This is never more important than when you’re part of an organization that’s undergoing some form of digital transformation. Here, even though you’re working on a digital product, your organization will not be used to a digital-first mindset. 

If you’ve joined a company going through digital transformation, where stakeholders are used to physical products or service-based solutions, you’ll need to take them on a journey – helping to bridge the gap between the product approach they’ve used in the past and a new digital product strategy. 

Or perhaps you’re managing a portfolio that spans both physical and digital products. You’ll need to pay close attention to the unique considerations for those digital products and make that distinction clear with a digital product strategy. 

In both cases, thinking about digital product strategy isn’t just a checkbox exercise  – it’s a challenge that needs careful navigation.

A digital product strategy isn’t just a product strategy with “digital” tacked on the front. It’s a long-term plan that accounts for the unique dynamics of digital products, including faster iteration cycles, evolving user expectations, data-driven decision-making, and ongoing optimization. 

Reckon you need a digital product strategy? No problem.

Let’s talk through the steps to build a digital product strategy that fits the needs of your product, business, and customers. We’ll introduce a new framework to help transform your product strategy into a digital product strategy. 

That framework is something I like to call Digivolution. If you watched Saturday morning cartoons in the early 00s, you may recognize that phrase . 

Let’s dig in. 

What is a digital product strategy? 

At its core, a digital product strategy is much like the product strategy you know and use, being a guide for how the product will be managed to achieve your business goals. It includes all the common components – like product vision, customer insights, and market analysis – but is crafted through a digital-focused lens. 

The structure and documentation might look the same, but the considerations and approaches need to be fundamentally different. 

When going through a digital transformation, it can be easy to create a product strategy that forgets to consider the main factors of a digital environment, as opposed to the physical focus your business may be used to. This oversight can lead to misalignment between strategy and execution. A digital product strategy ensures that the unique characteristics of digital products are addressed, including:

• Different pricing models: Digital products often use subscriptions, freemium models, or pay-as-you-go structures instead of one-time purchases.
• Product-led growth: Digital products rely more on self-serve adoption, network effects, and viral loops than traditional sales-driven approaches.
• Distinct user interactions: Customers experience digital products through interfaces, workflows, and automation rather than physical touchpoints.
• Unique challenges and friction points: Onboarding, engagement, and retention require different strategies than in physical products.
• Rapid iteration and evolution: Unlike physical products, digital products can be updated continuously, demanding an agile, data-driven Product Management strategy.

A digital product strategy isn’t just about acknowledging these differences between a physical product and a digital one – it’s about building a strategy that actively accounts for them.

It’s very similar to how there are various specialized Product Manager roles. An AI Product Manager or Growth Product Manager still follows core PM principles, but the role title makes explicit the particular focus they need to have. Similarly, a digital product strategy follows traditional strategy principles but adapts them to the digital landscape.

So, as with any product strategy, a digital version defines how your product will achieve its goals while aligning with the overarching business objectives. It’s not a plan, it’s a guiding system that helps you: 

Define your product vision
Understand customer needs
Prioritize key initiatives
Establish success metrics
Navigate the digital landscape effectively

Key differences between a product strategy for physical products and a digital product strategy

Let’s look at the difference between digital and physical products and see how that impacts the strategy. Knowing this is key for Product Managers who manage a portfolio that mixes digital and physical products (like hardware and software), or PMs who are guiding a company through a digital transformation.

Still don’t think you need to specifically worry about creating a unique strategy for your digital product? Here are some of the core characteristics of a digital product in more detail to help you out:

Speed and Iteration

Digital products evolve continuously, unlike physical products with fixed lifecycles.

Product strategies for physical products revolve around a linear lifecycle – development, launch, and eventual obsolescence. In contrast, digital products are in a state of continuous improvement. 

Regular updates, feature rollouts, and rapid iterations mean that your strategy must be flexible, prioritizing agility over long-term fixed plans. This requires adopting frameworks like Agile and Lean methodologies, ensuring that teams can pivot quickly based on user feedback and market demands.

Data-driven decisions

Digital product strategy relies on real-time analytics, not just upfront research.

Digital product strategies are dynamic, leveraging real-time analytics to inform decisions. This changes how you build your digital product strategy.

Continuous monitoring of user behavior, A/B testing, and predictive analytics allow Product Teams to refine their approach instantly. This means that product strategies must integrate data collection mechanisms from day one, so you can actively use insights to optimize user experiences, pricing models, and feature development.

Ecosystem thinking

Digital products integrate into platforms, APIs, and marketplaces rather than existing in isolation.

Unlike physical products that function independently, digital products thrive in interconnected ecosystems. Whether integrating with third-party APIs, being part of a SaaS marketplace, or leveraging cloud-based services, digital product strategies must factor in partnerships, interoperability, and network effects. 

This shifts strategic priorities and goals toward compatibility, seamless integrations, and creating value within an ecosystem rather than just focusing on standalone features.

Customer retention and growth loops

Unlike one-time purchases, digital products depend on engagement, subscriptions, and viral growth.

For traditional products, success is often measured by unit sales. Digital products, however, rely on ongoing user engagement and retention. Your digital product strategy should include mechanisms that help build this like personalized onboarding, habit-forming designs that follow the Hook Model, and incentives that encourage user advocacy. 

Scalability and tech considerations

Digital strategies must account for scalability, security, and AI-driven features.

Unlike physical products with fixed production limits, digital products can scale exponentially, but only if built with the right infrastructure. Scalability isn’t just about handling more users; it includes cloud computing decisions, database management, and automation. 

Security is also a critical consideration, as digital products handle sensitive user data and must comply with regulations like GDPR. Plus, AI and machine learning are increasingly shaping digital strategies, enabling personalized recommendations, automation, and predictive analytics to enhance user experiences.

What goes into a digital product strategy?

As we’ve said, a digital product strategy is similar to a physical one, just with an explicit focus on making sure you consider the nuances of managing a digital product. It includes the same core elements as any product strategy – just with a modern, adaptable approach. 

At its foundation, a product strategy defines what you’re building, who it’s for, why it matters, and how you’ll bring it to market. It typically covers:

• Product vision: The long-term goal and purpose of the product.
• Customer insights: An understanding of the target audience, their needs, and pain points.
• Market analysis: Research findings into the competitive landscape, trends, and broader market dynamics.
• Goals & KPIs: Your definition of success through measurable outcomes.
• Roadmap & execution plan: An outline of how the product will evolve over time.

However, building a digital product strategy requires an evolved framework. To make your strategy fit for the digital world, you need a framework that adapts to the nature of digital ecosystems, user behaviors, and rapid technological advancements. 

If you’re transforming an existing product strategy used for physical products to suit a new digital product, or if you’re making a strategy for your digital products alongside physical ones, you need to scrutinize your existing strategy and refine it through a digital-first lens. 

Every assumption, goal, and approach that worked so well for a physical product should be re-evaluated to ensure it aligns with how digital products are built, sold, and scaled.

This can be a daunting task. Trying to retrofit a physical product strategy without a structured framework can lead to gaps, inefficiencies, and missed opportunities.

That’s where Digivolution comes in.

Introducing Digivolution – evolving your product strategy for digital

Digivolution is a useful process to follow to ensure your product strategy fully embraces the realities of digital products. It helps take a previous strategy and evolve it for online products and services, addressing the unique challenges that come with them.

If you watched Saturday Cartoons in the early 00s, you might recognize the term from Digimon, where creatures “digivolve” into more powerful versions of themselves. Think of Agumon, the small yellow dino. When he digivolves, he transforms into an armored T-Rex – stronger, faster, and way more capable. 

That’s exactly what you’re doing with your product strategy: upgrading it to handle the digital landscape more effectively.

Instead of force-fitting old-school product frameworks onto digital products, Digivolution helps you systematically refine each stage of your product strategy. From pricing models to engagement loops, every element is optimized for digital success, so your strategy isn’t just functional, it’s built to thrive.

How to create your digital product strategy

Let’s walk through what you need to do with your product strategy to make it properly suited for your digital product. 

The process follows general product strategy steps but with a digital-first mindset at every stage.

Step 1: Define your product vision

Traditional Approach: Define your long-term vision, identify market fit, and clarify the problem your product solves and how you want it to grow. You can do that by creating a product vision statement or by following our free product vision template.

How to Digivolve It: Digital products don’t exist in isolation: they live in ecosystems. Your vision must account for platform scalability, integrations, and network effects to ensure long-term viability. Think beyond just what the product does today and consider how it will evolve in a constantly changing digital landscape.

• Ask: How will this product integrate with existing digital platforms and services?
• Think about your product architecture and plan for growth. Can features be expanded or adapted easily?
• Consider AI, automation, and emerging tech that could shape future iterations.

Step 2: Understand your customers

Traditional Approach: Develop detailed user personas based on demographics, behaviors, and pain points. Conduct surveys and focus groups to gather qualitative insights.

How to Digivolve It: Digital products generate real-time customer data, so don’t just rely on static personas – use live product analytics to understand behavior and hone in on your ideal customer.

• Implement heatmaps, session recordings, and A/B testing to track how users actually interact with your product.
• Use cohort analysis to see how different demographics of users are engaging with your product.
• Leverage AI-driven personalization to tailor experiences dynamically, and build user profiles to get a sense of your users based on real facts, not assumptions.

Traditional persona: “Sarah, 32, a busy Marketing Manager who needs better team collaboration.”
Digivolved insight: “Users who invite 3+ team members within their first week have a 70% retention rate. This shows that your strategy should optimize onboarding for team invites.”

Step 3: Set your outcomes & goals

Traditional Approach: Establish SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) to track product success. These goals often focus on revenue, market share, or product adoption within a set timeframe.

How to Digivolve It: Traditional sales-driven goals don’t always capture the continuous, user-driven nature of digital products. Instead, focus on engagement, retention, and monetization metrics that reflect real user value.

• Prioritize engagement metrics like Daily Active Users (DAUs), session length, and feature adoption rates.
• Optimize for retention – set goals around customer churn reduction and cohort retention rates.
• Think in growth loops: What actions drive the different types of growth loops?
• Revenue isn’t just about sales anymore: track Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) and Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) as well.

Traditional goal: “Sell 10,000 units of the product in the first year.”
Digivolved goal: “Increase MRR by 15% in Q3 by optimizing onboarding to boost trial-to-paid conversions.”

Step 4: Establish KPIs & success metrics

Traditional Approach: Choose key performance indicators (KPIs) such as revenue growth, customer acquisition cost (CAC), and Net Promoter Score (NPS).

How to Digivolve It: Some business KPIs don’t always apply to subscription models, freemium structures, or SaaS offerings. Your KPIs must reflect the realities of digital engagement. Look at:

• Activation rate: How many users take the key first step that leads to long-term use?
• Churn rate: How quickly do users abandon your product, and why?
• Feature adoption: Are users actually using the features that drive business value?
• Virality metrics: Referral rates, social sharing, and organic growth indicators.

Step 5: Define your action plan

Traditional Approach: Develop a product roadmap with key milestones, dependencies, and execution timelines. Planning often follows a fixed schedule.

How to Digivolve It: Digital products thrive on agility and iteration – your action plan should focus on continuous improvement rather than rigid milestones.

• Adopt an agile roadmap like Now-Next-Later with broad time horizons rather than  rigid feature deadlines..
• Plan for continuous deployment rather than a fixed “launch and leave” mentality that leads to feature creep.
• Use customer feedback loops at every stage – your strategy should evolve based on real-world usage, not just internal assumptions.

Traditional roadmap: “Feature X launches on Feb 2, Feature Y on Apr 14.”
Digivolved roadmap: We want to solve this problem now, and we’ll prioritize this other problem next.“

Your product roadmap is one of the core ways you can communicate your digital product strategy. Because of that, you’re going to want a powerful and effective product roadmap tool. ProdPad offers just that, working as a centralized product ecosystem where you can tie your product strategy and objectives to your roadmap Initiatives and Ideas. 

Check out our interactive template to have a go yourself.

The power of digivolving your product strategy

Switching from physical to digital products doesn’t just change what you build, it changes how you think about strategy. The key difference is adaptability: instead of static planning, digital product strategies are living, breathing frameworks that evolve based on real-time user behavior, rapid iterations, and ecosystem shifts.

By applying the Digivolution framework, you ensure that your product strategy isn’t just a copy-paste of traditional methods that worked for physical products, it’s built for the realities of the digital world.

As you go through a digital transformation, you’re already going to have a product strategy, but the question is: have they truly made it digital-focused?

With ProdPad, you can easily create a digital product strategy through your product roadmap. Try ProdPad today for free to get started and improve the way you manage your digital product. 

The post Digital Product Strategy Guide: How to ‘Digivolve’ Your Product Strategy appeared first on ProdPad.

But not all adoption metrics are created equal or relevant at the same time. Measuring product adoption isn’t just about looking at a handful of stats in isolation. It’s about understanding when and why each metric matters across different stages of the user journey.

That’s what makes this guide different. 

We’re breaking down the best product adoption metrics and mapping them to key user journey stages so you can measure product adoption with precision.

Let’s dive in.

What is a product adoption? 

Product adoption happens when a user moves beyond signing up. They reach a key activation point, experience the value proposition of your product, and make it a regular part of their workflow.

Simply getting users through the door isn’t enough. Someone might download your app, create an account, or even start a reverse trial, and then ghost you. If they never come back, they haven’t adopted your product. True adoption means they’ve engaged with it meaningfully, integrated it into their routine, and see its ongoing value.

Product adoption usually happens after user activation, the moment when a user experiences the core benefit of your product for the first time. This is known as the wow moment (or aha moment). 

Once a user has completed this action, they’re more likely to stick around and fully adopt the product. 

As a Product Manager, your job is to guide users toward product adoption as quickly as possible. The faster they reach that moment of value, the more likely they’ll be to stay put.

Why should you measure product adoption metrics? 

Product adoption metrics provide deeper insights than surface-level stats. They tell you not just how many people show up to the party but whether they’re actually sticking around to buy a drink.

Take signups, for example. If a million people create an account, download your app, and then never return, traditional metrics might still paint a rosy picture. But product adoption data reveals the truth: if users aren’t engaging beyond the first touch, your product isn’t landing the way it should.

Without that insight, you risk a false sense of security. Paid signups may look great on paper, but if users never reach their wow moment they won’t stick around for renewal.

Put simply? Product adoption metrics track behavior, making them invaluable for identifying pain points, testing assumptions, and spotting where users drop off. They help you:

1⃣ Spot friction points: Understand where users struggle and why they disengage.
2⃣ Refine your onboarding: Guide users to activation faster and more effectively.
3⃣ Validate feature success: See which updates drive real engagement (and which don’t).
4⃣ Align teams on priorities: Give product, customer success, and marketing a shared source of truth.
5⃣ Prove long-term value: Adoption data is a powerful story for investors, showing not just traction but sustainable growth.

Ultimately, product adoption isn’t just about tracking usage—it’s about understanding what keeps users coming back so you can build a product that thrives.

15 product adoption metrics you should know

Most articles throw adoption metrics at you without much context. We’re not going to do that.

Instead, this list will follow the customer journey – so you’ll know not just what to track, but when to track it, depending on what insights you’re after.

From first touch to churn risk, here are the key stages:

Acquisition: Getting users to sign up or engage for the first time.
Activation: Ensuring they experience the product’s core value early.
Onboarding: Helping users learn how to navigate a product.
Engagement: Encouraging active usage of key features.
Adoption: Getting users to make the product part of their routine.
Retention: Keeping them engaged and coming back consistently.
Churn Risk: Spotting when users are disengaging and at risk of leaving.

And now, here are 15 product adoption metrics: laid out in order of where they fit best in the journey, so you can track exactly what matters at every stage:

1. Conversion rate

Conversion rate measures the percentage of visitors who take a desired action. Essentially, it shows how successful you are at turning potential users into active customers.

The definition of a “converted user” can vary depending on the context. For example, in a free trial scenario, a conversion might be someone upgrading to the paid version. If you’re a Product Marketing Manager tracking the impact of a marketing campaign, a conversion could mean users who accessed your product through a promotion.

Why is conversion rate a great metric? Well, it directly reflects the effectiveness of your onboarding process, sales funnel, and marketing strategies. By understanding how many users are transitioning from interest to action, you can identify any friction points or opportunities for improvement in driving user adoption. 

Ultimately, tracking this metric helps you assess how well you’re getting people through the door and getting them to stick around.

