

R = realistic, relevant, reasonable, rewarding, results-oriented

T = time-based, time-bound, timely, tangible, trackable

Aside from creating SMART goals, you’ll need to ensure they are aligned with your overall product strategy and business strategy.

Here are a few examples of high-level product goals that will help you drive your product forward:

• Become #1 work and data management platform by 2025
• Become a $1 billion company by January 2024
• Develop an exceptionally secure and trustworthy application by 2023
• Reach 1 million users by Q1 2025

How To Set Actionable Product Initiatives

Once you set your product goals, initiatives will be the actual steps you’ll need to take if you want to reach those goals. Even so, product initiatives don’t have to be tied to a specific goal as long as they’re aligned with your overall product strategy and vision.

The timeframe necessary to complete an initiative can vary from a few months to even a few years. For example, one initiative can be to improve the conversion rate by 3% which can take a few months to accomplish. If your initiative is to reach 100,000 signups, this will take much longer to complete.

The important thing is to set a timeframe and stick to it so you can track your progress, measure the results, and improve your strategy over time.

Here are some examples of product initiatives:

• Get 10,000 new users by November 2024
• Increase free trial engagement by 5%
• Get into the top 10 tools for project management
• Build 3 collaboration features
• Improve onboarding by 50%

It’s easy to see why initiatives are such an important part of your product strategy, but they have more than a single purpose.

Firstly, they will help you figure out what needs to be done inside and outside the product in order to reach the desired goals. Once you lay the initiatives out in the roadmap, you’ll be able to share and track them with the team so everyone can be in the loop.

And finally, you’ll be able to analyze the effort and impact of your initiatives, so you can tweak your product strategy accordingly and allocate resources in an optimal way.

Product Roadmap

If the product were a building, the product roadmap would be its blueprint. In other words, you can’t even begin to build a successful product without a solid product roadmap.

So, what is a product management roadmap and why is it so important?

A product roadmap is an important document for both your internal teams and external stakeholders. The purpose of a roadmap is to provide several valuable aspects, including:

• Providing the framework for your product development process
• Keeping all stakeholders on the same page (including your team, investors, and even customers)
• Helping to predict how much development power will be necessary to deliver the features you’re planning 

After defining your product strategy, creating a product roadmap is the next priority. A roadmap is a guiding document that outlines the direction of your product and the plan for executing the strategy. In other words, a product roadmap is a map of features and functionalities that you’re planning to add to your product and the general time frame necessary to develop them.

What Is an Agile Product Roadmap?

When it comes to building SaaS products, there are numerous methodologies to choose from. However, one of the most popular methodologies for developing software is Agile. 

The main idea behind the Agile methodology is focusing the whole development process on satisfying the end user and embracing the changing requirements that are an inevitable part of this process.

This means that when creating a product roadmap, you need to make sure it is completely flexible and regularly updated. The market and your audience will dictate the priorities, and your product management roadmap needs to reflect that. 

How To Get Ideas for Features

Once you’ve set up your product strategy with goals and initiatives, coming up with ideas for your product is not going to be a problem. But you will need to make sure that all the ideas that make the cut and find their way to your backlog are aligned with your product strategy.

For example, if one of your initiatives is to increase conversions by 15%, you need to make sure that your feature ideas are going to contribute toward achieving that goal.

You should also remember to align your feature ideas with the feature segments you’ve determined in one of the previous steps. For example, you can divide feature ideas into segments like Structure, Views, Usability, Accessibility, Design, etc.

When it comes to getting ideas for features, you can find inspiration in multiple places. It’s very important to write ideas down as soon as they are conceived, to make sure you don’t forget them. 

Your Ideas

As the product manager, you will know the product like the back of your hand. This means that you will always know best which features are missing, what needs improvement, or what the users will find the most valuable.

You can come up with ideas in the following ways:

• Analytics will help you see what customers need and which areas of the product need improvement.
• Using the product every day will give you great insight into the problematic areas and bugs as well as potential new features.
• Market research will help you figure out the way market trends are changing and how to improve the product to keep up with those trends.
• Solo brainstorming — dedicate time to think about new ideas and you’ll be surprised with the outcome.

Team Ideas

At the beginning of this guide, we mentioned that the product management process requires involvement from the whole team. That’s why your whole team should be somewhat involved in the process of creating the product roadmap.

Each part of the team — engineering, marketing, sales, customer success — will have their unique insights about the product because they see it from a different angle.

