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Moustapha is a Product Manager on a lifelong journey to continuous improvement. Previously a founder, Moustapha has experience building engineering and design teams and leading them to ship solutions to enterprise users. He currently does research in the Product Analytics space and brings Toronto Product Managers together as a community leader.

Product Manager

Moustapha Seck

<p>Every product is meant to be released and every release is meant to bring value to the customer. However, as all product managers know, not all releases are equal! Some go well and others are painful &#8211; sometimes they&#8217;re even monsters, as Saeed Khan of Transformation Labs explains in this Product Tank Toronto talk.</p>
<p>Watch the video to see his talk in full, or read on for an overview of his key points:</p>
<ul>
<li>What a great release looks like</li>
<li>Defining your objective</li>
<li>Assessing risk</li>
</ul>
<p>To start, we first have to understand what is meant by <strong>a great release. </strong>In his talk, Saeed defines a major functional release as:</p>
<blockquote>
<h3><span style="font-style: italic;">A set of new capabilities and improvements requiring large effort and providing significant value to the company and the market</span></h3>
</blockquote>
<p>While all product managers go through the process of making their products go live, release planning is not always a clear, well-defined process.</p>
<p>In order to bring harmony and clarity to product release planning, Saeed shared a few tips (and an awesome Release Planning Canvas) with the ProductTank Toronto community.</p>
<h2>Focus on the “Why”</h2>
<p>Every step of the product development cycle should be driven by purpose. The first thing that should be done when planning a release is defining its objective. What are you trying to validate? What is the problem that you aim to solve for your users? Stating unambiguous answers to these questions will guide you for the rest of the release.</p>
<h2>Share the Game Plan</h2>
<p>Major releases impact companies in multiple ways. There is a new product to market, sell and provide support for. Understand the needs of your stakeholders. Communicate the release plan early on. This will save you the trouble of having to adjust your strategy to fit the demands of someone else in the organization.</p>
<h2>Spot the Potential Fires</h2>
<p>Few product processes are perfect and problem-free, but assessing risks and potential obstacles during the planning phase will significantly improve your chances of success.</p>
<h2>Define the Win</h2>
<p>As Saeed explains, “if you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it” and beyond helping you assess performance, having meaningful metrics for your release process is the key to improvement over time.</p>
<p>Saeed left the audience with a <a href="https://www.transformationlabs.io/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Release-Planning-Canvas-v1018.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Release Planning Canvas</a>, encapsulating the major questions every product person should ask themselves when releasing. Ultimately, monster<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>product releases (named Kraken releases by Saeed) are born from poor planning, politics and exertion of power and, at times, will require heroics to be stopped in their tracks. However, as he points out if you need to be a hero, it means the system has failed somewhere.</p>
<h3></h3>

core/freeform

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