2. Activation rate

Activation rate measures the percentage of users who reach a specific activation threshold, which typically means they’ve experienced the core value of your product. This is a key indicator of user engagement and product fit, as it shows how many users get to the point where they truly understand the problems your product solves.

While conversion rate can measure various actions like trial-to-paid or marketing campaign responses, activation rate is specifically focused on the moment when a user has interacted with your product enough to reach that wow moment.

Activation rate is important because it highlights how effective your onboarding process is and whether users are able to quickly experience the value your product promises. A high activation rate typically leads to better retention and long-term engagement, making it a crucial metric to track as part of your overall adoption strategy.

Learn more about user activation and how to improve it:

3. Time to First Value

Time to First Value (TTFV) measures how long it takes for a new user to experience their first meaningful benefit from your product. It’s a critical metric because the faster users see value, the more likely they are to continue engaging.

This is different from Time to Value (TTV), which tracks how long it takes for a user to gain full, long-term value from the product. TTFV focuses on the initial wow moment, whether that’s completing a key action, using a core feature, or achieving a small win.

A shorter time to first value means a smoother onboarding experience, leading to higher activation and retention rates. If TTFV is too long, users may drop off before realizing what makes your product valuable. Optimizing onboarding flows and reducing friction points can help users reach value faster, increasing overall adoption.

There’s a lot more to get into when it comes to Time to Value. Learn more:

4. Onboarding completion rate

The onboarding completion rate measures the percentage of users who complete your onboarding process. It’s a key indicator of how effective your onboarding experience is at guiding users toward activation and adoption.

A high onboarding completion rate means users are successfully navigating the steps needed to get started with your product. A low rate, on the other hand, signals friction, whether that’s down to a confusing setup process, too many steps, or unclear guidance.

Improving this metric is important because users who don’t complete onboarding are far less likely to stick around. Streamlining the process, reducing complexity, and offering in-app guidance can all help.

For more on user onboarding, check out our tips on how to give a product tour:

5. Session duration

Session duration measures how long users actively engage with your product in a single visit. While looking at one user’s session length in isolation won’t tell you much, averaging session duration across all users or specific cohorts provides a clearer picture of engagement.

A higher average session duration often indicates that users find your product valuable and engaging, while shorter sessions may suggest friction, lack of interest, or difficulty navigating key features. 

However, context matters. Long sessions aren’t always a good thing if they’re a result from users struggling to complete tasks.

Tracking session duration alongside other metrics, like feature usage or task completion rates, helps you understand how users interact with your product. If your session duration is lower than expected, consider improving UX, or adding in-app guidance to keep users engaged for longer.

6. Feature usage frequency

Feature usage frequency tells you how often users interact with specific features in your product. Usage frequency can be measured based on different timeframes. The right frequency metric depends on how often you expect users to engage. 

Are you building a tool meant for daily use, or is weekly or monthly engagement more realistic? You have three primary options to focus on:

• DAU (Daily Active Users): Measures the number of unique users engaging with a feature daily. Ideal for products that rely on frequent engagement, like communication tools or social apps.
• WAU (Weekly Active Users): Tracks the number of users who interact with a feature at least once per week. This is useful for products where regular, but not necessarily daily, usage is expected, like project management tools.
• MAU (Monthly Active Users): Measures unique users who engage with a feature over a month. Best for products with less frequent usage, like subscription-based platforms or financial tools.

Tracking the right feature usage frequency helps you understand engagement patterns and identify opportunities to improve stickiness and retention.

7. Product engagement score (PES)

The Product Engagement Score (PES) is a combined metric that gives you a more complete picture of how well users are adopting and engaging with your product. Rather than looking at individual numbers in isolation, PES brings together three key metrics:

• Product Adoption Rate: Measures how many new users are actively adopting your product over time.
• Product Stickiness: Compares daily or weekly active users to monthly active users, showing how frequently users return.
• Product Growth Rate: Tracks how fast your user base is expanding.

By combining these three data points, PES provides a high-level engagement snapshot that helps teams quickly assess overall performance. A strong score suggests users are not only trying your product but sticking with it and spreading the word. If your PES is low, it’s a sign to dig into the individual metrics to uncover areas for improvement.

Here’s more on product engagement score: 

8. Product adoption rate

Product adoption rate measures the percentage of new users who go beyond signing up and start actively using your product. It’s a critical metric for understanding how successful you are at turning interest into sustained engagement.

A high adoption rate means users are quickly seeing value and integrating your product into their workflow. A low rate suggests friction in onboarding, unclear value propositions, or gaps in feature usability.

Tracking the adoption rate helps teams identify bottlenecks and optimize the user experience. If you want more users to stick around, focus on reducing time to first value and refining your core feature set.

9. Feature adoption rate

Feature adoption rate is like product adoption rate’s more detail-oriented sibling. Instead of measuring overall product adoption, this metric focuses on how many users are actively engaging with a single feature.

Tracking feature adoption helps you understand which features are resonating and which are being ignored. If a new feature isn’t getting traction, it could signal issues with discoverability, usability, or value perception.

To improve feature adoption, you need to make a new feature stick by implementing strategies like in-app guidance, tooltips, and email nudges that highlight its value. The more effectively you introduce and integrate new features, the higher your chances of driving long-term engagement. If you want to learn more about feature adoption rate – and its brother product adoption rate for that matter – we’ve got an in-depth deep dive on both: 

10. Product stickiness

Product stickiness tells you how often users return to your product within a given timeframe. The key here is choosing the right timeframe based on how frequently you expect users to engage.

For products designed for daily use you’ll want to track Daily Active Users (DAU) ÷ Weekly Active Users (WAU). This helps measure whether users keep coming back day after day.

For less frequently used products Weekly Active Users (WAU) ÷ Monthly Active Users (MAU) is a better fit. This tells you whether users are consistently engaging over longer periods.

A high stickiness rate means your product is valuable and habit-forming. A low rate could signal friction in the user experience or a lack of compelling reasons for users to return.

11. User retention rate

User retention rate measures the percentage of users who continue using your product over a given period. It’s a key indicator of how well your product delivers ongoing value and whether users find it worth sticking with.

A high retention rate means users are engaged and see your product as essential. A low retention rate, on the other hand, could signal issues with user experience, lack of value, or competition pulling users away.

To improve retention, focus on delivering continuous value and addressing pain points before users churn. Tracking retention alongside other metrics like product stickiness (which we’ve just mentioned) and churn rate (we’ll get to that) gives you a clearer picture of long-term user engagement.

Learn more about user retention: 

12. Customer satisfaction scores

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is a straightforward way to gauge how happy users are with your product. It’s calculated by asking users to rate their experience and determining the percentage of positive responses.

But what’s a positive response? Well, say in your survey you ask to get rated out of 5. All your scores of 4 and 5 can be considered a positive response. 

CSAT helps you quickly assess user sentiment, identify pain points, and improve areas of your product that might be falling short. Since it relies on direct user feedback, it’s an essential tool for keeping a pulse on customer happiness. If you want to boost your CSAT, start by learning how to collect customer feedback in 2025.

13. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a key customer experience metric used to measure customer loyalty. It asks users how likely they are to recommend your product or service to others, using a scale from 0 to 10.

Scores of 9-10 are considered “Promoters,” people who are enthusiastic about your product and likely to spread the word. Scores of 0-6 are “Detractors,” users who are unhappy and may hinder growth. Those in the middle (7-8) are “Passives,” and while they are satisfied, they don’t directly influence your NPS score.

By calculating the NPS, you get a clear picture of your customer’s loyalty and satisfaction, helping to identify areas for improvement and strengthen customer relationships.

14. Customer lifetime value (CLV)

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a metric that helps you understand the total revenue a customer is likely to generate for your business during their relationship with your product or service. It gives you a clear picture of how much each customer is worth in the long run, helping you make more informed decisions on customer acquisition and retention strategies.

To calculate CLV, you’ll need two other key metrics:

1. Customer Value: This is calculated by multiplying the average purchase value by the purchase frequency. In other words, how much does each customer spend per transaction and how often do they make a purchase?
   
2. Average Customer Lifespan: This measures the average duration a customer remains active with your business, either in years or months. It gives you an idea of how long customers typically stick around.

Once you have these figures, you can multiply them to calculate your overall CLV. Understanding CLV allows you to make data-driven decisions about marketing spend, customer retention efforts, and overall growth strategies, ensuring you prioritize long-term value over short-term gains.

15. Customer churn rate

Customer churn rate measures the percentage of customers who stop using your product or service over a specific time period. It’s an essential metric because it helps you understand how well you’re retaining customers and if there are any underlying issues driving users away. A high churn rate may indicate dissatisfaction with your product, poor user experience, or stronger competition, while a low churn rate suggests you’re successfully meeting customer needs.

By tracking churn, you can identify patterns or pain points in your product or customer experience that need attention. Lowering your churn rate is key to long-term success, as retaining existing customers is often more cost-effective than acquiring new ones.

Learn more about customer churn:

How do I choose the right product adoption metrics? 

You don’t need to track every adoption metric under the sun. In fact, tracking too many can lead to information overload, making it harder to get actionable insights. Instead, you should focus on the few that best align with what you’re trying to learn.

But how do you whittle it down?

Every metric on our list is useful, but not all will be useful right now. The key is to choose metrics based on what you want to uncover. Specifically, the metrics you choose need to help you answer:

• Who is adopting your product?
• What features do they love?
• When does adoption happen?
• How long do adopted users stay?

And because no two products are the same, the best metric for one company may not be as relevant for another. That’s why your objectives dictate which metrics matter most.

For example:

• If your goal is to improve activation, you should focus on Activation Rate over PES.
• If you’re trying to increase feature engagement, tracking Feature Adoption Rate makes more sense than measuring Session Duration.
• If your priority is long-term retention, then Customer Retention Rate will tell you more than CSAT scores.

By aligning your metrics with your goals, you ensure that what you’re measuring actually helps you make informed decisions – without drowning in data.

You’ll also likely find that your current objectives will focus your attention on a specific part of the customer journey. This is why this list has been structured this way, as it can help you pinpoint the best metrics for your main aim. 

• Early journey: If you’re focused on getting users in the door and experiencing value quickly, metrics like Conversion Rate and Activation Rate will tell you if your onboarding is working.
• Mid-journey: If you want to ensure users are integrating your product into their workflow, Feature Adoption Rate and Product Stickiness (DAU/WAU/MAU) show how often they return.
• Late journey: If your goal is to reduce churn, you’ll want to monitor Customer Retention Rate and Churn Rate to catch disengaged users before they leave.

By aligning metrics with the customer journey, you’re not just collecting data—you’re getting the right insights at the right time.

Want to know more about matching metrics with your objectives – check out our free OKR Course

How do I measure product adoption metrics? 

Chosen your key product adoption metrics? Great. Now let’s talk about how to measure them effectively.

How often should I measure product adoption metrics?

The frequency depends on the metric. Some adoption metrics, like Sign-Up Rate or Activation Rate, should be tracked daily or weekly to spot trends early. Others, like Feature Adoption Rate or Customer Retention Rate, may be better suited for monthly or quarterly reviews to see long-term patterns.

A good rule of thumb: Shorter cycles for early-stage adoption, longer cycles for retention and churn.

Where do I measure product adoption metrics?

Tracking adoption requires product analytics tools, platforms that integrate with your product to monitor user behavior, feature usage, and engagement. These tools let you:

• See trends across your entire user base (e.g., how many users activate per week)
• Drill down into individual user journeys (e.g., where a specific user drops off in onboarding)
• Customize dashboards and reports to match your product’s unique goals

The best product analytics tools are easy to use, flexible, and packed with insights. If you’re looking for recommendations, check out our list:

Who is responsible for measuring product adoption metrics?

The Product Manager is typically the main person responsible for gathering and analyzing product adoption metrics. They track these metrics to understand how users engage with the product, identify barriers to adoption, and prioritize improvements.

However, product adoption isn’t just a Product Manager’s job, multiple teams rely on these insights to optimize their own strategies:

• Product Teams use adoption data to refine onboarding, improve UX, and prioritize feature development.
• Customer Success Teams leverage adoption insights to identify struggling users, offer proactive support, and reduce churn risk.
• Marketing Teams track which acquisition channels bring in the most engaged users and refine their messaging to attract more of them.
• Sales Teams use adoption data to highlight key benefits, handle objections, and showcase product value to potential customers.

Since product adoption metrics affect nearly every aspect of the business, cross-team collaboration is essential. The best results come when teams share adoption data and align their strategies to improve the overall user experience.

What do I do after measuring product adoption?

Measuring adoption is just the start: the real value comes from using that data to drive action. Once you’ve gathered insights, you should:

1⃣ Identify friction points: Where are users dropping off? What’s stopping them from fully adopting the product?
2⃣ Experiment & iterate: Test different onboarding flows, feature prompts, or engagement nudges to improve adoption rates.
3⃣ Segment your users: Compare adoption metrics across different user groups to see who’s thriving and who needs help.
4⃣ Align your roadmap: Use adoption data to prioritize improvements that will have the biggest impact on retention.

By continuously measuring and acting on product adoption metrics, you’re not just tracking success, you’re actively driving it.

Measuring for success 

That list of product adoption metrics should keep you occupied for a while, and narrow down the metrics that are worth tracking – but crucially only when they match your objectives. 

Don’t see this list as the 15 product adoption metrics you need to track. It’s more of a catalog of metrics that you can choose from. And now, you should know how to choose which ones best suit you. 

Now, this list only covers product adoption metrics. There are a hell of a lot more wider product metrics and KPIs that you need to be aware of. Well, good job that we’ve gathered all the worthwhile ones and put them into this nice, easy-to-read eBook. 

Download it now and learn which metrics you should have in the back of your mind: 

The post 15 Product Adoption Metrics: How to Measure Product Adoption in 2025 appeared first on ProdPad.

Many businesses use an agile methodology these days. That means that many Product Teams are likely going to have a Scrum Master and a Product Owner within their midst. The issue here is that these two roles can easily be – and often are – confused. 

The Product Owner and the Scrum Master are two unique team members. It’s time, once and for all, to explain what those roles mean so that you can go away with a solid understanding of both positions and how to get the most out of them. 

We’re going to do that by running through a checklist of the burning questions people have about these roles.

Scrum Master vs Product Owner: What do they do? 

Let’s start small by covering the top-level explanation of these two roles. What’s their purpose? Why do they exist?

What is a Scrum Master? 

A Scrum Master’s entire role is designed to make sure that an Agile squad in an Agile release train follows the Agile playbook properly. They do all the background work to make sure that a team continues to adopt the Agile methodology at all times, helping them to work more efficiently. 

Here’s our definition:

To properly visualize this, imagine a rugby coach who’s talking the players through their strategies and tactics while nurturing camaraderie, teamwork, and innovation. That’s the Scrum Master. 

A ruby coach ensures that every player knows the rules, and understands the game plan, just like how a Scrum Master makes sure that everyone executes and follows the core principles of the Agile manifesto. They ensure that everyone operates in an Agile way. 

What is a Product Owner?

A Product Owner is responsible for articulating the product vision and ensuring the Development Team builds what delivers the most value to users. They act as the bridge between stakeholders and the team, prioritizing the backlog, refining requirements, and making decisions that keep the product moving in the right direction.

Here’s how we define it internally: 

To put it simply, a Product Owner is like a navigator, setting the course and making sure the team stays on track. They translate big-picture ideas into actionable tasks, ensuring that what gets built truly meets user and business needs.

Because they can help guide product development, Product Owners are also often confused with Product Managers.  

The easiest way to differentiate them is that Product Owners manage the product backlog, ensuring the team is building the right features at the right time, while Product Managers own the product roadmap, setting the overall direction and vision for the product.

That’s the surface-level distinction, but it’s worth checking out our article explaining the difference between those two as well. 

Scrum Master vs Product Owner: Why are they important? 

Both roles are pretty important to well-functioning Scrum teams, but they serve distinct purposes. The Scrum Master focuses on making sure the team follows Agile best practices and works efficiently, while the Product Owner ensures the team is building the right things. Having both means your team stays focused, productive, and aligned with business product goals.

Why should you have a Scrum Master?

A Scrum Master is key to keeping the Agile process running smoothly, helping teams collaborate effectively and continuously improve. They remove obstacles, facilitate all the ceremonies (fancy word for meetings), and ensure Agile principles are followed without unnecessary hassle.

The benefits of having a Scrum Master are:

Keeps the team focused and efficient by eliminating roadblocks.
Ensures Agile processes are followed correctly, preventing bad habits.
Facilitates team collaboration between team members and stakeholders.
Helps the team continuously improve through retrospectives and feedback.
Shields the team from distractions so they can focus on delivering value.

