Product-Led Growth Series - Gear Up For 2022
by Leica Ison
As you gear up for 2022, we look at how you can meet the challenges of an evolving product landscape and get better revenue growth from your product management and risk management efforts. Learn how to get the most from modern timesaving tools and uncover tips and best practice tactics to meet your product-led growth objectives. From addressing customer value, legal and regulatory requirements at Ideation or concept stage to using automation tools at Shaping and Launch phases, this 6-part series makes it easier to get powerful insights, make data driven decisions for growth and product impact.
Product-Led Growth & Impact: How to set legal and regulatory product requirements across the lifecycle.
In this step-by-step guide we look at how product designers can rapidly understand regulatory constraints and opportunities for a product.
As a product manager, you need to be able to challenge and also comply with these obligations. Why? So, you provide fair value for your customers, comply with industry standards and community expectations and monitor them across the complete lifecycle.
The need for a product manager to accelerate efforts to understand and manage legal and regulatory obligations is increasingly urgent. Community expectations and social trends that drive new regulation and its impacts worldwide are growing. Product managers' leadership and innovation are vital to accurate communication across the complete lifecycle.
Product managers championing action in this area must also apply commercially viable actions to maintain business growth. Product managers can identify opportunities to boost their bottom line, reduce risk, and discover competitive advantages by addressing your product's regulatory footprint.
We explore defining and managing the legal and regulatory obligations over a product life cycle in the blog to give you the know-how to:
- Define the scope of legal and regulatory requirements for a product lifecycle - design, launch, monitor, optimise
- Identify the life cycle stages and what to include in your design and monitoring plan
- Find the difference between legal and regulatory requirements and design and distribution obligations
- Collect data, assess with your team, and credibly report performance to stakeholders
A product's regulatory footprint is defined in a multi-stakeholder partnership of product team, legal team and marketing team. As a Product Manager, you have the lead role in setting and monitoring regulatory requirements across the complete lifecycle. The product managers lead any course correction required across the Ideation, Shaping and Execution lifecycle stages.
Product design and regulatory footprint principles
- Customer led- understand the customer problem and aim to provide fair value
- Product legal and regulatory obligations can be identified and monitored rapidly
- Course-correct - monitoring and reviews are critical to delivering sustainable value.
Each section of this guide brings together best practices to design and deliver products across a complete lifecycle. Actionable steps are provided across the phases covered: ideation, shaping, launch, monitoring, and optimise.
1. IDEATION PHASE
The ideation phase is where the product manager generates ideas and validates problems and opportunities.
Regulatory Footprint activity: Complete Lean Canvas and document a matrix of legal and regulatory design requirements.
The regulatory design matrix helps us understand, validate and communicate the product value and regulatory design obligations. It forms a concise and evidence-based overview of the requirements. The document becomes the anchor point for product design and lifecycle monitoring.
The Outputs The outputs at this stage are Lean Canvas and Regulatory Design Matrix.
Why do it? Crystallises the idea and regulatory principles to be shared and discussed with the agile team.
2. SHAPING PHASE
The Shaping Phase is where the product manager validates and develops innovative product concepts with the customer.
Regulatory Footprint activity: Complete analysis of legal and regulatory design requirements.
The legal and regulatory analysis identifies the requirements to be considered in the conceptual product design. This is where a Product Manager explores how to address them, and solutions are shaped with your team.
The Outputs The outputs at this stage are Product Legal and Regulatory Analysis.
Why do it? Provides an understanding of legal and regulatory requirements, boundaries, constraints, and opportunities. Product teams can be innovative and challenge the assumptions of how best to comply.
3. PRODUCT LAUNCH PHASE
The Launch phase is where the product manager delivers value to the customer and refines the value proposition and product roadmap to meet product metrics and targets.
Regulatory Footprint activity: Complete a product design and distribution statement.
The Design and Distribution statement sets out the essential requirements to monitor and review after your product launch. This includes identifying your target market, excluded customers, and your risk indicators that would require an out-of-cycle review, such as e.g. customer complaints, cancellations, and sales decline.
The Outputs The outputs at this stage are Product Design and Distribution Statement.
Why do it? This ensures that the product manager has rapid access to the design and distribution obligations clearly and concisely. This forms the basis of a monitoring cadence and plan. The best practice for agile product teams is to monitor monthly, and review is every 90 days. Product managers can then be confident they meet legal and regulatory requirements and can do that efficiently.
4. MONITOR PHASE
The Monitor phase is where the product manager continuously monitors a product to understand performance, value and risk.
Regulatory Footprint activity: Complete an annual monitoring schedule and set product triggers.
The Monitor phase can be automated using modern product lifecycle and governance platforms like Skyjed. The free monitoring templates for your initial reviews and annual reviews are accessible with a few clicks and can get you up and running in minutes.
The Outputs The outputs at this stage are Product reports and insights that can be used to make optimisation decisions and reports to stakeholders.
Why do it? Provides the insights and reports needed to determine if your product strategy is solving a customer problem, providing fair value or if you need to pivot or course-correct.
5. OPTIMISE PHASE
The Optimise phase is where the product manager uses improvement actions to course-correct product strategy and meet targets and metrics.
Regulatory Footprint activity: Report on product triggers and governance events. The Product Regulatory report includes strategic insights to share with stakeholders covering monitoring and review outcomes, trigger events, customer complaints, risk actions, sales activity and product metrics.
The Outputs The outputs at this stage are Product Design and Distribution Report.
Why do it? Provides an understanding of leading and lagging product growth and compliance measures. It identifies opportunities for improvement and evolve your product strategy and informs future direction or if you need to course-correct or use risk mitigation actions.
Lift the standard of your product growth decisions!
With these five steps and additional tips, you'll be well on your way to leading your product design and reviews with confidence and comply with your legal and regulatory requirements.
Suppose you're looking to streamline your product design and monitoring process, making things easier for management and your general team. Why not try out the product lifecycle and governance platform Skyjed. With a product design and monitoring workspace with templates and improvement tools, you can confidently monitor, manage and report your entire product life cycle.
You can find more in this playbook or book a live 15-minute demo. What's more, it's free for small teams, making this the perfect opportunity to try out the tool as you gear up for 2022.
What's next in the series?
In part 1, we provided you with an overview of Product-led Growth & Impact tactics to help you gear up for 2022.
Next, we'll delve deeper into the individual phases and share best practice tips for optimal performance.
Part 3: Shaping
Part 4: Monitor
Part 5: Optimise
About Skyjed:
Skyjed provides the essential monitoring, reporting and analytics capability to continuously improve a product portfolio to give the visibility required for teams and management to manage a lifecycle end-to-end. With pre-built product drivers, reports, dashboards and trigger-based alerts and notifications, business teams can ensure fast and smart product decisions.