Developers will know best how each new feature will fit inside the code. Marketing and sales teams can predict what would bring the biggest impact on your bottom line. The customer success team talks to the users every day and knows their problems best.

That’s why you should make it possible for your team members to note down their suggestions in the product roadmap. That way, anyone can directly contribute by adding an idea. One of the best ways to get the most out of your team members is to regularly organize brainstorming sessions.

User Ideas

At the end of the day, you’re creating the product for the end user. That’s why some of your best ideas will come directly from your users.

Make sure to stay in touch with your users/customers through support channels, live demo calls, and community channels (such as a forum or a Facebook group). 

Your users will be eager to give suggestions, report bugs, and offer plenty of honest feedback that will help you build the product.

A good approach is to directly ask users for their opinions by having polls on what features they want to see next or by providing a form for user suggestions.

Competitors

Picasso once said (and Steve Jobs confirmed): “good artists copy; great artists steal.” There’s nothing wrong with keeping tabs on your competitors and copying (or stealing) ideas from them.

In fact, that is the only smart thing to do. So make sure to check on your main competitors ’products from time to time, follow their new releases, read their blog, and pick up a few ideas along the way.

Agile Product Development

Agile product development is a flexible, iterative approach to building products that emphasizes customer feedback, rapid delivery, and continuous improvement.

Roadmaps in Agile are living documents.

Instead of rigid long-term plans, they outline strategic themes and evolving priorities, giving teams direction while allowing room for adaptation.

Prioritisation ensures that the most valuable features are delivered first. Frameworks like MoSCoW, RICE, or Value vs. Effort help teams decide what to build now, what to defer, and what to drop.

Agile development is driven by short sprints, cross-functional collaboration, and incremental releases. This reduces risk, accelerates time-to-market, and allows teams to respond quickly to change.

Together, roadmaps, prioritisation, and iterative delivery form the backbone of Agile, ensuring products remain aligned with customer needs and market realities.

Roadmaps & Prioritisation 

A product roadmap is more than just a timeline of features. It is a strategic guide that communicates the product vision, the problems being solved, and the sequence of priorities that will deliver value over time. Roadmaps bring alignment across teams, ensure stakeholders have visibility, and help product managers make intentional trade-offs.

Product development often involves multiple moving parts—engineering constraints, customer demands, competitive pressures, and business goals. 

Without a roadmap, teams risk chasing shiny objects or working in silos. A roadmap ensures:

• Clarity of Direction – Everyone understands where the product is heading and why.
• Prioritization of Efforts – Resources are finite; a roadmap helps decide what matters most.
• Cross-Functional Alignment – From sales to engineering, teams work towards shared objectives.
• Stakeholder Communication – Investors, leadership, and customers see the bigger picture.

In essence, a roadmap connects vision to execution.

Great roadmaps are not created in isolation. They combine customer insights, sales inputs, and internal perspectives to ensure relevance and balance.

Customer Feedback: Listening to customers through interviews, surveys, and product analytics highlights pain points and opportunities. For example, recurring feedback about onboarding friction signals the need to improve first-time user experience.

Sales Team Input: Sales teams act as the front line to the market. Their insights reveal common objections, competitor gaps, and customer demands that influence roadmap priorities.

Internal Stakeholders: Engineering, design, and support teams provide feasibility, scalability, and usability perspectives, ensuring the roadmap is realistic and effective.

The role of the product manager is to synthesize these inputs, identify patterns, and prioritize based on impact and effort.

Traditionally, roadmaps listed features: “Build referral program,” “Add payment integration,” “Launch analytics dashboard.” While clear, this approach can be limiting—it focuses on outputs, not outcomes.

Outcome-based roadmaps shift the focus to business results and customer impact. Instead of promising a set of features, they commit to achieving measurable goals. This approach gives teams flexibility to experiment with different solutions while staying aligned with desired outcomes.

Example:

Outcome: Improve customer retention by 10% in the next quarter.

Possible initiatives: redesign onboarding flow, add personalized email nudges, or enhance in-app tutorials.

The team can test and iterate until the retention outcome is achieved, without being locked into one feature upfront.

This results-oriented approach promotes innovation, accountability, and adaptability.

Product Backlog

A product backlog is a prioritized list of product requirements that is a part of the overall roadmap. 

Simply put, a product backlog is a list of everything that needs to be done to create the product — features, defect fixes, and other technical work.