Without a Scrum Master, teams risk inefficiencies, unstructured workflows, and process breakdowns that slow progress.

Why should you have a Product Owner?

A Product Owner ensures the team builds what matters most, aligning development efforts with customer needs and business objectives. They own the product backlog, define priorities, and make critical decisions about what gets built next.

The benefits of having a Product Owner are:

Maintains a clear product vision and communicates it effectively to the team.
Prioritizes the backlog to ensure the team works on the most valuable tasks.
Balances business goals with user needs to maximize impact.
Provides clarity on requirements, reducing rework and confusion.
Keeps stakeholders aligned and informed on product progress.

Without a Product Owner, teams risk working on low-impact tasks, losing sight of customer needs, and struggling with misaligned priorities.

Why you need both

While their responsibilities are different, the Scrum Master and Product Owner work best together. The Scrum Master optimizes how the team works, while the Product Owner defines what the team should work on. Without both, teams either risk building the wrong thing efficiently or struggling with productivity despite having a clear vision. Having both ensures a balanced, high-performing Agile team that delivers real value.

Scrum Master vs Product Owner: What are their responsibilities? 

So we now understand the main aims of both these roles. But let’s dive deeper into the details and take a granular look at what these two roles do in their day to day.

While both roles are crucial to an Agile Product Team, their day-to-day responsibilities are very different. That becomes clear when you focus on their daily and weekly activities.

What are the Scrum Master’s responsibilities? 

The Scrum Master’s overarching responsibility is to keep the Agile methodology working effectively within the team. In a nutshell, the Scrum Master clears the way so the team can focus on delivering value without unnecessary disruptions. They obsess over Agiel so that others don’t have to.

Here’s a simple breakdown of a Scrum master’s main responsibilities:

Facilitating Scrum events such as daily stand-ups, sprint planning, and sprint reviews.
Removing any impediments that obstruct the team’s progress.
Coaching the team on self-organization and cross-functionality.
Protecting the team from external distractions.
Encouraging continuous improvement and the adoption of Agile best practices.

What are the Product Owner’s responsibilities? 

A Product Owner’s main job is to ensure the team is always working on the most valuable things. They look after the product vision, break it down into actionable work, and communicate priorities to the Development Team. Their role is highly strategic, requiring them to balance business goals, customer needs, and technical feasibility.

While they don’t dictate how the work is done, they are responsible for defining what the team should build and why it matters.

A Product Owner can do a lot. Here are some of the main responsibilities of the role.

Break down strategy into user stories and tasks.
Gather insights from customer feedback and product data.
Prioritize and groom the backlog effectively.
Say no when necessary to keep focus.
Bridge the gap between Product and Development.
Align stakeholders on goals and priorities.
Advocate for customers in every decision.
Oversee releases and maintain quality standards.

If you’re curious to dive deeper into these responsibilities, we cover them in great detail:

Scrum Master vs Product Owner: What skills do you need? 

Since these two roles serve completely different purposes, they also require distinct skill sets. Sure, there’s some overlap – strong communication and adaptability are valuable for both – but the day-to-day demands of each role mean they require vastly different strengths. Let’s break it down.

Scrum Master skills

A Scrum Master is more of a coach than a manager. Here’s what it takes to do that well:

Strong leadership skills: A Scrum Master isn’t the boss, but they do need to guide and motivate the team, keeping everyone aligned and engaged.

Excellent communication and interpersonal skills: Whether it’s running standups, facilitating retrospectives, or conflict resolution, clear and effective communication is key.

Deep knowledge of Scrum and Agile methodologies: You can’t guide a team through Agile without a rock-solid understanding of its principles, frameworks, and best practices.

Problem-solving and conflict resolution abilities: Scrum Masters need to anticipate roadblocks, clear obstacles, and navigate team dynamics without derailing progress.

Champion of continuous improvement: Agile is all about iteration. A great Scrum Master encourages feedback loops, retrospectives, and process tweaks to keep things running smoothly.

Empathy and emotional intelligence: Understanding team dynamics and individual needs helps create a collaborative and psychologically safe work environment.

Adaptability and flexibility: Priorities shift, challenges pop up, and teams evolve. A great Scrum Master rolls with the punches while keeping the team focused and motivated.

Product Owner skills

A Product Owner is the visionary of the team, responsible for ensuring the product delivers real value. Here’s a list of the most important skills that make up an effective product owner:

Strong business and market acumen: A Product Owner needs to understand the market landscape, industry trends, and customer pain points to make informed product decisions.

Excellent communication and negotiation skills: Whether it’s aligning stakeholders, defending prioritization decisions, or sharing the product vision, strong communication is non-negotiable.

Prioritization and strategic decision-making: With endless requests and limited resources, a Product Owner must ruthlessly prioritize what delivers the most value.

Empathy for customers: Understanding the user’s perspective is crucial. A great Product Owner puts themselves in the customer’s shoes to build products people actually want.

Data-driven decision-making: It’s not about opinions; it’s about evidence. A Product Owner must rely on data, not gut feelings or HiPPOs (Highest Paid Person’s Opinions), to drive decisions.

Analytical and problem-solving capabilities: From assessing product performance to interpreting user feedback, strong analytical skills help a Product Owner identify opportunities for improvement.

Leadership and collaboration: A Product Owner works with development, marketing, sales, and leadership teams. Aligning everyone toward a common goal is a must.

Adaptability and flexibility: The market changes. Customer needs evolve. A good Product Owner is always ready to pivot and adjust the roadmap accordingly.

Scrum Master vs Product Owner: Where do they sit in a Product Team?

A clear way to differentiate between a Scrum Master and a Product Owner is to look at where they sit within the Product Team hierarchy in an Agile setup. While both roles are essential to the success of a Scrum team, they carry distinct responsibilities and report to different individuals, which helps to clarify the demands and expectations placed on each role.

Let’s take a look at who each reports to and where they fit into the Agile team structure.

Who does a Scrum Master report to? 

While this role isn’t typically hierarchical, the Scrum Master still reports to someone depending on the organizational structure and the scope of their responsibilities.

In smaller teams, the Scrum Master often reports to a Head of Product or Head of Engineering. The Scrum Master is less involved in the business-side decisions and more focused on enabling the Development Team to succeed in their day-to-day sprint work.

In larger organizations or more complex projects, the Scrum Master may report to a Program Manager, Project Manager, or even a senior-level Scrum Master overseeing multiple teams. This setup helps maintain consistency across teams while allowing the Scrum Master to focus on their primary duty: facilitating team efficiency and removing blockers. The Scrum Master is there to serve the team and remove obstacles, not to make product or business decisions.

Who does a Product Owner report to?

The Product Owner typically reports to a senior leadership figure within the product department, such as the Head of Product, VP of Product, or Chief Product Officer. In some organizations, the Product Owner might also have a line to the Business Development or Marketing teams, especially if they play a role in the go-to-market strategy. While the Scrum Master focuses on the process, the Product Owner ensures the output aligns with business goals and customer value.

In terms of day-to-day interactions, the Product Owner works closely with stakeholders across the organization, including Sales, Marketing, Customer Support, and Development Teams. They are responsible for maintaining the product backlog, prioritizing Ideas, and ensuring the team’s work aligns with the broader strategic vision. 

Learn more about the relationship between Product Owner and product vision:

Here’s a good look at the Product Owner and Scrum Master both chilling out in an Agile scrum squad: 

Scrum Master vs Product Owner: How do you become one? 

How do you become a Scrum Master? 

Becoming a Scrum Master is all about understanding Agile principles and the Scrum framework, along with gaining hands-on experience in leading teams through Agile processes. If you’re looking to transition into this role, here’s a simple step-by-step guide to help you along the way:

1. Gain a thorough understanding of Agile principles and Scrum framework

Dive deep into the Agile Manifesto and familiarize yourself with Scrum values, roles, and processes. Understanding the core principles of Agile methodologies is key to your success.

2. Acquire hands-on experience in Scrum projects as a team member

Get involved in Agile projects, whether it’s as part of Development Teams, as a tester, or any other role. Experience within a Scrum team will give you a solid understanding of how an Agile sprint works.

3. Enroll in a Certified Scrum Master (CSM) training program

Sign up for a reputable Scrum Master training course. These programs often last a few days and cover all essential topics, including Scrum ceremonies, roles, and techniques to facilitate team processes.

4. Obtain the Certified Scrum Master (CSM) certification from a recognized institution

After completing the training, take the CSM exam to get your certification. This credential proves you understand the fundamentals and are ready to take on the role of Scrum Master. 

5. Continuously update your knowledge and skills

Agile and Scrum practices evolve. Stay up-to-date by attending workshops, joining Scrum communities, and networking with industry professionals to continue improving your skills and knowledge.

How do you become a Product Owner?

The path to becoming a Product Owner involves gaining experience in Product Management, understanding customer needs, and learning the ins and outs of Agile product development. Here’s a step-by-step guide to get you there:

1. Gain practical experience in Product Management or related fields

Start by working in roles like business analysis or Product Operations Management. These roles give you valuable insights into understanding customer needs, business goals, and the product development process.

2. Develop a deep understanding of the product development lifecycle and Agile methodologies

Familiarize yourself with the entire Product Management lifecycle, from ideation and design to launch and iteration. Additionally, strengthen your understanding of Agile methodologies and how they apply to product management.

3. Enhance your communication and negotiation skills

As a Product Owner, you’ll need to communicate effectively with stakeholders, customers, and your Development Team. Consider taking courses in communication and negotiation to sharpen these critical skills.

4. Obtain the Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) certification

The CSPO certification is a recognized credential that demonstrates your knowledge of Agile practices and your ability to manage the product backlog. It’s one of the essential certification courses to show your expertise in product ownership.

5. Continuously gather feedback and stay updated with market trends

A successful Product Owner listens to customers and stakeholders, iterating on the product to deliver maximum value. Regularly collect feedback, monitor market trends, and adjust your product strategy to keep it relevant and competitive.

The Product Management career path

Both the Scrum Master and Product Owner are early, entry-level roles within the Product Management career tree. From these roles, you can take multiple directions and sculpt your skillset to make you a better fit for more specialized roles in the future. 

To see where you can go from these positions, read our article on the Product Management career path:

Scrum Master vs Product Owner: How much do they get paid? 

When it comes to compensation, the annual salary for both Scrum Masters and Product Owners varies based on factors like location, experience, and company size. While these are average figures in the U.S., keep in mind that salary expectations can differ significantly across regions, and outliers may skew the data. Nonetheless, the following should provide a clear snapshot of what you can expect to earn in each role.

What is the Scrum Master salary? 

On average, a Scrum Master in the U.S. earns around $115,000 per year. The salary range typically spans from $96,000 to $139,000, according to Glassdoor.

This range is consistent across multiple sources, although it’s important to note that entry-level Scrum Masters will likely earn less than the average, with starting salaries on the lower end of the spectrum. Factors such as company size, industry, and geographic location all play a role in determining the exact figure.

In addition to the base annual salary, many Scrum Masters also receive bonuses and other supplementary benefits, which can increase their overall compensation package.

What is the Product Owner salary?

The average salary for a Product Owner is around $124,000, according to Talent.com – roughly $9,000 more than the average Scrum Master salary. This is in line with the fact that Product Owners tend to have more seniority and broader responsibilities compared to Scrum Masters.

The salary range for Product Owners typically starts at $105,000 and can reach as high as $159,000, depending on experience and seniority level. The higher end of the range generally applies to those with significant experience or working in larger, high-paying organizations.

Geography also plays a significant role in salary differences. For example, according to Built In, cities like San Francisco and Colorado offer notably higher salaries compared to places like Orlando or Miami, highlighting regional pay discrepancies within the U.S.

The Final Comparison 

I don’t know about you, but I think we sufficiently broke down the differences between a Scrum Master and a Product Owner. We’ve covered quite a lot, so we thought it’d be handy to break it all down into a neat comparison table: 

Of course, we don’t think these two roles should be seen as competitors – they’re complementary. Both play essential but distinct roles in an Agile Product Team, working together to enhance efficiency and deliver value.

It’s like apples and oranges – different in function and flavor, but both essential in their own way. And when combined and mixed with other fruits, they create a killer fruit salad.

Understanding their differences is useful, but once that’s clear, like it should be now, it’s best to see them as separate, yet equally vital, parts of the team.

The Scrum Master and Product Owner are just two cogs in the machine that make great Product Management Teams, and Agile is just one aspect of impactful Product Management. 

Want to learn how to improve the product function in your business? Of course you do! 

We’ve got a comprehensive Product Management Handbook, covering everything you need to know to build a product that can thrive. Used by the folks at Amazon, Google, and more, this is a resource that can supercharge your capabilities. 

Download it now. 

The post Scrum Master vs Product Owner: What’s the Difference appeared first on ProdPad.

“The Product Owner is the voice of the customer in Scrum, ensuring the Development Team delivers maximum value.” 

“The Product Owner is often a Product Manager in disguise – balancing feedback from customers, stakeholder demands, and roadmap strategy.” 

“A Product Owner is the mini-CEO of their product area, making key decisions that shape the roadmap.”

So, which one is it? That’s what we’re here to figure out, together.

I think the easiest way to fully understand the impact and importance of a Product Owner is to go through the tasks that they’re fully responsible for. 

By walking through the complete list of Product Owner responsibilities, this often hard-to-pindown role should become more clear. 

Let’s take a look at the responsibilities of a Product Owner, but first, let’s define it real quick.

What is a Product Owner? 

Our definition of a Product Owner goes something like this:

So the overarching aim of a Product Owner is to ensure the Development Team builds the right thing by managing the product backlog, defining and refining user stories, and aligning work with customer needs and business goals. They serve as the bridge between business strategy and execution, keeping the team focused on delivering value in an agile way while maintaining momentum in the sprint cycle.

If you want to learn more, we’ve got a detailed article comparing the Product Owner role to another key figure in agile teams – the Scrum Master.

Here’s a key point: A Product Owner doesn’t actually own the product, despite what the title might suggest. 

They have the power to shape the product and guide the development process, but they aren’t the final authority on every decision. Instead, they represent the voice of the customer, the business, and the team, steering the development process while aligning it with broader business objectives.

Now, here’s where things get interesting. Many of you may be thinking, gee this sounds a lot like Product Management. That’s because, at first, A Product Manager and Product Owner were the same thing. 

Let’s dig deeper.

Product Owner vs Product Manager

The difference between a Product Owner and a Product Manager is one of the most puzzling distinctions in Product Management. That’s because, once upon a time, these roles were practically identical.

Before the rise of Product Owners and agile methodologies, Product Managers followed slow, document-heavy waterfall methods. They’d spend months planning, only for the Development Team to deliver something completely different from what they envisioned. This repetitive cycle of rework made it clear that a more adaptive approach was needed.

In the 90s, agile frameworks like Scrum, XP, and DSDM emerged to boost speed and flexibility. Within Scrum and agile teams, a new role – Product Owner – was introduced to break away from the rigid waterfall approach. The Product Owner was responsible for ensuring the team was building the right thing, while the development team focused on building it correctly and the Scrum Master kept things moving efficiently. This helped teams hit the sweet spot.

To fully embrace Scrum, the traditional Product Manager role evolved into the Product Owner. The job title was intentionally rebranded to shift the way people thought about Product Development, with the Product Owner responsibilities emphasizing flexibility, collaboration, and responsiveness to change. Over time, this role continued to morph, gradually becoming more distinct from the original Product Manager function. What was once a shared responsibility now became a specialized, tactical role with a much narrower focus.

Today, Product Owners and Product Managers are completely different positions. The easiest way to differentiate them is that Product Owners manage product backlog items, ensuring the team is building the right features at the right time, while Product Managers own the product roadmap, setting the overall direction and vision for the product.

However, the distinction isn’t always clear-cut. Often, a Product Manager is also expected to take on the responsibilities of a Product Owner. Rather than having a separate individual fill this role, the Product Manager wears both hats – leading to confusion about where Product Owner responsibilities end and the Product Manager’s begin.

But they shouldn’t be the same. The Product Owner is a tactical role with specific responsibilities that ensure the Development Team is aligned with business goals and customer needs. To better understand the difference, check out ProdPad CEO, Janna Bastow’s blog for a more in-depth explanation.

Where does a Product Owner sit within an organization? 

