The starting point of any great feature work is Feature Opportunity Validation.

Before specs
are developed or any code is written, product managers need to decide what to build, and
validate whether the opportunity will create value for their users and their business.

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For an opportunity to be worth pursuing, it needs to have 3 components. First, strategic fit.
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It needs to align with the strategy and goals of the company. The second component is
user value. it needs to solve a relevant problem for a target user. The third component is
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business value. Solving the problem needs to create value that the company can capture in
some way.
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Great product managers are not only able to validate each component of an opportunity,
but also communicate and build alignment across the company to ensure the project is on
a successful path. We walked through a four-step process to help sequence and execute
these two objectives.

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The first step is to conduct a manager briefing. A manager briefing is a meeting with your
manager in which you can gather information about the project you have just been
assigned, and align on the expectations of that work. You’ll use the three components of a
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feature opportunity—strategic fit, user value, and business value—to guide the discussion.
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Let’s start with strategic fit. An opportunity’s strategic fit can be evaluated at four levels:
company mission and vision, company strategy, product strategy, and team’s
goals. Defining each of these levels with your manager during the manager briefing
ensures you have a clear, shared understanding of why this project is a good strategic fit
for your company.

After building a shared understanding of the strategic fit of the project, you can begin
asking your manager about the next component: user value. The goal is to understand the
starting hypotheses about the user and their problems. There are four elements to a user
hypothesis:

Who is the user?

What is the problem we are trying to solve for them?
Why is that problem important to the user?
What does success look like for the user, and how will we measure that success?
After gathering your manager’s hypotheses about the user, you can move on to
understanding their business value hypotheses. There are 3 elements to a business value
hypothesis:

Who are the key stakeholders, and how do you identify and align with them?
What does success look like for the business?
How does success for this project tie to the team goals, product goals, and broader
strategies of the company?

The information gathered from each of these questions in the manager briefing is the
starting point from which you’ll refine the user value and business value of the opportunity.
We’ll start with refining the user value. The best tool for refining user value is the user
interview. In order to get insights about how users think and feel, you need to engage
directly with them. Interviewing users lets you dive deep into the problems they’re facing
and how they’re solving those problems today.

You can think of conducting an interview like guiding your user up a mountain trail. The trail
guide has three distinct parts. First, the warm up phase: You begin by establishing rapport
to build a relationship and foster trust ahead of the journey.

Next is the build phase. This means setting the context and boundaries of the problem you
want to explore, and letting the user provide their own perspective. The idea here is to
guide the interviewee up a gentle incline, rather than scrambling to the peak too quickly
and leaving them behind.

Finally, you reach the peak phase, where you can ask specific questions about the
problem, or “peak questions.” This is the main objective of your interview: to deeply explore
the user’s experience of the problem. But it’s very difficult to get there without taking the
time to warm up and set boundaries.
After you talk to users, it’s important to invest time in translating your raw insights into a
synthesized user value map. There are two phases to this process: debriefing and
synthesis.

Synthesizing insights from your user interviews has 5 steps:

1. Cluster based on user problems

2. Identify patterns across user profiles
3. Identify patterns across alternatives and severity
4. Create the User Value Map
5. Reevaluate the project based on these findings
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The third step of validating a feature opportunity is to refine the potential business value.
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You already know that your manager and the leadership team believe there is value for the
business to capture by completing this project. It’s your job as a PM to validate the
probable magnitude of this business value. To do this, you can leverage a method called
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funnel analysis.
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Funnel analysis breaks down into three steps:

Step 1: Build a funnel. This means establishing the starting point and endpoint, and
identifying the intermediate steps that connect the two.
 Step 2: Calculate the problem magnitude. This is the number or percentage of people
that drop off somewhere in the middle of the funnel and don’t reach the end point.
Step 3: Evaluate the potential business value. In this step, you can leverage proxy
metrics to create directionally correct estimates of how well your project can improve
or solve the problem.

There are two types of meetings you can leverage to achieve this objective: product
reviews with leadership, and project updates with your core team. While you should plan
on hosting project updates with your team throughout development, a product review is a
meeting with your leadership at the end of the feature opportunity validation phase to
ensure the opportunity you’ve identified is correct, and align with them on the path
forward.
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To achieve these objectives, we recommend breaking down the meeting into four distinct
parts. First, take time to state the objectives and rules of engagement for all attendees.
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Next, deep dive into the opportunity. This is where you can share your learnings and
pressure-test your refined hypotheses about strategic fit, user value, and business value.
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Third, identify constraints and dependencies, and finally, align on next steps.
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After completing your product review, you should codify your learnings about the
opportunity in the product requirements document, or PRD. This document will be the
single source of truth that sets your team up for success in the next phase: feature design.