Product Empowerment Pyramid

Turn vision into action, guiding teams from strategy to detailed execution for product success

This week, we’re diving into the essence of product development—the "why" and "what" behind every feature, function, and capability we build. At the heart of this process is our Product Empowerment Pyramid. This concept ensures our co-creators are fully equipped to tackle the "how" with clarity and confidence.

We review this in great detail with examples in the Product Protégé Guide and our Product Management Courses.

The top 1% of product managers already know this stuff… if that’s you, don’t subscribe :)

The Power of Why

Starting at the top of the Product Empowerment Pyramid, we have your product’s Vision. This is more than just the purpose and benefit of what we’re building—it's about setting a compelling vision for our product team (and co-creators) and defining the overarching theme we’re pursuing. Why does the collection of capabilities that we craft for our customers matter in the grand scheme of our business? How does it align with our overall team mission? Grounding our work in a clear vision unites the team with a shared goal, building an understood and transparent sense of purpose and direction.

I often remind my Scrum team and product teams of our vision verbatim. We discuss this in the Product Protégé Guide, including tips on how to ensure your co-creators know the team's vision as well as the product manager.

Strategy: The Pillars and Guardrails

Next, we have Strategy—this includes our pillars, guardrails, and themes. Strategy translates vision into a set of guidelines within which we operate. These elements help us navigate through challenges, ensuring we stay on course while maintaining the flexibility to adapt as needed.

How do you use your strategy when working with co-creators and stakeholders?

It’s a question I often find product managers struggling with while they try to find the printout of their strategy in their desk.

Here is a tip: when someone tells you they have an idea, immediately use your strategy to determine if it's something you'll consider further or pause the conversation and explain how the idea doesn't fit with the current strategy. Whether your strategy is right or wrong, time will tell—but it will definitely be clear, and everyone will understand it. Clarity is the most important thing.

Roadmap: Realizing Strategy and Vision

The Roadmap is where strategy meets execution. It’s the detailed plan that guides us from the present to the future, laying out the steps needed to realize our vision in the short to medium term. A well-defined roadmap allows you to showcase to your team, co-creators, and stakeholders where the team will be spending its energy and time, and what we are committing to. While a roadmap can always change, at any given moment it represents our current commitments—use it to defend your team's time by pointing to our focused objectives.

As new learnings, investment opportunities, or high-value pitch decks arise, you will need to update the roadmap. When it does change, everyone will know what it was before and what it is now, providing clarity on how you are adding value to the organization. This transparency fosters trust and alignment among all team members and stakeholders, ensuring that everyone understands the rationale behind the adjustments and remains committed to the updated goals.

Epics: Pitch Deck, Assumptions, and Scope

Epics are the large bodies of work that capture significant pieces of functionality. They include pitch decks (problems, observations, and hypothesis with target metrics and forecast), assumptions, risks, open questions and what is in/out of scope for our project. Clear and comprehensive epics provide our co-creators with a strong foundation to understand the broader context and the key objectives we aim to achieve.

Tip: When defining an epic, ensure that it is not just a repository of tasks but a narrative that tells the story of the problem you’re solving. Include examples of customer stories or any case studies to illustrate the impact of the proposed solution. This makes the epic more relatable and helps co-creators fully grasp the significance of their work, driving engagement and alignment with the project's goals.

User Stories: Details for Execution

Finally, User Stories break down epics into manageable tasks, detailing what needs to be built. They are the building blocks of our development process, giving our co-creators precise instructions to execute effectively. When user stories are well-crafted, they remove ambiguities and hurdles, enabling the team to focus on delivering quality work. We cover user stories in great detail in our Product Management Courses - you can start them for free today!

Tip! Craft your user stories with detailed acceptance criteria that can directly translate into test cases for your QA team. By providing clear, specific requirements, you enable your QA team to write comprehensive test cases, ensuring thorough testing and higher quality outcomes. Well-defined user stories pave the way for efficient testing, reducing ambiguities and streamlining the development process.

Empowerment Through Clarity

The Product Empowerment Pyramid is a tool for empowering your stakeholders, co-creators, and your product team mates to understand why and what you are building. They gain a deep understanding of the project’s purpose and objectives, which in turn, allows them to figure out the "how" with creativity and efficiency.

Tip! Make sure to let all of your co-creators and stakeholders have access to your Product Empowerment Pyramid and the documents or confluence pages that represent them. Link them directly to remove all friction from understanding your team’s pyramid.

We’re here to support every step of the way. Questions? Feedback? We're all ears. Let’s continue to build great products, together.

Until next week,

Jason @ Product Protégé

Feel free to forward this newsletter to your fellow product managers and co-creators. For more insights and tools, check out the Product Protégé Guide available now on Amazon.

Happy product managing!