Where the Product Owner fits within an organization can vary, depending on the Product Team structure. As we’ve mentioned, the Product Owner may also double as the Product Manager, so let’s simplify things.

Typically, the Product Owner sits within the Product Team as the key liaison to the Development Team. They usually report to a Chief Product Officer, Head of Product, or Chief Product Owner.

In organizations with both a Head of Product and a Chief Product Owner, Product Managers will likely report to the Head of Product, while Product Owners report to the Chief Product Owner.

The Product Owner is responsible for managing the relationship between the Product Team and their Scrum Team/Squad. Within that squad, you’ll typically find a Scrum Master, a Product Owner, and Developers.

This would be the general structure:

13 Product Owner Responsibilities

It’s time to put a magnifying glass on the core Product Owner responsibilities. If you’re solely a Product Owner or a PM who wears the Product Owner hat, these are the Product Owner responsibilities that you need to manage. 

1. Turn product strategy into user stories

Turning a product strategy into actionable user stories is one of the most important tasks for a Product Owner. This process takes the high-level business goals and breaks them down into clear, bite-sized user stories that can be understood by the Development Team. These user stories focus on the needs of the user and guide the team in the right direction.

But why is it important?

Without user stories, the Development Team would be left to interpret vague product strategies, leading to confusion and potentially misaligned results. Clear user stories help ensure everyone is on the same page and working towards the same product vision.

To be good at this, practice is key. You’ll need to write stories from the user’s perspective, avoid jargon, and break down tasks to the most manageable level possible. We’ve got a few tips to help you write them:

A great user story clearly articulates why a feature is needed and how it will benefit the user. Focus on clarity and simplicity – less is more! It’s also important to keep refining your user story skills over time and use feedback from your team to improve.

2. Gather and analyze customer feedback and product performance data 

A great product isn’t built on assumptions – it’s built on real user feedback and performance data. As a Product Owner, your job is to gather insights from customers, Support Teams, and analytics to understand what’s working, what’s not, and what needs to change.

This is crucial because it ensures the team is solving real problems, not just guessing. A feature that seemed like a great idea on paper might flop in the real world, and without the right data, you won’t know why.

To do this well, stay close to customer conversations, read support tickets, conduct user interviews, and dig into survey responses. Make sure to perform assumption testing too so that everything you do is backed by facts.

3. Manage, groom, and prioritize backlogs

Managing, grooming, and prioritizing backlogs is one of the key Product Owner responsibilities. The product backlog is a living ecosystem that evolves with the product, and the development backlog is where the team focuses on actual development work. 

One of your Product Owner responsibilities is to keep both backlogs clear, relevant, and prioritized to make sure that the team is always working on the most important tasks.

A cluttered, outdated backlog leads to confusion and wasted resources. If the product backlog contains ideas that won’t make it into development, they need to be removed to keep things moving smoothly. Similarly, the development backlog should be kept free of unnecessary tasks.

To perform product backlog refinement well, you need to nail prioritization. Being methodical is key – ensure that only high-priority tasks get through to the development team. 

A well-maintained backlog with groomed product backlog items helps the Development Team stay focused, reduces friction, and increases overall efficiency. Download our ebook on prioritization frameworks to help you create well-maintained backlogs.

4. Say NO when necessary 

Not every idea belongs in the backlog. Saying yes to everything leads to bloated roadmaps, missed deadlines, and a product that tries to do too much but excels at nothing. That’s where a Product Owner’s ability to say no comes in.

Your job isn’t to please everyone – it’s to build the best product possible. If a request doesn’t align with the product vision or isn’t backed by clear user needs, it’s your responsibility to push back. This keeps the team focused on work that truly moves the needle.

The key is how you say no. Explain your reasoning with data and business goals, and offer alternative solutions when possible. A well-handled no builds trust and keeps stakeholders engaged, rather than frustrated. 

We’ve got a great article to help you say no to stakeholders:

5. Manage the relationship between Product and Development Teams 

The Product Owner acts as the link between the Product and Development teams. As the gatekeeper of information, it’s your job to ensure a free flow of communication in both directions. You’re not just relaying what needs to be done; you’re also ensuring the Development Team has all the context they need to execute tasks efficiently.

Miscommunication can lead to wasted time, misunderstanding of product requirements, or even failure to deliver on key features. It’s essential that the Development Team understands not just the what but also the why behind each task. At the same time, you need to communicate clearly with the Product Team about how development is progressing and any potential hurdles, be it technical feasibility or other issues.

To be good at managing this relationship, establish regular check-ins with both teams. Be available for questions and clarifications, but also keep a clear line of communication to prevent bottlenecks. Understand the needs of both sides and make sure you’re proactively addressing issues before they arise. 

This all stems from coming from a place of empathy – a piece of advice we’d give to all Product Managers who want to get better. Check out our article for more advice on what makes a good Product Manager.

6. Ensure stakeholder alignment

Product development is a team sport, and without alignment between stakeholders – Executives, Developers, Sales, Support, and other key roles – things can fall apart fast. As a Product Owner, you act as the bridge, making sure everyone understands what’s being built and why.

This matters because misalignment leads to wasted effort. If leadership expects one thing and the Development Team builds another, you’re in for last-minute pivots, scope creep, and missed deadlines.

To avoid this, improve communication skills to keep discussions flowing. Regular check-ins, clear product documentation, and well-structured backlog grooming sessions help keep expectations in sync. Aligning everyone under a North Star metric can also improve alignment. Transparency is your best tool. Make sure stakeholders have visibility into priorities, progress, and constraints. When everyone is on the same page, execution becomes much smoother.

7. Be the voice of the customer 

A Product Owner needs to be the voice of the customer within the development process. This means deeply understanding the customer’s needs, pain points, and desires, and ensuring those are reflected in the product. By gathering insights from user testing, product research, and feedback from Sales, Support, and Marketing teams, you can make sure that every decision aligns with the customer’s best interests.

As you can guess, if the product doesn’t align with customer needs, it won’t succeed. Your role as the voice of the customer makes sure the product is relevant, valuable, and solves real problems.

To do this, stay close to the data. Use user testing, surveys, and market research to understand what your customers want. Engage with customer-facing teams regularly, and always keep the end user in mind. It’s not just about building product features; it’s about delivering value that resonates with your customers.

8. Oversee releases and ensure quality standards are met 

Once the sprint has ended and a product release is shipped, your job as a Product Owner isn’t over. You’ll need to oversee product releases, making sure that updates, bug fixes, and new features are rolled out smoothly. You also ensure that all the necessary stakeholders – like Marketing and Sales – are updated with release notes, changelogs, and any educational resources you need.

Product releases are a critical time to communicate the value proposition of new updates. If the product is released without proper communication, it can confuse users, frustrate stakeholders, and miss an opportunity to highlight improvements.

Many Product Teams don’t do their releases justice, as they’re unsure who takes responsibility for things like release notes. Here’s me to say that it’s firmly the Product Owner. You’re communicating needs to Developers, now it’s time to communicate value to users.

9. Be available to answer questions from the Development Team

During each sprint, the Development Team will inevitably have questions about user stories, features, and implementation details. It’s your job to be available to answer these questions and provide clarification when needed. This is key for preventing delays and ensuring that work doesn’t stall due to confusion.

When Developers have to stop their work to hunt for answers, it delays progress and can lead to frustration. Quick, timely responses help maintain product velocity and reduce stress.

To be good at this, keep track of what’s in the sprint and what’s coming up next. Make sure you’re familiar with all the user stories and tasks, so you can answer questions accurately. Set aside time during the sprint to be accessible and responsive. Being proactive in answering questions and providing guidance shows you’re engaged and committed to supporting your team.

10. Monitor key product metrics

As a Product Owner, tracking key product metrics helps you see if your features are actually delivering value. Common metrics include adoption rates, churn, feature usage, and customer satisfaction scores.

This is important because without it, you’re flying blind. If adoption rates are low, maybe users don’t see value in a new feature. If customer churn is rising, something might be frustrating them. Monitoring these signals helps you spot issues early and adjust before they become bigger problems.

To get good at this, define key performance indicators before launching a feature. Set up dashboards, track trends over time, and regularly review the data. More importantly, act on what you learn – don’t just collect numbers, use them to drive decisions.

11. Articulate the product vision

A Product Owner must clearly articulate the product vision to the team. This means understanding the big picture of what the product aims to achieve and communicating it clearly to everyone involved. It’s the Product Owner’s primary responsibility to ensure that the team stays aligned with this vision throughout the development process.

If the vision isn’t clear, the product might end up going in the wrong direction. Clear communication ensures everyone is working towards the same goal and avoids misaligned expectations.

Now big distinction coming up: yes a Product Owner articulates the vision, but they DO NOT set it. A Product Owner has no say in the direction the product goes, they instead just take the direction they’re given and make sure everyone else is on the right path.

To be good at this, refine your ability to communicate the vision clearly and concisely. Use simple language and concrete examples to make sure everyone understands. Revisit the vision regularly, especially during planning sessions and sprint reviews, so it stays top of mind. The clearer you are about the vision, the better the product will reflect the original goals.

12. Evaluate progress at each iteration

Agile teams move fast, and if you’re not stopping to check progress, you risk veering off course. After each sprint, the Product Owner should evaluate what was delivered, whether it met expectations, and what to improve next.

This matters because it keeps the team aligned on outcomes, not just output. Just delivering a feature isn’t enough – it needs to create value. If something doesn’t land well with users, it’s better to catch it early and adjust rather than plowing ahead blindly.

Be rigorous in your sprint reviews. Compare what was built to the original goal, gather team and stakeholder feedback, and check key metrics. Celebrate wins, learn from misses, and continuously refine the backlog based on what you’ve learned. Strong iteration leads to better products, faster.

13. Attend daily standups, planning sessions, reviews, and retrospectives

As a Product Owner, you’ll be involved in daily standups, sprint planning sessions, sprint reviews, and retrospectives. You’re an ever-present in all of these get-togethers. These meetings are essential to staying aligned with the team and ensuring the product is progressing as planned.

These meetings are where problems are identified, solutions are proposed, and everyone’s priorities are clarified. By participating, you help guide the team and ensure the product stays on track. As a Product Owner, you’re kind of like the orchestrator – people won’t know how to play their instruments if you don’t turn up to rehearsals. 

To be a valued participant, listen actively and participate meaningfully. You don’t need to dominate every conversation, but make sure your voice is heard, especially when representing customer needs or articulating product goals. Be prepared, stay focused, and use these meetings as an opportunity to keep the team aligned and moving forward.

What does a Product Owner not do? 

Here’s a quick bonus section exploring some of the things that a Product Owner shouldn’t do. Or more specifically, things don’t fall into the Product Owner job description. As you can see from our list, there’s a fair bit you need to have a handle on, so it can be a nice relief to know that you can unshackle the following responsibilities and hand them off to someone else. 

Of course, that’s only if you’re a Product Owner and Product Owner only. As we’ve discussed, 9.9 times out of 10, a Product Owner will be a responsibility – a hat – that others wear. 

So if you’re just a Product Owner, or a PM who wears the Product Owner hat and likes to compartmentalize, Here are all the things that don’t fall under your jurisdiction as a Product Owner: 

• Define the overall product strategy and vision – This is the Product Manager’s responsibility. The Product Owner takes the strategy and vision set by the Product Manager and ensures it’s executed properly, turning that vision into actionable user stories.
• Own the release management process – While the Product Owner ensures that a product is ready for release and sorts things like release notes, the actual timing, deployment, and coordination with Sales, Marketing, and Customer Support are typically handled by Product Managers, Release Managers, or Engineering Leads.
• Design the user experience (UX/UI) – The Product Owner works to ensure the product’s features meet user needs, but UX research, wireframing, and design fall under the expertise of UX/UI Designers and Researchers.
• Manage Engineering Teams or technical execution – The Product Owner collaborates with Development Teams, but the technical execution of how things get built is the responsibility of Engineering Managers, who guide the team on best practices and timelines.
• Conduct deep customer research or market analysis – The Product Owner may consider user feedback, but in-depth customer research and market analysis are handled by Product Managers, UX Researchers, or Marketing teams who specialize in gathering and analyzing these insights.
• Define pricing or go-to-market strategy – While the Product Owner shapes features based on customer needs, defining pricing models and go-to-market strategies are the responsibilities of Product Marketing teams and Product Managers.
• Micromanage the Development Team – The Product Owner prioritizes tasks and ensures the right features are being worked on, but they don’t manage the day-to-day work or timelines of the Development team. This is the role of Scrum Masters and Engineering Leads.

Know the Product Owner responsibilities to be a successful Product Owner

Knowing your responsibilities as a Product Owner is essential for driving product success. Without clear goals, stakeholder alignment, and a well-managed backlog, a Product Owner’s ability to guide a team effectively can be compromised. 

Managing all these tasks efficiently can be a challenge, especially without the right tools. That’s where our Product Management platform comes in. With features tailored to streamline your product roadmap, backlog management, and prioritization, ProdPad helps Product Owners maintain clarity and stay aligned with stakeholders. 

It empowers you to create a clear, actionable plan, track progress, and make informed decisions, all while reducing the chaos that often comes with managing a product. 

Learn how to get the most out of ProdPad with our ultimate Product Roadmap template, found in our interactive product Sandbox.

The post The Complete List of Product Owner Responsibilities: 13 Things You Need to Do appeared first on ProdPad.

At companies like these, you’ll not only manage roadmaps and navigate the Product Management lifecycle like usual, but you’ll also need to juggle significant technical requirements.

Hence the creation of the Technical Product Manager. 

Now here’s the thing: I’m willing to bet that as time goes on, more classic, traditional Product Managers will be expected to have Technical Product Manager skills and capabilities. 

So to help you be prepared, why not get ahead of the curve and learn how to become a Technical Product Manager before it becomes the norm?

To do that, we’ve put together 15, easy-to-implement tips to help you make the transition from PM to Technical Product Manager. These tips will make stepping into a Technical Product Manager role super easy, and give you more options for your career.

Let’s get straight to it!

1. Be clear on what a Technical Product Manager is

So what is a Technical Product Manager? In a nutshell, a Technical Product Manager is a specialized version of the core Product Manager, where your responsibilities lean heavily toward technically complex tasks. The role bridges the gap between technical teams and non-technical stakeholders, ensuring the product is both user-centric and technically feasible.

A Technical PM is a specialized role, but it’s not the only one. Over the years, we’ve seen roles like:

• Growth Product Managers
• Data Product Managers
• AI Product Managers

With each of these roles, a specific focus is highlighted that dictates what that PM’s main priority should be. A Growth PM is laser-focused on driving product growth, a Data PM uses data to guide decisions, and a Technical PM manages and builds technically complex products.

Let’s put it this way. In a football team, you have your offense and defense. Now you could single out a player as part of the offense and get the gist of what they do – they’re there to help the team score touchdowns. But we don’t know exactly how. 

So we give them a more specific job role like Wide Receiver, and now we know they’re the one hanging by the edge of the field to get the ball thrown to them. Calling a PM a technical PM is the same concept – we now know what they’re focusing on when getting a product to market .

2. Know the difference between a Product Manager and a Technical Product Manager

To become a Technical Product Manager, you need to understand what sets the role apart. What makes it unique? Well, the true answer is that a Technical PM will be doing a lot of what a Product Manager already does, with extra responsibilities. 

Here’s a side-by-side comparison going through the high-level focuses and aims of each role, and what is shared between the two:

As you can see, a Technical PM is still going to be doing everything in the Product Management lifecycle, but there’s an increased focus on tech-focused tasks, like making sure that it’s feasible, that the code is well written, and that it meets regulatory standards.

Now, here’s where things get interesting. Some believe the Technical PM will eventually become indistinguishable from a core Product Manager. In other words, the baseline responsibilities of a Product Manager may soon include the technical requirements of a TPM. 

So, while the distinction is clear now, the lines are likely to blur.

We’ve seen this trend with other specialized roles. Growth Product Managers have become the fastest rising since 2020 as companies lean on their products to recover lost revenue.

Today, fewer new Growth PM roles are being advertised, but the need hasn’t vanished. Instead, all Product Managers are expected to take on growth-focused responsibilities – regardless of title. The same will likely happen with Technical PMs in the future.

3. Be clear on the responsibilities of a Technical Product Manager

The role of a Technical Product Manager is a blend of strategy, technical expertise, and stakeholder management. While a core Product Manager focuses on the what and why of a product, a TPM dives deeper into the how, working closely with Engineering teams to ensure feasibility, scalability, and efficiency.