A typical product backlog in Scrum contains four different types of requirements (although you can add more):

1. User stories

2. Bugs

3. Refactoring

4. Knowledge acquisition

When you create the product backlog for the very first time, you’ll want to fill it out with the best-known requirements that are aligned with your overall product strategy — your vision, goals, and initiatives.

As your product grows, so should the backlog. One of the basic principles of agile development is continuous work on the product, which is why the product backlog is never complete.

If things go according to plan, your product will evolve and your community will grow, which means that you will receive a lot of suggestions from users and the team in order to make your product bigger and better.

Product Backlog Management

During the sprint planning meeting, you and your team will need to turn the product backlog into the actual to-do list — or the sprint. The product manager and the Scrum master (or the head of development) should come together to figure out which items from the backlog should go into the next sprint. 

They have to make sure to choose the optimal number of items and the most important items that can be delivered within the coming sprint — which is all part of product backlog management.

A great backlog should state clearly which ideas from your roadmap should be done next and it should ensure that the most impactful features are delivered in each new release.

Your product backlog should also be a reliable source of information for the whole team. Reserve one folder for the product backlog and make sure to keep all relevant information there.

Types of Product Backlog Tasks

In the previous chapter, we talked about user stories, but there are four main types of items that will be populating your product backlog. So what does a task in the backlog represent?

Backlog tasks are classified into user stories, bugs, refactoring, and knowledge acquisition. Let’s dive into each of the four categories and learn how to define and prioritize them.

User Stories

The majority of your backlog tasks will be in the form of user stories, which are the most important items in your backlog. As we already said, user stories are units of development that describe product functionalities from the users ’perspective.

For example: As an admin user, I want to be able to control who can delete a task in my boards. Aside from this definition, a user story needs to include the acceptance criteria, which represents the conditions that need to be met for the story to be considered complete.

Bugs

Bugs are errors in the code discovered during peer review or testing. A bug will end up in your backlog most likely after it gets reported by a user or noticed by someone on your team.

Bugs will usually be high-priority items in your product backlog. However, they should be discussed just like other backlog items during the backlog refinement and weekly Scrum meetings.

Example: New item on the task list appears in the middle of the list.

Refactoring

Refactoring is the process of restructuring existing code without changing the external behavior of the software. This results in better code readability and lower complexity, which makes the code much easier to work with and build upon.

In other words, refactoring is essential for creating a good basis for improving the tool and adding more value in the future.

Knowledge Acquisition

As their name suggests, knowledge acquisition tasks are tasks focusing on gathering new information and knowledge to accomplish some future task.

Let’s imagine that there is a user story that your development team doesn’t know how to tackle or that requires some prior learning. A knowledge acquisition task will be assigned to a team member to give them the knowledge necessary to eventually develop that user story and all similar stories in the future.

Example: Research WordPress plugin libraries and select which one to

implement.

Prioritizing With the ICE Score

When you’re developing a product, there are a great number of ways to prioritize features on the roadmap. Whatever method you choose, it’s important to cut subjectivity out of the equation.

All the people who contributed with their feature ideas (you, your team, and the users) will feel very strongly about their own ideas. The prioritization process shouldn’t be in favor of the loudest or most persuasive person.

The process should be as objective as possible so that you end up prioritizing the features that are the right choice for the product and the majority of users. This way, you can deliver the features that will add the most value first. 

As we said, you can try one of the many methods to prioritize the features. When it comes to Infinity and our roadmap, we use the ICE scoring system.

The ICE framework is the feature evaluation method that relies on three factors -impact, confidence, and ease.

• Impact: How impactful will this feature be (regarding user experience as well as product goals)?
• Confidence: How certain is it that this will prove my hypothesis (based on existing data)?
• Ease: How much effort by time is necessary to deliver this feature?

Each of these three criteria should get a 1-10 grade, and the average is considered the ICE score.

For example, if we have a feature called ‘Onboarding Tour ’we can grade it this way:

Impact: 8

Confidence: 6

Ease: 7

ICE Score: (8+6+7)/3=7

It’s important to note that all stakeholders should be taken into account for the scoring process — including all decision-making team members as well as users/customers. Even so, the ICE method is not perfect, as it can result in a lot of biased information.

However, ICE shouldn’t be taken too rigidly. This method is not supposed to be perfect — it’s supposed to help product owners evaluate ideas more easily and make data-driven decisions, instead of getting overwhelmed by everyone’s subjective opinions.

