Product Management Glossary

The Agile Manifesto is a document written up by a group of 17 developers called the Agile Alliance. It details four key values and 12 principles that software developers should adhere to for their work. It’s important to note that the Agile Manifesto doesn’t prescribe a specific methodology or framework. Instead, it proposes a mindset that software developers should adopt..

In agile, the definition of done is an agreement between a product team on the set of conditions that must be true in order to consider backlog items truly done.

Whether it’s a single person or an entire team, the goal of Product Ops is to streamline and improve the product team’s work so there is a more consistent approach to managing tools and processes and the various facets of what it takes to run a successful product team.

Prioritization in product management is the disciplined process of evaluating the relative importance of work, ideas, and requests to eliminate wasteful practices and deliver customer value in the quickest possible way, given a variety of constraints. Here are frameworks to leverage.

Along with the four values of the Agile Manifesto, there are 12 principles you need to be aware of. These principles go into a little more detail and expand upon the four values.

The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is the sweet spot between return on investment (ROI) and risk, which correlates directly to effort and time to market.

Jobs-to-be-Done is a framework that helps you focus on a user’s needs by separating it from the solution. JTBD analyzes why people make their purchases.

Dual-track agile is an agile methodology that contains two separate tracks. There’s the “Discovery” track, and the “Delivery” track. Dual-track agile enables product teams to work on research and product development in parallel.

The Agile Manifesto consists of four key values. We look at each in detail.

Whenever you see a successful startup, you see one that has achieved product/market fit. You can always feel that product/market fit is happening—it leaves no room for doubt. Here's how to define product/market fit, frameworks to find it, and how to measure it.

Backlog grooming is a regular session where backlog items are discussed, reviewed, and prioritized by product managers, product owners, and the rest of the team. The primary goal of backlog grooming is to keep the backlog up-to-date and ensure that backlog items are prepared for upcoming sprints.

The 5 whys method is an iterative approach to get past surface-level problems and uncover the underlying cause. See why 5 whys is useful for product managers, and learn how to conduct a 5 whys analysis step-by-step.

Product differentiation is what sets your product apart from you competitors’ products. The product differentiation process involves discovering the characteristics of your product that your customers value and are unique to you.

Think of a company’s product portfolio as its menu; it’s a collection of every product, service and brand that a company offers. A product portfolio provides companies with a snapshot of which products and services are generating revenue or meeting other business objectives.

Product strategy is the process of crafting a cohesive plan to guide the development, marketing, and positioning of a product or service within a market. It represents a comprehensive understanding of customer needs, competitive landscapes, and long-term business objectives, and clearly aligns all three to inform smarter, more customer-centric business decisions.

For product managers, it is incredibly important to get buy-in and support from stakeholders. That's where the stakeholder analysis comes in. Here's why stakeholder analysis is important, and a step-by-step guide to loop key influencers into your product decisions.

Product Roadmap Guide Every great journey might begin with a destination, but it’s almost impossible to set forth without a guide. For the product manager, a product or feature launch is the destination, the product roadmap, their necessary guide. The product roadmap leads the product team and others through product

A user story is a simple description of something that a user of your product wants to achieve. It often involves one feature or aspect of your product, and is written from the user’s perspective. Here's everything you need to know.

Scrum Master is a role defined in the Scrum framework that is responsible for helping everyone understand Scrum theory, practices, rules, and values. If you’re filling the role of Scrum Master, here is the meaning and your responsibilities.

A product requirements document (PRD) is an artifact that product teams use to describe the solution they are providing in order to solve a specific problem.

Product-led growth is a go-to-market strategy that relies on product usage as the primary driver of acquisition, conversion, and expansion. We dive into the benefits of a product-led growth model and key metrics of success.

Here’s a look at what product features are, how they tie in with benefits, how you represent features, and how you incorporate features into product planning.

The product development process is the entire process for taking a new product from an idea to market. There are several different models or frameworks you can adopt in your organization to effectively and efficiently build new products. We detail the most popular ones.

In agile development, a product backlog is a list of all things — new features, bug fixes, improvements, changes to existing features, and other product initiatives — that product teams must prioritize and deliver in order for a product to strategically come to life.

In Agile product management, epics are used to organize tasks and create hierarchy in the development process. Before delivery work can begin, product people must break epics down into bite-sized "stories" that can more readily be brought to life as real working functionality...