So, what exactly does a Technical Product Manager do? Here’s a breakdown of the key responsibilities so that you know:

• Define technical product strategy: Align product decisions with the company’s long-term technology vision and evaluate emerging tech.
• Own backlog and prioritization: Balance business needs with engineering constraints, ensuring technical debt isn’t ignored.
• Bridge the gap with Engineering: Work closely with developers to break down complex requirements and remove blockers.
• Oversee system architecture and integrations: Ensure seamless API connections and tech stack compatibility.
• Champion security and compliance: Stay ahead of GDPR, SOC 2, and other industry regulations.
• Assess technical feasibility: Validate ideas with Engineering before committing resources.
• Optimize performance and scalability: Prevent bottlenecks and ensure systems can handle growth.
• Support incident management: Troubleshoot outages, work with Engineers and communicate updates.
• Drive data-driven decisions: Define key metrics, analyze technical performance and back decisions with data.

4. Get to grips with Technical Product Manager terms 

Diving into the world of Technical Product Management introduces a whole new set of industry jargon that can feel like everyone around you is speaking Elvish at first. It’s easy to get lost in the sea of technical terms and abbreviations.

To become a successful Technical PM, you’ll need to get comfortable with this vocabulary. Luckily, we’ve put together a handy jargon-buster to help you navigate these tech-heavy terms with ease.

Here are the key Technical Product Manager terms you need to know:

• API : A set of protocols and tools that allow different software applications to communicate with each other, enabling integration of third-party services and functionalities into a product. (Check out our integrations to see how powerful good API can be)
• Technical debt : The cost of maintaining and updating software that was built quickly or inefficiently, which accumulates over time as shortcuts in coding or design create long-term problems that need to be addressed.
• System architecture: The high-level structure of a software system, outlining its components and how they interact, ensuring scalability and performance across hardware, software, and network configurations.
• Scalability : The ability of a system to handle increasing amounts of work or to be enlarged to accommodate growth without sacrificing performance or requiring a complete redesign.
• Microservices : An architectural style where a product is built as a collection of small, independently deployable services, improving flexibility and scalability by allowing each service to be developed and maintained separately.
• CI/CD : A set of practices that enable development teams to frequently integrate code changes (CI) and automatically deploy them to production environments (CD), reducing errors and speeding up product delivery.
• Version control : A system that tracks changes to code, allowing developers to collaborate efficiently, revert to previous versions, and manage different iterations of a product. Git is a popular version control system.
• Containerization : A method of packaging software into isolated containers, ensuring that applications run consistently across different computing environments, commonly using technologies like Docker.
• Load balancing : The process of distributing incoming network traffic across multiple servers to ensure no single server is overwhelmed, enhancing system reliability, uptime, and performance.

5. Know your system architecture and APIs like the back of your hand

Now that you know what APIs and system architecture are, you should next learn more about them in relation to your own product. These two terms are some of the most important in Technical Product Management, so they’re worth focusing on.

A Product Manager must know their product inside and out – its users, market positioning, value, key features, and use cases. A Technical PM needs all that knowledge plus a strong grasp of how the product actually works from an engineering perspective.

Since a Technical PM ensures technical feasibility, pushing a feature that disrupts the product’s structure means you’re missing the mark. Understanding how features fit together helps you introduce new ones without breaking what already works.

If you’re unfamiliar with concepts like system or product architecture, our glossary can help you get up to speed and strengthen your understanding of your product’s foundations.

Likewise, understanding your APIs is essential for planning integrations and ensuring your product fits seamlessly into your customers’ existing ecosystems. Your product is going to be a hard sell if it doesn’t fit in with the suite of tools your customers are already using, so understanding your APIs and capabilities can help you prioritize product updates and improvements. 

6. Perfect your core Product Management skills

Just because you’re transforming from a PM to a Technical Product Manager doesn’t mean you can forget everything you know. In fact, you’re going to need to sharpen various Product Management skills to excel in this role. 

As you’ve seen in tip 2, there’s a lot of overlap between a Product Manager and Tech PM, so holding onto the skills that got you through the door is vital. 

Here’s the Product Management skills you need to keep and ideally improve upon:

• Strategic thinking : Even as a Technical PM, you need to understand the larger product vision and how your technical decisions align with broader business objectives. It’s important to remain focused on long-term goals while considering short-term trade-offs.
• User-centric mindset : Whether you’re dealing with technical specs or APIs, never lose sight of the user. A deep understanding of your users’ pain points and needs is fundamental to ensuring the product delivers real value and aligns with customer expectations.
• Prioritization : The ability to prioritize features, tasks, and fixes is a crucial skill for any PM. As a Technical PM, you’ll need to weigh technical debt, system constraints, and user needs when making tough decisions about what should be worked on next.
• Roadmapping : A strong roadmap sets the direction for your product. As a Technical PM, you’ll need to create and manage detailed product roadmaps that outline key milestones and align technical capabilities with business priorities.
• Problem-solving : Every Product Manager must be a problem-solver. For a Technical PM, this means having the ability to troubleshoot issues, think critically about potential solutions, and guide teams through technical challenges that could impact product delivery.
• Stakeholder management : You’ll still need to work with cross-functional teams and external stakeholders. Balancing technical feasibility with business needs and ensuring stakeholders are aligned and informed is an essential skill for driving product success.
• Execution and Delivery : No matter how technical your role is, delivering the product is the end goal. Having a keen eye for execution – ensuring deadlines are met, features are tested, and products are delivered on time – is a must-have skill.
• Data-driven decision-making : A Technical PM needs to back up decisions with data. Understanding analytics and using data to measure product performance, user behavior, and system performance is crucial for fine-tuning features and improvements.
• Adaptability : The product development landscape is constantly shifting. A great Technical PM can adopt a pivot strategy quickly, adjusting their approach to accommodate changes in the tech stack, market conditions, or user needs without losing sight of the bigger picture.
• Collaboration with Design teams : As a Technical PM, you will often work alongside Design teams to ensure that the product’s technical side supports the desired user experience. Understanding design principles and collaborating effectively is vital in creating a seamless product.

7. Improve communication skills to manage stakeholders

Like every type of Product Manager, you’ll be juggling multiple stakeholders, but as a Technical Product Manager, you’ll likely find yourself communicating with Engineers and Developers more often than most. 

This means you need to be fluent in their language – not just technically, but in terms of how they approach problems, prioritize tasks, and break things down into manageable pieces.

You might recognize this common scenario for Technical PMs: being caught between a rock and a hard place as your C-Suite requests a feature that your Engineers can’t deliver. 

Suddenly you’re in the middle, trying to manage expectations and keep everyone happy. This is where your stakeholder alignment skills come into play. You’ll need to balance the needs of different departments, like Sales pushing for features and Engineers warning about technical debt, and make decisions that move the product forward without alienating anyone.

Mastering the art of saying no to stakeholders is essential when you’re managing stakeholders with competing demands. It’s not just about saying “no” but understanding when and how to negotiate, set expectations, and offer alternative solutions that keep the product moving forward. 

8. Develop the technical skills to stand out as a Technical Product Manager 

A specialized role like that of a Technical Product Manager demands specialized skills – specific knowledge and characteristics that can help you meet the demands of the position.

So, what technical skills do you need to refine that you might not already be well-versed in as a core Product Manager?

Here are a few key technical skills you should hone to succeed as a Technical PM:

Agile methodology knowledge

While you’re probably familiar with Agile from your experience as a core PM, you need a deeper, more comprehensive understanding of this role. Tech companies rely heavily on agile practices, and as a Technical PM, you’ll need to not only understand it but also be able to lead and coach teams through agile processes, such as sprints, stand-ups, and retrospectives.

Look for Agile certification courses, attend Agile workshops, or participate in Agile coaching sessions to get a more hands-on experience.

Product prototyping 

As a Technical PM, you’ll often need to help translate ideas into workable products. Prototyping allows you to quickly visualize and test concepts, ensuring that ideas align with user needs before full-scale development.

Start using prototyping tools like Figma or Sketch, and explore courses in UX/UI design to get comfortable with turning abstract ideas into interactive prototypes.

To really enhance your Product Prototyping capabilities, you can also AI prototyping tools for Product Managers like Replit. 

Data analysis and extraction

While every PM deals with data, a Technical PM must be particularly adept at analyzing and interpreting technical data, such as system performance, error logs, and usage analytics, to make informed product decisions.

To be more comfortable with data, take online courses in data analysis or tools like SQL, Python, or Tableau to build your analytical skills. Familiarizing yourself with key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics will also help you track and optimize product performance.

Technical writing

As a Technical PM, you’ll need to document features, technical specifications, and APIs in a clear, concise manner. Strong technical writing skills are essential for communicating complex ideas to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Practice writing technical documentation, and explore technical writing courses or workshops. Read well-regarded tech blogs and documentation to get a sense of how clear, user-friendly documentation is structured.

Understanding of DevOps practices

DevOps practices are essential for ensuring seamless collaboration between Development and Operations teams, especially when managing continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. Familiarizing yourself with these processes will ensure you’re aligned with Engineering teams and help you identify bottlenecks or opportunities for optimization.

To improve, attend DevOps-related webinars, or look for online courses covering CI/CD, automation, and the tools typically used in DevOps (such as Jenkins or Docker).

Risk management and troubleshooting

Understanding potential risks associated with new features or product releases is key for any Technical PM. This includes not only identifying technical risks but also understanding how to troubleshoot and resolve technical issues in collaboration with Engineering teams. Being able to predict, mitigate, and address issues will keep your product’s development on track.

Work alongside Engineering teams to identify risks in product development or previous launches. Reading books on risk management or taking specific courses in troubleshooting can also help you build this skill.

9. Learn basic programming to speak your Engineer’s language

There was one Technical Product Manager skill we left out of the above, and that’s because it needs to be singled out. That is knowing how to code.

Now, before you run off and try learning every coding language under the sun, it’s best to focus on the main ones used by Engineers. These are:

• JavaScript – Often used for front-end development, and increasingly important in full-stack development.
• Python – Known for its versatility, Python is widely used in data science, machine learning, and backend development.
• SQL – A must-have for querying databases and extracting relevant data for product decisions.

Now you can go off and develop your coding skills in a few different ways. You can put yourself through a hackathon that tests your coding skills under pressure, create open-source projects that experienced coders can help you with, or shadow your current Engineers.

If you find coding tough, you’re in luck, as you only need a basic understanding for this role. Plus, if you get stuck, there are plenty of great AI tools that can help you understand and write code, helping to fill in the blanks as you learn.

We recommend Cursor, but that’s just one of the many great AI tools for Product Managers. As AI becomes embedded in Product Management – and especially in the Technical PM role – learning about the best tools available to you can boost your efficiency and make your job much easier.

10. Understand the basics of security and compliance

Security and compliance aren’t just for Engineers or legal teams – they’re key responsibilities for a Technical Product Manager. A product that isn’t secure or compliant can lead to data breaches, fines, and lost customer trust. Since you define requirements and influence technical decisions, understanding security ensures best practices are built in from the start.

Familiarize yourself with key principles like data encryption, authentication (OAuth, SSO), and API security. Know industry compliance standards like GDPR, HIPAA, or SOC 2. Even if you’re not implementing them, understanding these requirements helps you ask the right questions and ensure security is a priority.

To improve, take security courses, read industry guidelines, and work with security and legal teams. Reviewing security incidents in your field can also keep you proactive. A strong foundation in security and compliance helps protect your product, user data, and regulatory standing.

11. Nail prioritization with the best frameworks for Technical Product Managers

Frameworks can be a game-changer for a Technical Product Manager, helping with validation, prioritization, and decision-making. When used correctly, they provide a structured approach to solving complex problems, ensuring you focus on the most impactful work while balancing technical feasibility.

Of course, you should never blindly follow Product Management frameworks. They need to suit the situation and make sense at the time. It’s like math formulas – Pythagoras’ theorem is great for finding the length of a triangle but useless for calculating the surface area of a cube. The key is knowing which framework to apply in different contexts rather than forcing a one-size-fits-all approach.

Here are five frameworks every Technical Product Manager should have in their toolkit to pull out when the time is right:

• RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort): A structured way to prioritize features and initiatives based on their potential value and effort required.
• Kano Model: Helps assess customer delight by categorizing features as basic expectations, performance drivers, or delightful surprises.
• MoSCoW (Must-Have, Should-Have, Could-Have, Won’t-Have): A simple framework for prioritizing requirements based on necessity.
• Cost of Delay (CoD): Helps quantify the impact of delaying a feature, making it easier to justify prioritization decisions.
• Opportunity Solution Tree: A visual framework for mapping problems, opportunities, and solutions, ensuring you tackle the right challenges first.

12. Apply for companies that actually need a Technical Product Manager 

Not every company is looking for a Technical Product Manager. If you’re holding out hope that your current company will eventually create the role, you could be waiting forever. To land this job, you need to target the right companies – ones that actually need and value technical specialization.

This role is far more common in larger enterprise organizations that can justify the specialization. Smaller companies tend to have generalist Product Managers who wear multiple hats, handling both technical and non-technical responsibilities. If your goal is to be a dedicated Technical PM, you need to work at a company where the demand for one exists.

This also means you’ll likely need experience in enterprise environments. If your background is primarily in startups or small teams with limited budgets, you may not stand out as the ideal candidate for companies looking for a Technical PM. Hiring managers at enterprise-level businesses often prioritize candidates who have navigated complex technical roadmaps, collaborated with large Engineering teams, and worked within structured development processes.

So how do you get on the radar of these companies? You can grow into the role by evolving with your current organization – though that’s not guaranteed – or you can proactively transition into a larger business through strategic networking, upskilling, and gaining relevant experience in enterprise-grade products.

13. Prepare for Technical Product Manager interview questions 

The Product Manager interview is perhaps one of the hardest in the world. Multiple stages, tough questions, and a lot of competition. The process for a Technical Product Manager isn’t any easier. These are going to have more focused questions and really test your technical knowledge, so you’re going to have to be prepared. You can’t wing this. 

As well as the general Product Manager interview questions, here are some of the most common Technical Product Manager interview questions and what they’re trying to learn from these questions: 

Can you explain the role of a Technical Product Manager in simple terms, as if you were talking to a 7-year-old?

This question is asked for two reasons. It shows off how well you know the role and your experience with it, as well as your ability to be clear – something super important when talking with Engineers (who we’re not comparing to seven-year-olds – we promise ) 

A great answer will be clear and simple, avoiding jargon. Something like:

“I help build cool products by working with Engineers to make sure what we create is technically possible.”

What technical skills do you have that make you stand out from other candidates?

This question is designed to evaluate your technical knowledge and expertise. They want to understand your background and whether your technical skill set will complement the existing team. While coding skills aren’t usually expected, understanding key technical concepts is crucial.

To nail this, highlight technical skills such as knowledge of APIs, system architecture, technical writing, data analysis, or familiarity with agile methodologies.

How would you approach resolving a technical problem or unexpected issue?

This question assesses your problem-solving and decision-making skills, especially when dealing with technical challenges. A Technical PM often faces hurdles that need creative, quick, and effective solutions. The interviewer wants to see if you follow best practices, and how you handle pressure. 

Start by identifying the issue, gathering necessary information, and working with your Engineering team to brainstorm solutions. Show that you can remain calm under pressure and make decisions based on data and team input. If possible, include examples from past experience where you handled a technical issue successfully.

What aspects of our product would you change or improve, and why?

This question tests your critical thinking, understanding of the product, and whether you’ve done research on their company. It also assesses how well you can balance user needs, technical feasibility, and business goals.

A thoughtful, constructive critique of their product based on research is what’s needed here. Focus on areas where there’s room for improvement – whether it’s usability, features, or performance – and justify your suggestions. Make sure to back your points with reasoning and explain how the changes could benefit the user experience or business goals.

In addition to these questions, you’re also going to be asked a lot about Product Sense – The Product Manager version of common sense. There may even be an entire interview stage for this that you’re going to have to master.

14. Get a Technical Product Manager mentor to show you the ropes

Loads of Product Managers have mentors, and if you want to excel as a Technical Product Manager, finding one should be a high priority. Technical PMs operate at the intersection of product strategy and engineering, which means there’s a steep learning curve – especially if you’re transitioning from a more traditional Product Management role.

A mentor, coach, or Product Consultant, can help you navigate this transition, offering real-world insights that aren’t always covered in courses or books. They can provide guidance on working effectively with Engineers, breaking down complex technical concepts, and making informed prioritization decisions. Plus, they can help you avoid common pitfalls and accelerate your growth.