Task Prioritization With the MoSCoW Method

During the product development process, you will have ideas, suggestions, and bugs coming left, right, and center. That’s why you’ll need to prioritize tasks in your backlog and make sure that the most impactful ideas are developed first.

By performing task prioritization, you will be able to divide all tasks into three groups:

• Tasks that will go into the next sprint
• Tasks that will be developed later
• Tasks you won’t be working on at all

So, how do you prioritize the backlog?

The MoSCoW Method

There are several backlog prioritization methods that can help you manage your backlog, and you can choose whichever works best for you. In this guide, we will cover one of the most popular methods, called the MoSCoW method.

The system differentiates between these four levels  of priority:

Once you start prioritizing tasks in your backlog in such a way, it will become much clearer for you and the stakeholders what should be worked on in the next sprint. To make this prioritization more visual, you can create separate labels for these four priority levels.

To make your product backlog even cleaner, you can create a separate folder for your W (Won’t Have) items. You can name the folder Long Term, Future Tasks, etc. In Infinity’s Product Development board, we call this folder On Hold and we keep all lower priority tasks there.

You should revisit this folder from time to time and check if some of these items have deserved their spot in the backlog or if they should be completely scratched off the list.

You don’t have to follow the MoSCoW method to a tee. To make things simpler, you can create a label set in your Backlog folder called Priority and give it values Mo – High, S – Medium, Co – Low, and W – None. In this case, the items with no priority will go to the ‘On Hold ’folder, while the rest will become contenders for the sprint.

Backlog Refinement, aka Backlog Grooming

Backlog refinement, also known as backlog grooming, is the process of keeping the backlog clean and orderly and adding the necessary details and estimates to the product backlog items. Product refinement is the result of the product refinement meeting held between the product owner/manager, Scrum Master, or CTO and the development team.

During the product backlog refinement meeting, top items from the backlog are discussed, reviewed, and revised. You should hold this meeting once per sprint and it should happen near the end of the sprint to ensure that the backlog is ready for the next sprint.

Why You Need To Have a Well-Groomed Backlog

Backlog refinement can have multiple important benefits. Refinement reduces confusion and uncertainty and prepares the team to be much more efficient in the following sprint. If done right, this meeting also helps reduce the time necessary for the sprint planning meeting.

Plus, refined backlog items are much easier to estimate and implement.

In order to reach these benefits, it’s crucial to include the whole development team in the meeting (or at least as many team members as possible). 

The discussion needs to be focused on gaining more insight into each backlog item and helping the responsible team member understand what needs to be done. You should document all decisions for future reference.

For a successful product backlog grooming meeting, each team member needs to know their responsibilities.

• The product owner or manager is supposed to lead the meeting and make sure all decisions are in line with the overall product strategy.
• Scrum Master needs to facilitate communication between the development team and the product owner.
• Developers need to find and document creative solutions for backlog items, give time estimations, break up backlog items into smaller tasks if necessary, and collaborate with other team members on finding unified solutions.

If the whole Scrum team is involved in the process of product backlog grooming, it becomes much easier to plan and execute a successful and fruitful sprint.

Agile Development 

Scrum Sprint

A Scrum sprint is an iteration of development work that is accomplished in a fixed timeframe. A sprint usually lasts between one and four weeks, but it shouldn’t be longer than a month. The length of a sprint is determined at the beginning of the agile project and it should be followed throughout the project.

During a sprint, the Scrum team builds a set of features and functionalities

predefined in the sprint goal. At the end of each sprint, a potential new release of the software is completed.

Each agile sprint starts with a sprint planning meeting where the product owner (or manager), Scrum Master, and development team come together to choose which backlog features will be completed in the following sprint.

While the product manager decides on the sprint goal and the criteria that need to be met to achieve the goal, the development team decides how much work can realistically be done during the sprint.

Once the Scrum sprint begins, the product owner needs to leave the Scrum team to work independently until the end of the sprint and should only provide feedback and answer questions if needed.

The sprint ends when the time allocated for the sprint ends, regardless of whether all tasks have been completed. After that, a sprint review meeting takes place where the product owner determines whether the sprint goal has been achieved.

The following agile sprint starts as soon as the previous sprint ends, allowing the development process to work like a well-oiled machine.

What Happens During Sprint Planning?

Sprint planning happens during the sprint planning meeting held by the whole Scrum team – the product owner, Scrum Master, and the development team.

As its name suggests, sprint planning is the process of planning the following sprint. The meeting shouldn’t take more than eight hours for a month-long sprint, but ideally, it should take an hour per each week of the sprint.

