Reviewing Peers

I am suggesting reviews of your problem statements with your peers. Specifically the other product management types you work with. I know, you are the only product manager in the company. This is a great excuse to have a sit down with the head of marketing or an executive. At this point, I am trying to stay away from the people who will build the solution.

This doesn’t have to be a formal review with an official sign-off process. You are looking to validate a few things including that you have a well defined problem statement that is devoid of solution, within your market segments, measurable, observable and answers all questions.

Since the problem statement is technically your first official analysis of the idea (no matter who or how it was sourced.. err.. sensed), you want the extra eyes to validate whether it warrants further processing. This is a great gating factor to help save some R&D cycles by filtering out requirements that are ill-defined or out of scope for your target market. If the problem smells, it’ll never get to the requirement stage.

For what it is worth, this totally works for features and roadmaps too.

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