To find a mentor, start by exploring your network – look for seasoned Technical PMs in your company or industry. Join Product Management communities, attend events, and engage in online discussions. 

We actually partner with a few Product Coaches and mentors at ProdPad, you can find some great teachers who can help you improve as a PM. 

15. Stay up-to-date on emerging tech trends to keep ahead of the curve

Technology moves fast, and as a Technical Product Manager, you need to keep up. Staying updated on emerging tech trends is about anticipating changes that could impact your product and strategic decisions. Falling behind means your competitors get ahead.

Advancements in AI, new software development frameworks, and more can influence product decisions. Understanding what’s coming next helps you explore new opportunities, assess risks, and have informed discussions with Engineers and stakeholders.

To stay ahead, make continuous learning a habit. Subscribe to industry newsletters, follow Product Leaders on Twitter and LinkedIn, and read popular blogs in the tech industry. Attend conferences and webinars to learn about emerging technologies and experiment with new tools yourself.

The best Technical PMs anticipate trends. By staying informed, you’ll position yourself as a forward-thinking leader who can guide your team through the ever-changing tech landscape.

The tech industry’s Product Manager

And with those 15 tips, you should have all you need to excel as a Technical Product Manager. Becoming a successful TPM means striking a balance between managing the full Product Management process and diving deep into the technical side. From understanding security and compliance to staying ahead of emerging tech trends, these 15 tips will help you confidently step into a more technical PM role

As you continue to develop your skills, remember that mastering the full product lifecycle is just as important as technical expertise. If you want to dive even deeper into Product Management and refine your approach, check out our Product Management Process Handbook. It’s designed to give you the tools and strategies to navigate the complexities of both technical and non-technical aspects of the role, helping you become the best PM you can be, whatever your job description.

The post The Technical Product Manager – 15 Tips to Help You Become One appeared first on ProdPad.

No matter if you’re mapping out and communicating a product roadmap for the first time, are unhappy with your current product roadmap format, and want to try something new, or are just sense-checking your approach, we’ve got the product roadmap template to help you. 

Of course, there are a lot of product roadmap templates out there, varying widely from basic slide deck templates to fully interactive and detailed templates that help you fully understand best practices. Makes you wonder if you’re using the right one? 

Not all of these roadmaps are going to be super helpful. Some can be nothing more than an outline to fill in, but others are more interactive and allow you to fully understand what you need to do to create a successful product roadmap. 

If you’re looking for the latter, you’ve come to the right place. 

At ProdPad, we have categorically the best product roadmap template available. Now I’m not just saying that through obligation, we genuinely believe our roadmap template is the most useful. If you hear us out as we explain why, we’re sure by the end of it you’re going to agree. 

In this article, we’re going to walk you through the product roadmap template, giving you reasons why you need to use one, why ours is the best choice, and how to use it.

Believe us already? Dive straight into our dynamic, drag-and-drop product roadmap template.

What is a Product Roadmap template? 

A product roadmap template is more than just a fill-in-the-blanks document – it’s a structured framework that helps you plan, communicate, and evolve your product strategy. It outlines key aspects of your chosen roadmap format to help you use it effectively. 

Essentially, a great product roadmap template functions as a how-to guide on using a roadmap properly.

Now most roadmap templates come in a downloadable format, ready to be filled in like you would a workbook at school. We’re not throwing shade at these types of templates. We’re all for a good downloadable resources and have plenty ourselves that help with every aspect of Product Management.

But when it comes to product roadmaps, a static document doesn’t go far enough. Product roadmaps are living, breathing tools, unlike other forms of product documentation. They’re dynamic and evolve constantly alongside your product. If your roadmap is dynamic, your product roadmap template should be too.

That’s exactly what our product roadmap template is. It’s an interactive tool designed to help you fully grasp – and actually use – your roadmap in the way it’s intended. 

Why use a Product Roadmap template? 

Product roadmaps are a huge part of a Product Manager’s day in the life, but that doesn’t mean they’re easy to use. Roadmaps can be complicated, especially if you’re working with an unfamiliar format. Given how much attention they demand, it makes sense to use a template as a structured way to navigate and master them.

Now there are a lot of different product roadmap formats around, so many that we’ve covered them in their own neat article:

With how different they are, it can be jarring to switch from one type to another. Each roadmap type has a learning curve. A roadmap template acts as a blueprint, helping you quickly adapt to and fully engage with a new format.

If you’re using a quality product roadmap template complete with guidance notes and example content, they can demonstrate the gold standard of what that roadmap should look like. They ensure you adopt Product Management best practices, avoid common mistakes, and don’t make any omissions, all to help you create a roadmap that’s clear, effective, and actionable.

Plus, if you get the whole Product Function in your organization to follow the same product roadmap template, you can foster alignment and standardization across your team. With everyone using the roadmap in the same way, this consistency prevents any collaboration issues, making you more effective and synced up. 

If you’re looking to explore a new type of product roadmap – say, moving from a timeline roadmap to Now-Next-Later – a template makes that transition seamless. But why would you want to do that?

I’m glad you asked… 

What is the best product roadmap template to use? 

We’ve said it from the start, our product roadmap template is the best. But why? Well, for starters, our template is focused on the most popular, and most effective, roadmap format there is: Now-Next-Later. 
Now-Next-Later is an agile product roadmap format, meaning that it’s focused on outcomes, not outputs, and allows for adaptability. It does away with strict timelines and deadlines, instead giving you the flexibility to plan your work within broader time horizons, focused on the outcomes you want to drive, not the features you want to deliver. You break your Initiatives into stuff that needs to be done now, things you’re working on next, and priorities for later. Check it out:

Here’s why Now-Next-Later is categorically the best: 

• Simple to understand: A Now-Next-Later roadmap is easy to understand, reducing the potential for confusion or misinterpretation. This makes it a great way to communicate your product strategy and direction, especially with stakeholders or team members who may not be involved in the day-to-day Product Management process.
• Customer-focused: The emphasis on ‘problems to solve’ ensures your product delivers maximum value for your customers, making it a more successful product.
• Happy, empowered teams: By allowing scope for discovery and experimentation within each roadmap item, the team has more autonomy to find the best solutions, making their day jobs more interesting! This, along with less deadline pressure, makes for a happy, productive team.
• Efficient and time-saving: The Now-Next-Later time horizons help Product Teams avoid wasting time planning out detailed schedules that are too far in the future to be accurate, only to have to rework them when deadlines aren’t met or priorities change.
• Strategically aligned: Everything on a Now-Next-Later is linked to a strategic objective, ensuring you are prioritizing based on what will create the most business value. It’s an easy way to align a product roadmap with what is most important to the organization.
• Faster delivery: Because Now-Next-Later does not rely on exact deadlines for its structure, teams aren’t asked to plan schedules ahead of time and commit to exact dates. This means no one is baking in buffer time and things get delivered faster.

Now we know that we’re not the only Belle in this ball. There are a lot of roadmap templates out there, with many others also focusing on Now-Next-Later. But let us tell you why we turn heads. 

If you didn’t know, ProdPad Co-Founders Janna Bastow and Simon Cast invented the Now-Next-Later roadmap. That means that we know this format inside out, like the back of our hand. We’re the originators, the OG. Why would you get a Now-Next-Later roadmap for anybody else? 

If you need more convincing that Now-Next-Later is the most effective product roadmap template, you can learn why ProdPad Co-Founder, Janna Bastow, invented it: 

Another reason why our product roadmap template is the best is because it’s dynamic. It’s not a print-out, it’s a functioning version of ProdPad that you can use and learn from. It’s not one of those templates that you’re going to make a copy of, fill out, and then forget about by this time next week.

Frankly, we’re surprised by how many static product roadmap templates there are out there. Because they’re simply bad. Here’s why using a static document as a product roadmap template is a bad idea: 

• They lock you into a single moment in time: A static roadmap might capture your plan today, but as soon as priorities shift, it’s outdated. You’ll either have to recreate it from scratch or work from an obsolete roadmap.
• They aren’t flexible: A static template forces you into a fixed structure that might not fit your team’s workflow, making it harder to adjust as things change.
• They kill collaboration: A file-based product roadmap template is just a document, not a living tool. Teams can’t update it in real-time, meaning decisions happen elsewhere, and alignment suffers.
• They focus on formatting over function: Using a rigid template often means squeezing plans into predefined boxes rather than thinking strategically about what needs to be communicated.
• They don’t scale: As your product evolves, your roadmap should too. A static template doesn’t grow with your team, leaving you with an outdated or overly simplified view of what’s next.
• They make tracking progress a nightmare: With a static roadmap, there’s no easy way to reflect shifts, updates, or completed work without manually editing or recreating the document.

Here’s another thing. Not all product roadmap templates are created equal. In fact, some straight-up suck. With Now-Next-Later being a popular format, you’re going to find lots of templates masquerading as this style. When choosing a product roadmap template, you need to beware of fakers. 

When is a Now-Next-Later product roadmap template not a Now-Next-Later product roadmap template? 

There are a couple of key components of Now-Next-Later that without them, result in a different style of roadmap. Now-Next-Later is outcome-driven, not output-focused. That’s why you can easily tie OKRs and business goals to each Initiative in the roadmap, alongside framing your roadmap around problems to solve and prioritizing based on the outcomes you want to achieve. Without this outcome-driven focus, you haven’t got a Now-Next-Later roadmap, you have trash. 

And crucially, a proper Now-Next-Later product roadmap template uses a two-step hierarchy. This means that you have your overarching problems to solve, and then within them the possible ideas and experiments you’re going to explore to best solve those problems. 

So, as an example, the first level of your roadmap item would be a problem that needs solving like  “How can we improve user onboarding?” while the second level solution ideas might be “Create a new onboarding flow” or “Test new user onboarding emails”. 

If you’re missing any of these elements, you ain’t got a Now-Next-Later product roadmap template. Beware of imitations. Product roadmap templates that call themselves Now-Next-Later, but that lack the inherent outcome-focused structure, are nothing more than feature boards. 

If you’re looking for a Now-Next-Later product roadmap template, it’s best to go with the O.G. Founded by the creator of Now-Next-Later, ProdPad lives and breathes this format. 

How to use our Product Roadmap template

Our product roadmap template is easy to use. That’s because it’s baked right into our online sandbox, a free-to-access version of ProdPad that you can use today to see how it all works. Your access is unlimited and forever and includes a bunch of different roadmap examples for different industries and product types to help you understand Now-Next-Later in action. 

Now with it being an open sandbox environment, any changes you make won’t be saved. So when you’ve learnt everything from the product roadmap template and it’s time to save and share your own version, you’ll want to start a free trial of ProdPad which will allow you to save your roadmap, create unlimited customized views and share and publish it to all your stakeholders.

To help you fully understand how to use our template, let’s break down all the key elements: 

Time Horizons

In the Now-Next-Later roadmap, time horizons replace traditional fixed timelines. Instead of committing to specific dates, Initiatives are categorized based on their priority and readiness. Now by default, our time horizons are Now, Next, and Later, but you need to define what that means for your team.

This is important because everyone can have different interpretations of what now, next, and later mean. You need to be explicit about how you’re defining these horizons so you’re setting the right expectations with your stakeholders. 

For example, your time horizons could be something like: 

• Now = Well-understood problems with defined solutions and committed development resources. 
• Next = Problems at the design or discovery stage with assumptions that need to be tested. 
• Later = Fuzzy aspirations that are still taking form. 

Alternatively, they can be spit up into fiscal quarters – a good tactic if you’re weaning a team off timeline roadmaps. 

You don’t even have to stick to now, next, and later as your time horizon headings.You can adopt the process and principles of the Now-Next-Later without being tied to those exact terms.

In fact, even in ProdPad, we allow our customers to customize the column headings and call them whatever they want. You might want to be more explicit about the time brackets for each and call them ‘This quarter’, ‘Next quarter’, and ‘The future’.

Using time horizons allows teams to manage uncertainty effectively, providing a structured yet flexible approach to planning. It acknowledges that priorities can shift, enabling teams to adapt without the constraints of rigid timelines.

Objectives

Objectives are the core aims of your product. They’re the overarching goals and you need to be aware of them to then dictate the Initiatives you set to try and achieve them. Your Objectives don’t have to be specific, measurable goals just yet, but they do need to be something that you can focus your roadmap around. 

With your Objectives, you can set them in the Objectives & Key Results tab. Once you have them there, you’re then able to assign them to the relevant Initiatives, so that you’re always clear on what each Initiative card is working towards.

By focusing on objectives rather than just a list of tasks, teams can maintain a strong sense of purpose and adaptability, making sure every effort contributes to meaningful progress.

Initiatives

Initiatives are high-level problems that the Product Team aims to address. These are the particular efforts you want to focus on to deliver value that aligns with the product’s strategic goals. Initiatives should be expressed as problems to solve – that’s very important for Now-Next-Later. 

If the Initiatives on your product roadmap are focused on the problems you want to solve for your customers or your business, then you have the flexibility within each Initiative to explore different solutions and adapt your plans as you learn through discovery and experimentation.

To help you tick off Initiatives, the steps involved are then broken down into smaller tasks or Ideas that can be linked to the cards. More on them in a sec.

In our product roadmap template, you create Initiative cards, which you can then move based on priority and readiness, based on the time horizons you’ve set.

Focusing on Initiatives helps maintain a clear connection between daily activities and overarching strategic objectives, promoting coherence and purpose in the team’s work.

Ideas

Ideas are potential solutions or actions that can be done to achieve the defined Initiatives they’re linked to. They represent the team’s creative responses to the problems identified.

Ideas can emerge from various sources, including team brainstorming sessions, customer feedback, or market research, and should be linked to the Initiative(s) they most relate to.

When adding Ideas to your roadmap, they need to be assessed for feasibility, impact, and alignment with strategic goals before implementation.

Target date

While the Now-Next-Later roadmap emphasizes flexibility over rigid timelines, assigning target dates can be beneficial for planning and accountability. Target dates provide a temporal reference, helping teams manage expectations and coordinate efforts.

These dates are set with an understanding of their tentative nature, allowing for adjustments as priorities evolve. Usually, as Initiatives move across the roadmap right to left from the Later column to Now, this target date will likely get more concrete and not as broad. 

Instead of fiscal quarters and rough monthly estimates, you’ll be using more specific dates as you gain more knowledge on Intitivate.  

Target dates ensure that the roadmap remains dynamic while providing sufficient structure to guide the team’s activities.

With target dates, that’s all the basics of Now-Next-Later covered. Of course, there’s still so much to learn and see. Access our product roadmap template to fully get to grip with this outcome-focused format.

Inside the initiative card

All the above is just what you can change and edit from the roadmap overview display. When you dig into each individual initiative card, you have options to add more details to help you better plan and optimize each item included in your roadmap. For example, when you click on each initiative, you can add extra juicy details like: 

• Target outcomes: These are the goals and metrics you want to hit with this initiative. For example, it could be increasing user retention by 10% or improving feature adoption rate within the first month. Defining the target outcome helps align the initiative with your overall product and business objectives.
• Actual outcomes: The actual results of the initiative once it’s completed. This is where you can compare the planned outcomes with the real impact, helping you measure the success and refine future initiatives. It could include metrics like conversion rates, user satisfaction, or revenue growth.
• Linked ideas: This allows you to connect related Ideas or features that are tied to the initiative. If your initiative is part of a bigger goal, you can reference related Ideas that are driving or influencing it, providing context and showing how the pieces fit together.
• User stories: A description of the user’s perspective on the feature or initiative. User stories define what the user wants to accomplish, why, and the expected benefit. Adding user stories helps keep the focus on delivering value to the user and ensures alignment with their needs.
• Any comments you need to add: This is where you can add additional notes, insights, or clarifications related to the initiative. Whether it’s feedback from stakeholders or adjustments based on new market insights, this section helps keep everyone aligned on any changes or additional context.

If you’re stuck with any of these, our in-built AI Assistant CoPiliot can help you generate descriptions and Ideas. In fact, CoPilot can help automate a lot of the roadmap process. Check out what else CoPilot can do.

Making the switch to Now-Next-Later

Sold on Now-Next-Later? Thought you might be. Now, I know what you’re thinking. You want to switch but don’t know if you can. You feel shackled to timeline roadmaps, trapped by them. You can’t fathom to think about the effort to make the switch and convert everything over – oh the horror! But just like scary films, that horror is not real. 