The plan should be the result of a collaborative discussion of the entire Scrum team and it should identify the backlog items that will be delivered in the upcoming sprint and determine how this work will be done.

Sprint planning needs to happen right before the sprint but after the sprint review and retrospective. Each successful sprint needs to have a sprint goal, which is the main priority at the beginning of every sprint planning meeting. 

The sprint goal is the objective of the sprint that should guide the development team while building the next product increment. All tasks for the following sprint should be aligned with the sprint goal.

Who Makes the Decisions?

As we already said, the whole Scrum team should be involved in sprint planning, and everyone has a specific role:

• The Product owner should propose the sprint goal and the backlog items work on in the upcoming sprint.
• Developers should give estimates on how many tasks they can handle in upcoming sprint and discuss how they’re planning to deliver these tasks ultimately achieve the sprint goal.
• The Scrum Master facilitates communication between team members and ensures that the discussion is effective. They need to make sure everyone is on the same page regarding the goal and the backlog items that will be handled in the sprint.

Together, they should decide which items from the backlog will be completed in the sprint, as well as define their requirements, potential problems, and the factors that will determine when a task has been done.

Why You Need Daily Scrum Meetings

Daily standups, also known as Daily Scrum, are quick daily Scrum meetings that the Scrum team has every day of the sprint. These meetings should be time-boxed to 15 minutes to keep the discussion quick but effective.

To eliminate confusion and keep things as productive as possible, daily Scrum meetings should be held at the same time and same place every day. It’s best to have them in the morning before the Scrum team starts their work.

The whole team should attend daily standups — the Scrum Master, product

owner/manager, and developers. Other team members can attend and listen but they shouldn’t actively participate in the discussion.

If other people are present at the daily standup, the Scrum Master should ensure they don’t disrupt the meeting.

During the meeting, the Scrum team should go over the Scrum meeting agenda. This includes synchronizing activities and planning the work for the following 24 hours.

Each team member should state:

• What they did the previous day
• What they’re planning to do that day
• Whether there are any obstacles in their way

The Scrum Master needs to make sure to remove those obstacles or find someone on the team who can do it.

By sharing this information, the whole team knows what has been done and what still needs to be worked on. It’s wrong to consider daily standups as feedback sessions where developers report to the Scrum Master and product owner. Instead, these meetings should help the whole team gain more knowledge of their progress and focus on the goal ahead.

Having daily Scrum meetings increases the chances that the development team will meet the sprint goal.

Sprint Review vs. Sprint Retrospective

Although sprint review and sprint retrospective can be mistaken for the same thing, these two Scrum events are completely different. Here’s a bit more about each of the two types of meeting and the things that set them apart.

Sprint Review

In each sprint, the Scrum team should produce a potentially shippable product increment. The sprint review is a meeting at the end of the sprint where the Scrum team and all stakeholders get together and discuss what has been accomplished during the sprint and whether the sprint goal has been met.

The people attending the sprint review should include the product owner and product manager, Scrum Master, the development team, management, and anyone else involved in the product creation process.

This is usually an informal type of meeting where the Scrum team presents the product increment, while the stakeholders provide feedback. A sprint review shouldn’t last more than four hours per month-long sprint (up to one hour per each week of the sprint). The Scrum Master needs to ensure the meeting doesn’t run longer than that.

Aside from presenting the work done during the sprint, sprint review meetings should have a few other things on the agenda:

• The product owner needs to inform the team about the tasks that have been completed and those that are not yet done.
• The developers need to discuss problems they encountered during the sprint and how they were solved.
• The Scrum team answers sprint-related questions from the rest of the team. 
• The team should discuss which tasks come next, which provides a great basis for the next sprint planning meeting.

Sprint Retrospective

The sprint retrospective meeting takes place immediately after the sprint review.

While the sprint review is a discussion about what the team is building, the sprint retrospective is focused on how they’re building it.

This meeting is usually slightly shorter than the sprint review and shouldn’t last more than three hours per month-long sprint. 

To get the most out of a sprint retrospective meeting, you should ensure that the whole Scrum team, including the product owner, attends and participates.

The goal of a sprint retrospective is to improve the development process. The Scrum team reflects on the previous sprint and discusses what’s working well, what could be improved, and how they could improve overall productivity.

Although these improvements may be implemented during the sprint, the sprint retrospective gives the Scrum team a formal opportunity to discuss the process and motivates each team member to voice their opinion and ideas.