With ProdPad’s inbuilt AI, you can upload documents – like your old timeline roadmap – and have them automatically transformed into a fully working, fully functional Now-Next-Later roadmap. It’s that easy. 

What we’re saying is that there’s no excuse. Between our product roadmap template and CoPilot, we make it as easy as possible to adopt Now-Next-Later, definitively THE BEST product roadmap format. 

Go and give it a go and transform how you handle your product roadmap.

The post The Ultimate Product Roadmap Template and How to Use It appeared first on ProdPad.

Now, making assumptions isn’t all bad all the time. Sometimes they’re spot on because you’ve gathered the evidence to reach that assumption: 

This coffee shop has flickering lights, a low hygiene rating, and the barista just spilled cigarette ash into the espresso machine – you can assume that it’s probably not the best place for a drink.

But other times, assumptions can miss the mark. Ever judged someone too harshly after a bad first impression? Like thinking a big, tattooed guy rolling up on a motorbike MUST be rough around the edges, only to discover that he’s a charming dog-walking, cake-baking softie. 

As a Product Manager, we can’t afford to operate on guesswork, even educated ones. Assumptions that go unchecked about our product, capabilities, and our customers can lead to you building the wrong feature, solving the wrong problems, and disappointing your customers. 

That’s where assumption testing comes in. 

It’s about challenging your gut instincts and getting the facts about your hypotheses – much like walking up to that intimidating biker and having a conversation to learn the truth about them. 

Assumptions can steer you down a blind alley if you act on what you think instead of what you know. But how do you test assumptions? Let’s break down assumption testing so that you’re building on solid ground. 

What is an assumption? 

An assumption is a statement taken to be true without any real proof. It’s something we all do to fill in the blanks when we don’t have all the answers. For Product Managers, assumptions are the invisible threads woven into your ideas, plans, and product strategies. 

They’re often hidden and untested, but they’re the foundation of whether your product decisions will stand tall or crumble. Knowing how to identify and challenge these assumptions is the key to avoiding wasted effort and creating solutions that actually work.

Here’s how Teresa Torres, the authority in assumption testing, defines an assumption:

Now assumptions aren’t always obvious to find. They’re lurking in the background, and you’ll need to properly seek them out to find and understand them. Let’s use a more Product Management specific example to figure out what assumptions might be. 

Say you have a desired outcome: Increase product adoption rates. 

To achieve that outcome, one of many potential opportunities is to get existing customers to refer a friend. 

From that, you then come up with a few solutions to help users do that, like adding a referral share button in your app. 

On the surface, this all sounds like a great, logical idea and a quick win to help get more potential users to your tool. 

But have you spotted the many initial assumptions made in that quick mini-product discovery session? 

Well for starters, we’ve made the assumption that users are engaged enough with your product to want to share – we don’t actually know that. 

We’ve also assumed that customers will use the share button instead of a different alternative, like good old-fashioned word of mouth. 

Plus, we’ve also assumed that anyone receiving a referral will actually open it. 

If all of these are incorrect assumptions, this whole design solution falls, and you’re left wasting time building a new feature that has little to no impact. 

Those three examples aren’t even all the potential assumptions of this scenario. This is why assumption testing is so important, to first find your preconceptions and then discover the truth about them.

Assumptions vs risks

Like the well-read Product Manager you are, you may have come across the idea of the four big risks, popularized by Marty Cagan. Risks are statements about your product that you want to prove are false to ensure that your solution is watertight. 

Assumptions and risks are actually pretty heavily linked, as both are used to note down expectations and preconceptions about customers, your product, or the market. Depending on who you ask, they’re the same thing. 

The main difference between the two is that one is phrased as a negative, while the other is more positive. One needs to be false, while the other needs to be true. 

So a risk is:

Customers WON’T understand how to navigate to that feature. 

Assumptions are:

Customers WILL understand how to navigate to that feature. 

So they’re opposite sides of the same coin. Ying and Yang. Whatever you call them and the way you phrase them, they’re preconceptions about your product that you’ll want to find the truth about before you implement the solution they’re tied to.

What are the different types of assumptions?

Your assumptions can be grouped into five different categories: 

1. Desirability Assumption: These are the guesses we make about why we think people will want what we’re offering. It’s all about predicting whether your solution will actually appeal to your customers.
2. Viability Assumption: This is where we assume that our solution will work well for the business. Will it bring in revenue? Will it align with company goals? These are the questions hiding under viability assumptions that can be answered with statistical tests.
3. Feasibility Assumption: Here, we’re betting on whether we can actually build what we’ve envisioned. These often involve engineering, but they can also include assumptions about compliance, legal issues, or security.
4. Usability Assumption: These are the assumptions about what our customers are able to do. Can they find the right features? Will they understand how to use them? Can they follow through without frustration?
5. Ethical Assumption: This is where we assume our solution won’t cause harm. If it involves collecting sensitive customer data, we need to ask tough questions about why we need it, how we’ll use it, and whether it’s truly necessary.

These categories can be helpful in guiding your process when it comes to finding your riskiest assumptions. When going through your potential solutions, you can work down these types like a checklist to make sure that no stone is left unturned, and that you’ve found all related assumptions. 

What is an assumption test? 

An assumption test is where you go out and test the validity of the assumptions that you’ve identified. Are they actually true, or have you missed the mark? An assumption test is a structured activity to test the risk in an assumption and to see if they’re accurate. It’s a way to see how bad your riskiest assumptions are and what the impact will be if it’s wrong. 

There are so many ways to test assumptions, and ultimately the choice is yours on how you want to go and find the truth. Some types of assumptions work best with certain tests. 

For example, desirability and usability assumptions can be tested best by looking at customer behavioral data – looking at how users interact with your product and learning what that says about their engagement. On the other hand, feasibility assumptions can be tested by simply having a discussion with your Design and Engineering Teams. 

We’ll go into more detail on some of the best ways to conduct assumption testing, but for now, all you need to know is that an assumption test not only checks if an assumption is true, it also showcases the risks if it’s found to be untrue. 

Why should you do assumption testing?

Every time you propose a new design solution to achieve a certain outcome, there’s no guarantee it’s going to work. There are many factors that can impact failure. Perhaps you didn’t perform product validation, or maybe a step was missed in your product discovery process. One of the biggest culprits, however, is the hidden assumptions baked into your proposal.

If your hypothesis or solution is riddled with assumptions – essentially guesses – you can’t be confident that an idea is going to lead to a viable product. Launching a new feature or making a change to your product without addressing the riskiest assumptions is like taking a gamble without knowing the odds. In essence, you’re betting blind.

Assumption testing lets you bet smart. You’re at least betting sensibly and giving yourself greater chances to win. 

Think of it like walking into a casino: without testing, you’re the person who throws their life savings on a single roulette number, hoping for the best. That’s what happens when you launch a feature based on gut instinct instead of insight.

By testing your assumptions, you’re stacking the odds in your favor. It’s like studying the patterns at the table, analyzing probabilities, and realizing that betting on red gives you the best chance of success.

Of course, no amount of preparation can eliminate risk. The ball might still roll into a black pocket. But assumption testing ensures your bets are informed, calculated, and sensible. It won’t guarantee success, but it will give you the confidence to know you’ve eliminated incorrect assumptions.

Beyond eliminating your riskiest assumptions, assumption testing comes with several other benefits: 

• Saves time and resources: By identifying and addressing flawed assumptions early, you can avoid wasting time, money, and effort on solutions that won’t work.
• Improves stakeholder confidence: Testing your assumptions gives you data to back up your decisions, which builds trust with your team, leadership, and other stakeholders.
• Fosters innovation: By challenging assumptions, you might uncover opportunities or insights you hadn’t considered before, leading to more creative ideas and a more viable product.
• Encourages collaboration: Testing assumptions often involves cross-functional input, such as from Engineering, Design, or Marketing, which ensures a well-rounded approach.
• Sharpens decision-making: The process of assumption testing forces you to think critically and make more informed, strategic decisions.
• Increases customer understanding: Many assumption tests involve customer research, giving you deeper insights into their behavior, needs, and expectations.
• Reduces cognitive bias: Testing removes the guesswork and counteracts bias, ensuring decisions are grounded in evidence, not personal beliefs.

How do you do assumption testing?

Testing assumptions is so important in making better, more informed product decisions. While the list of activities to test assumptions is endless, the most effective tests generally fall into one of the following four categories. 

• Prototype tests: Simulate user behavior to evaluate customer response to new product ideas. These tests involve creating a simple version of the product or feature to observe user interactions and gather feedback.
• One-question surveys: Quickly gather insights from customers to validate assumptions. A single, targeted question helps assess customer interest and validate ideas without requiring a long survey.
• Data mining: Analyze existing data to evaluate the risk and feasibility of an assumption. Statistical tests like reviewing past user behavior and engagement data can gauge whether an assumption is realistic.
• Research spike: Test technical feasibility through engineering prototypes. This is a quick, focused effort to explore the technical aspects of a solution, helping you determine if it’s feasible before moving forward.

Of all the potential assumption tests you can do, they’ll more or less fall within these four types. Still, let’s explore some of the standout ways you can test your assumptions.

Smoke testing

A smoke test is a lightweight way to gauge interest in a new product or feature before you fully commit to building it. The idea is simple: create a mock version of the product or feature (often through a landing page or placeholder) and test it to see if it sparks any real-world interest. It’s like putting out a sign that says, “We’re thinking about this, are you interested?” and seeing who shows up.

ProdPad itself originally validated assumptions through a smoke test, and here we are. We had the assumption that there’d be a demand for a Now-Next-Later roadmapping tool, and a smoke test confirmed there was that demand before the product was fully built.

A/B testing

A/B testing is one of the most effective ways to test assumptions about what works with users by comparing two variations of a feature or experience. This method involves showing two different versions (A and B) to separate user groups and measuring the difference in user behavior or outcomes.

Let’s say you assume that changing the color of a CTA button will improve click-through rates. With A/B testing, you can test the original color (A) against the new color (B) to see which one gets more clicks. This data allows you to make decisions based on actual user behavior, rather than assumptions or guesses.

A/B testing is particularly useful when you have an existing feature or product, and you want to improve specific aspects or validate small tweaks. It helps you make incremental changes with confidence, backed by solid user data.

Opportunity solution tree

The Opportunity Solution Tree is a framework that helps you map out various possible solutions to a particular opportunity. Although not originally designed to test assumptions but to instead prioritize solutions, it can be used to organize assumptions around customer needs, business goals, and technical feasibility, making sure you test all the variables that could impact your solution.

The beauty of the Opportunity Solution Tree is that it allows you to visualize how different solutions and assumptions interconnect. It’s an excellent tool for teams to collaborate and align on what needs testing first, ensuring that the most critical assumptions are evaluated early on. This makes it easier to prioritize the right solutions based on the risks associated with each assumption, helping you make smarter decisions.

Wizard of Oz testing

The Wizard of Oz test is a clever technique where you create the illusion of a fully functioning product, even though it’s not actually built yet. Typically, this involves using human intervention behind the scenes to simulate the behavior of a product or feature that doesn’t exist yet in its entirety. Kind of like what the Wizard did in the movie that gives this technique its name.

Imagine you’re testing a chatbot feature, and you want to see if users find it helpful. In a Wizard of Oz test, you might set up a fake chatbot interface where a real person responds to user queries instead of an automated bot. This gives you valuable insights into how users engage with the feature, without having to build the fully automated solution upfront.

This method is particularly useful when you want to test the feasibility of a new feature, concept, or service without committing to full development. It helps you validate assumptions about user needs, behaviors, and interactions before you invest in the technical complexity of building the feature.

User shadowing

User shadowing involves observing users as they interact with your product or similar products in real-time. The goal is to uncover implicit assumptions you may have about how users behave or what they need. By stepping into the user’s shoes (without interrupting them), Product Teams gain valuable insights into pain points, workarounds, and behaviors that might otherwise go unnoticed.

This technique helps Product Teams understand the true user experience in complex, real-world environments. It’s like being a fly on the wall while users interact with the product, which can reveal a wealth of information about how features are used, or where assumptions about usability or desirability fall short.

User shadowing is particularly effective when you want to test usability assumptions or observe specific behaviors that are difficult to capture in a survey or structured interview. It’s also an invaluable method for seeing how a user navigates through a system or process, which can often provide better insights than simply asking them about it.

When should you run assumption testing? 

Assumption testing is a crucial part of the discovery process that helps teams compare and evaluate different solutions. It’s especially useful after identifying a target opportunity and picking a few potential ideas to explore. By testing the assumptions behind each idea, teams can uncover risks, validate their hypotheses, and decide which direction is worth pursuing.

It’s also a great tool to use after narrowing down to a final solution, particularly if there are lingering questions about how the solution will work or if there’s still some risk to address. This helps teams refine their approach before jumping into development.

For teams that practice continuous discovery, assumption testing becomes part of the regular rhythm. It’s not something you only do once or at a certain stage, it’s instead an ongoing process of testing assumptions, validating ideas, and iterating based on what’s learned.

Bottom line: Assumption testing is an essential tool for making smarter, more informed decisions and keeping product development on track. It’s not a one-and-done trick, it’s something that you should be doing consistently (even if others aren’t so keen on the idea).

Why do some teams not perform assumption testing? 

A lot of Product Teams don’t test assumptions. That’s pretty absurd, especially after going through why it’s so important.  

So why do teams skip through this? 

I’ll let you in on a secret, nine times out of ten, it’s not the Product Manager deciding to ignore this. Instead, there are plenty of external factors that could be leading to assumption testing not being a desirable option, with teams instead plowing on without knowing if what they hope to be true is actually true. 

Here are some reasons why assumption testing may not be happening, and how you can challenge them: 

Confirmation bias

One of the main reasons why teams skip assumption testing is that they often don’t realize they’re operating on assumptions in the first place. It’s easy to get attached to an idea, which leads to seeing patterns in data that confirm what you want to believe – even if the data is telling a different story.

Past success compounds this issue. If a particular approach worked well before, it’s tempting to assume it will work again. But things change, especially in tech, where market dynamics, user behaviors, and expectations evolve rapidly. What worked yesterday may fail spectacularly tomorrow.

To beat confirmation bias, you need to ingrain assumption testing into your routine. Start by actively identifying your assumptions. Ask yourself and your team, ‘What are we assuming to be true here?’ Surfacing these hidden beliefs is the first step to addressing them and making you think again about moving forward with the assumptions you have. 

Fear of invalidating assumptions 

Some teams may not want to test assumptions because they’re scared of the consequences of finding out that the assumption is wrong. Many would rather go through the development cycle oblivious, than have their faults pointed out. 

Even worse, some team members may not feel comfortable questioning someone else’s assumption, due to a lack of psychological safety in the organization. It’s better to keep their mouth shut than to upset the team or rock the boat.

This is a mindset issue and one you should try to address. You need to try and reframe this viewpoint and make it clear that questioning and testing assumptions is super important.

Time constraints

For many PMs, the reality is that they feel they don’t have the time afforded to do assumption testing. 

In fast-paced environments, PMs are often under intense pressure to keep moving, releasing new features as quickly as possible to hit output targets. There’s a constant push to deliver more, faster, and this often means skipping critical steps like assumption testing.

The urgency to “just ship it” can overshadow the importance of validating the assumptions behind a feature or solution. The mindset becomes about checking boxes, rather than checking the data. With so many stakeholders breathing down the neck of the Product Team, it’s easy to fall into the trap of prioritizing speed over evidence. 

The fear of slowing down and delaying deliverables can create a false sense of efficiency, leaving assumptions unchecked and untested.

It’s important to recognize that assumption testing doesn’t have to be a lengthy process. In fact, it can save time in the long run by preventing teams from getting too far down a path that may not work. But it requires a shift in mindset. 

You need to go from output to outcome. Instead of focusing on output – pumping out features – it’s critical to focus on outcomes. Assumption testing isn’t about slowing down, but rather about ensuring that what’s being built will actually deliver the results that matter.

Stakeholders don’t want you to test assumptions

Assumption testing is so important, but not every stakeholder in your organization is going to know that. This can lead to a lot of outside pressure for you to skip this stage and get cracking with building the product. 

This puts you in a tricky situation. You know deep down that you should be validating assumptions, but you could be seen as a timewaster if you suggest doing it. That’s why many Product Teams simply don’t. 

This is a mindset that you’re going to have to challenge as a Product Manager if you want to ensure your future product development meets the mark. So how do you make the case for assumption testing? 

Easy; show them the evidence of why ignoring assumption testing is a bad idea. 