For a successful sprint retrospective meeting, each team member should try to answer the following sprint retrospective questions:

1. What went well during the sprint?

2. Is there anything that can be improved?

3. How can we make those improvements?

Instead of using the sprint retrospective as an opportunity for complaints, this meeting should be constructive with everyone on the team making an effort to improve the process and create an enjoyable work experience for the whole team.

What Are User Stories and How To Write Them

User stories are small units of development that describe a product functionality from the user’s perspective. Instead of giving a technical description of a functionality, a user story gives a clear idea of what a user wants to accomplish with it.

A lot of development teams rely on technical descriptions as well, which means you don’t have to eliminate them altogether. Still, it’s important to keep the focus on user stories and the user’s point of view.

Why You Need User Stories

User stories are incredibly useful because they provide a user-centric work

framework and allow the engineering team to be as creative as they like, as long as they deliver the end result expected by the user.

Since user stories are supposed to represent the user’s point of view, they should be short and simple descriptions written in non-technical language. After reading a story, the team should know what they are building, why they are building it, and what kind of value it will provide to the end user.

How To Write User Stories

The stories are written by the product manager or product owner, but they should be as simple as possible, narrowed down to one or two sentences. If the story is too complicated to write, it might mean that it should be broken down into several smaller user stories.

The details of a user story are added after a discussion with the team. This is where the product manager and the development team come together. At this point, features are broken down into several smaller user stories that can be delivered in a shorter time frame.

This discussion should also provide the conditions of satisfaction — or acceptance criteria — which are a list of conditions that need to be met for the story to be considered complete.

User Story Template

How to write user stories? 

Typically, a user story template looks like this:

As a [type of user], I want to [accomplish some goal] so that [reason].

For example, this is how one user story in your product roadmap could look: 

As a user, I want to be able to sort my tasks in a way that makes the most sense to me.

User Story Examples

However, this user story can be broken down into multiple smaller stories. So here are a few user stories examples that can come out of it:

• As a user, I want to be able to sort my tasks by the due date.
• As a user, I want to be able to sort my tasks by the assignee.
• As a user, I want to be able to sort my tasks by priority.

Closing Thoughts on Product Management

Product Management is often described as the intersection of business, technology, and user experience—but at its core, it is about creating value.

The discipline demands balancing vision with execution, intuition with data, and short-term priorities with long-term strategy. A great product manager is not just a coordinator of tasks but a curator of problems worth solving, a translator of customer pain into opportunities, and a steward of outcomes that align with business goals.

Nowhere is this balance more visible than in the process of building and launching an MVP (Minimum Viable Product).

The MVP represents a disciplined approach to innovation: rather than over-engineering solutions or waiting for perfection, product managers release the simplest version of a product that delivers core value. This early product is not about polish—it’s about learning. It gives teams the fastest possible route to test assumptions, gather feedback, and validate whether a real problem is being solved.

By putting something in the hands of users quickly, PMs reduce risk, accelerate insights, and avoid costly detours.

But launching an MVP is only the beginning.

The true test of product management lies in achieving PMF (Product–Market Fit). PMF occurs when the product resonates so strongly with its target audience that customer acquisition feels almost organic, engagement deepens naturally, and retention curves flatten instead of falling. Reaching this stage is a signal that the team has not only built something useful but something indispensable.

PMF is not achieved through guesswork; it is achieved through rigorous iteration, relentless customer focus, and constant measurement of what matters.

The journey from MVP to PMF captures the essence of product management.

It is a cycle of building, measuring, and learning, where each iteration brings the team closer to solving the problem in a way that delights customers and sustains the business. Product managers play a crucial role in orchestrating this cycle—deciding what to test, interpreting the signals, and making the hard calls on what to prioritize next.

Ultimately, product management is less about owning the roadmap and more about owning the outcomes. Features are transient; customer value is enduring. A strong PM recognizes that success is not defined by how many features are shipped but by how deeply the product improves the lives of its users.

In this light, the MVP is a tool for discovery, and PMF is the milestone that validates the product’s place in the market. Together, they represent the arc of progress that every product manager must navigate.

In closing, the role of a product manager is not just to manage products but to manage progress—from vision to MVP, from MVP to PMF, and from PMF to sustainable growth.

It is a craft of empathy, strategy, and persistence. And while tools, frameworks, and roadmaps will evolve, the essence remains constant: build what matters, measure what matters, and deliver value that lasts.