There are two ways to do this:

1. Bring up past mistakes 

If you’ve ignored assumption testing before and it backfired, bring that up the next time you’re asked to ignore it again. Say you’ve made a costly mistake where a stakeholder with shiny object syndrome wanted a new feature out and was sure that customers would want it, only for it to be shipped and not get the feature adoption the stakeholder wanted – talk about that. 

You’ll strengthen your argument if you can quantify it with hard numbers. Something like: That effort cost us $90,000 in development hours and marketing spend that we could have saved if we ran assumption testing to find out that it wasn’t the feature customers were after. 

That leads us to option number two:

2. Appeal to return on investment

Stakeholders might want things done quickly, but the most important thing is getting a return on investment in your efforts. They want to see that the money going into an initiative is being turned into a financial return. 

They don’t want to see that money being wasted because an assumption wasn’t checked. You can point that out, highlighting that you don’t know what the return on investment is expected to be. By testing assumptions, you could prove how valuable the idea is, or even find something that’s even more valuable – all by testing assumptions and validating product ideas. This will prevent you from going ahead and making costly mistakes.

Both these points boil down to speaking your stakeholder’s language, an essential tactic when learning how to say no to stakeholders. Find out more on how to calculate the ROI of risk-reduction activities like assumption testing in our free eBook: How to Prove the ROI of Product Management.

Turning guesswork into truths

Assumption testing is key to strengthening your solutions and gives you the clarity needed to prioritize new features and ideas based on solid, fact-driven insights. By testing assumptions, whether you find them to be true or false, you position yourself to make more informed decisions – ones that align with customer needs, business goals, and what’s realistically achievable.

If you discover an assumption doesn’t hold up, you can pivot and explore alternatives that are more likely to succeed. On the other hand, if the assumption proves accurate, you can confidently move forward with your plan.

At its core, assumption testing is about backing up your ideas with real data, helping you refine your product strategy. It’s a critical part of data-driven Product Management. Much like validation and prioritization, it ensures that the choices you make are focused on what truly impacts your product’s success. In fact, the insights you gain from assumption testing can directly inform how you prioritize features, ensuring that what you build aligns with both customer needs and business objectives.

With the assumptions in your solutions tested, you can properly prioritize them to work out which initiative has the greatest value. Learn more about the different ways you can tackle prioritization in our Product Managers Guide to Prioritization Frameworks.

The post Mastering Assumption Testing in Product Management appeared first on ProdPad.

What is customer feedback?

Customer feedback is any information, good or bad, that you receive about the quality of your products or services from the people paying money to use them.

Sometimes you’ll find it really easy to get feedback from customers – especially when you’re doing things badly. People are naturally more inclined to leave negative reviews than positive ones. In fact, people are 1.7 times more likely to give feedback following a bad experience than a ‘normal’ one.

So, if something’s really broken, you’ll probably already know about it thanks to some vocal, unhappy customers. 

But here’s the thing: collecting customer feedback that’s negitive is actually a golden opportunity. It’s ironclad proof that something isn’t working; it removes assumptions and shows you exactly what needs to change.

Why collecting customer feedback is so important?

Nobody likes criticism, so it’s tempting to steer clear of willingly soliciting negative feedback. But living in a bubble won’t help your product grow and evolve, and not listening to your customers is a surefire way to frustrate them. You may be passionate about your product, and think it’s the best thing since sliced bread, but you still need to be open to feedback to inform product decisions.

Besides, customers want to be heard, and they trust each other more than they trust you. SurveyMonkey found that some 91% of people feel that product innovation should come as a result of listening to customers, versus just 31% who think a team of in-house experts can achieve the same thing.

And you know what else? Any customer feedback you did manage to gather is a powerful indicator of the feedback you didn’t. A recent ThinkJar survey found that only one in 26 customers will voice their complaints; the rest will just up and leave without so much as a murmur, increasing customer churn.

That means that for every negative piece of customer feedback you manage to collect, 25 other people feel the same but have already moved on to a competitor, without telling you why. Talk about being ghosted. Working on the feedback you do have can help increase customer retention.

Oh, and another added bonus to sending out those survey questions: if customer feedback is filled with really positive experiences, then you can use what people write as testimonials, both on your site’s product page and in your social media activity.

How should you be collecting customer feedback online?

It’s never been easier to understand what people think about your products and services, and it’s never been more important to understand what your customer experience is really like. You need to know what people are thinking if you’re going to have an effective customer feedback strategy.

Here are the top 10 digitally-focussed ways to collect customer feedback:

1. In-app popups
2. in-app feedback widget
3. Customer feedback surveys
4. Customer feedback portal
5. Review sites
6. Live chat
7. Social media
8. Heatmaps
9. Product adoption analytics
10. Be easily contactable

1. In-app popups

If you have customers working within the confines of your tool, you have a captive audience that you can occasionally prod for feedback. A pop-up window in your product – perhaps set to appear after customers have been using it for a certain number of days – is an effective method for collecting customer feedback and can be used to ask them for many different types of responses.

You might ask for:

• Direct ratings out of five or ten
• Qualitative “tell us what you think” feedback
• Reviews on relevant app store pages
• A Customer Effort Score
• For them to give you a customer satisfaction score

Just remember not to bug people too much; with great power, comes great responsibility. You don’t want to end up getting bad feedback about how you collect customer feedback.

2. In-app widget

One top trick is to make it as easy as possible for your users to provide you with their feedback. By including an in-app button that your users can seamlessly use to tell you what they’re thinking, you make it more likely that they will. You can even encourage increased engagement by offering incentives to customers, and thanks to the added convenience you’ll be collecting more valuable and actionable feedback.

You’ll get real-time information about issues as soon as they occur, which means you can get on with fixing them sooner, and avoid more unhappy customers reporting the same issue.

So many tools out there can help you do this, but we recommend you try using ProdPad to collect your customer feedback. Our in-app widget works hand in hand with our customer feedback portal (more on those below), and together they’re seamless and convenient.

They’re also fully customizable. You can adjust them to fit your branding, increasing trust and credibility with your customers, and providing a more cohesive user experience. It’s a great way to see how well certain parts of your app feed into your overall understanding of your customer satisfaction levels. The widget’s also a smart replacement for live chat if you don’t have the staff to make that work.

3. Customer feedback surveys

There are loads of online survey providers out there, from paid services like SurveyMonkey, or Typeform to free resources like Google Forms. Most are incredibly customizable and easy to use, and they all collate feedback in one place for easy analysis – or let you export it into other formats.

Remember to keep surveys relatively short. Unless you’re offering an incentive like money off a subscription or a prize giveaway, customers will soon tire of filling out questions and are likely to stop answering with any care or accuracy if things drag on.

When collecting product feedback in this way, It’s a good idea to try mixing multiple-choice questions with a few longer-form open-ended question text fields, as well as asking the industry-standard NPS and CSAT questions.

Customer survey responses, whether you use a tool or send out a simple email survey, are a great way to get quantitative feedback and qualitative data about customer satisfaction. Perfect if you want to dig in right in and see how your customers really feel about your product.

4. Customer feedback portal

Having a branded customer feedback portal on your website means your customers can come and ask for features they want and give customer opinions about the ones they’ve been using. This’ll give your product team a clear understanding of what the people who use your product want you to build next, and what needs fixing.

This is an invaluable way to get some good use out of the customer feedback you’re collecting, to close the customer feedback loop, and to make sure that you’re building things that will boost customer loyalty.

Using something like ProdPad means you’re not just housing a feedback form on your website. We already mentioned that ProdPad has a customizable feedback portal, but it’s more than just that. You’ll also be collecting those feature requests into a place that helps you to do something useful with them.

You can link specific pieces of feedback directly into your Ideas in your ProdPad backlog, providing valuable insights on which features or fixes your customer base actually wants. That makes it much easier to prioritize the best thing to build that’ll improve your user experience.

You can link specific pieces of feedback directly into your Ideas in your ProdPad backlog, providing valuable insights on which features or fixes your customer base actually wants. That makes it much easier to prioritize the best thing to build that’ll improve your user experience.

5. Review sites

According to eMarketer, a Bizrate Insights survey showed that a massive 98% of buyers scour online reviews before making a purchase. Like, that’s pretty much everyone.

So, it’s important to know what those customer reviews are saying about you online. That way you can fix any common customer concerns and reply to any particularly aggrieved users. In fact, there’s a solid argument to be made for replying to every single review you find, whether it’s good or bad.

The best way to keep on top of reviews on third-party sites is to employ a listening suite that can scour everything from reviews to tweets and aggregate them for you. The best customer experience management suites can collate this with feedback from any other source you can think of, and suggest actions and next steps.

If you work in SaaS in particular, you’ll be no stranger to sites like G2. Generating positive reviews there is a great way to get yourself some of those oh-so-recognizable badges. They’re a wonderful way to show that your product gets so much positive feedback that your customers love you enough to leave you a glowing review. 

6. Live chat

Live chat is a great way to answer customer questions and queries instantly, and it doesn’t require them to hang around on the phone because follow-up replies can happen throughout the day. Even better, live chat can also become a powerful feedback engine.

The end of every live chat is an opportunity to ask for the customer’s opinion for quick feedback – and not just about how their customer support query went. You can take the chance to ask them if they’d be willing to provide a quick review of your product or give insight into what they do or don’t like about it.

As with any method of collecting customer feedback, not everyone will bother. But if you automate the ask, you lose nothing and stand to gain a ton of valuable opinions.

7. Social media

According to Sprout Social, 47% of customers with a complaint to air will do so on social media. If almost half of your negative feedback is plastered over Facebook and Twitter, it pays to be on the lookout for it. Social listening tools (like Sprout Social) can do this for you, while also flagging priority messages that need to be actioned first.

But you can be proactive, too. Why not occasionally run polls in Tweets or Instagram Stories? Or explicitly ask people what they’d like to see in future updates? You’d be surprised how many great ideas and keen advisors there are out there.

The response rate on social media platforms is a real draw too: it’s virtually instantaneous and easy for your customers to leave. You’ll likely be amazed by how much information you gather, especially if you have a large audience on your social media channels. Just ask Wendy’s.

So remember – social media isn’t all eccentric billionaires and cats playing pianos. It’s actually a wonderful way to get direct feedback from an online community of super-engaged people!

8. Heatmaps

Heatmapping technology is a pretty technical way to understand how people are using your product, though it can also pick out any issues they might be facing with it – even ones they might not be able to articulate themselves.

By embedding tools like Smartlook into your product, you can get an aggregate view of customer behavior, be it how they’re scrolling, clicking, and navigating your pages. One valuable insight you’ll get from using a heat mapping tool is seeing something in the user flow that you might not have picked up before the feature went live,

For example, you might see that your users are rage-clicking in a particular place, or bouncing when you don’t expect them to. Then, when you look into it a bit further, you might realize that a pop-up is blocking the next action, or that your CTA copy is misleading.

The catch here is that you can’t see an individual customer journey, and understanding what it all means requires a bit of lateral thinking.

9. Product analytics

Like heatmap tools, product analytics suites are platforms that monitor usage across your entire product. They can track a whole heap of product adoption metrics with feature-level granularity, making them a passive method of collecting customer feedback that doesn’t bother the user for input.

Let’s say you’ve released a new feature in the latest version of your product. Product analytics suites can look at metrics like feature adoption rate, time-to-first-action, and active users, to help you figure out if that new tool is landing how you’d like.

Product analytics tools can be really comprehensive and give you real-time feedback, but they also suffer from the same major drawback as any analytics suite: you need someone who knows how to interpret data in order to derive actionable insight. After all, generating a bunch of stats around product adoption is great for morale, but what’s even better is the ability to learn as much from those metrics as you would from a piece of written feedback.

We’ve actually got a breakdown of the 7 best product analytics suites right here to save you the trouble of searching them down yourself.

10. Be easily contactable!

How many times have you had to dive several clicks deep into a website to find actual contact details for a company? It’s infuriating, right? So, don’t do that. Have multiple direct channels open for feedback.

The humble email is still an excellent way to garner feedback from  customers, so don’t make it difficult for them to reach you.

Have a good long think about how quick and easy it is for users to send you an email. Maybe there should be a button in plain sight somewhere in the product itself? Or perhaps an email link in the footer of your website?

We’d advise cutting down on the required form fields, and maybe even using a dropdown list for possible topics, which are then delivered to separate inboxes.

How should you be collecting customer feedback in person?

While we do of course live in a digital age, there’s no better way to be sure of getting some feedback than having your customers there in the room with you.

Here are some of the best ways to collect some direct user feedback:

1. Customer Interviews
2. Focus groups
3. Customer advisory board
4. User testing sessions

1. Customer Interviews

Interviews are a fantastic way to get deeper insights and qualitative feedback into what your customers are thinking and feeling about your product. Start by carefully choosing a diverse mix of users, ensuring you hear from different perspectives. Flexibility in scheduling and creating a comfortable environment (be it in-person or online) is important if you want to encourage people to engage.

You’ll need to have skilled interviewers who can steer the conversation effectively, ask open-ended questions, and really listen, encouraging interviewees to share detailed experiences and ideas. And after your one-on-one interviews, make sure to send a heartfelt “thank you” and follow up to close the customer feedback loop! It’s more than just good manners; it’s about showing appreciation for their valuable time and thoughts, and building an even more personal connection between them and your product.

Sometimes, you might want to ask follow-up questions for more clarity, but only if they’re comfortable with it. This follow-up can shed more light on the initial feedback, adding even more value to what you’ve learned. Either way, dive into the data from these interviews, looking for patterns, pain points, and other golden nuggets to build out your user stories. Then, it’s all about turning these insights into action.

2. Focus groups

In a similar vein to interviews, focus groups can be goldmines for getting diverse, in-depth customer feedback, by bringing together a small group of people from different backgrounds and walks of life to talk about your product. It’s fascinating how a mix of perspectives can shed light on things you might not have considered, like customer expectations and needs.

Again, make sure to have a skilled moderator to lead the discussion. They’re like the conductor of an orchestra, ensuring everyone’s voice is heard and keeping the conversation flowing and on point.

Preparation is key to getting the most from the process. Set clear goals for what you want to learn from each group. It’s not just a casual chat; you’ll need to have specific topics and questions in mind to steer the conversation. But there’s always room for spontaneity – sometimes the most unexpected insights come from just letting the conversation take its own course.

Try to create a comfortable and inviting atmosphere. You want your participants to open up, share their honest thoughts, and interact with each other. That’s where the magic happens – when people start bouncing ideas off each other, so it can help to use icebreakers to lighten the mood and get everyone talking.

3. Customer Advisory Board

Your Customer Advisory Board (CAB) is like the Small Council from Game of Thrones, made up of your most engaged and influential customers from various customer segments. These members should be hand-picked for their diverse experiences and deep understanding of the market. The idea is to keep this group tight-knit, usually around 10-15 members, to foster meaningful discussions and easy management.

CAB meetings are like regular check-ins, usually happening every quarter or so. Again, you should always be clear about what you want to get out of these sessions – it could be anything from detailed feedback on a new feature to strategies for tackling market changes. The key is to have structured agendas but also leave room for open, candid conversations.

These sessions aren’t just about you talking at your customer base. It’s a two-way street, giving you space to dive into problem-solving, and tapping into the diverse expertise of your board members. Their unique perspectives often lead you to innovative solutions you might not have considered otherwise.

Post-meeting, don’t just pat yourself on the back and call it a day though. Follow up with a summary of what was discussed and the action points you plan to tackle. This follow-through is the whole point. It shows your CAB members that their input isn’t just valued, it’s instrumental. And, by implementing their feedback, you’re not just fine-tuning your product; you’re building a partnership with some of your most valuable customers.

4. User testing sessions

User testing sessions make for great reality checks. Bring in people who represent your actual users – you’ll want some that are already customers, and some that might be potential users. The goal is to see your product through their eyes.

It’s all about understanding how your product fits into their daily lives. By creating realistic scenarios for them to work through in a beta test, you get a window into how intuitive and user-friendly your product really is. After all, you probably know your product inside and out, which means you’re probably not a good judge of how new or less experienced users approach it.

Note where they stumble, what makes them pause, and when those wow moments crop up. It’s a fascinating process and can be super informative. Encourage them to think out loud as they navigate, giving you a peek into their thought process. This fresh, immediate feedback is gold – it’s raw and often points out things you might not have noticed with your burden of product knowledge.

Next, sift through it all, looking for patterns and key takeaways, then turn these into action points for your product team. It’s an ongoing cycle – test, learn, improve, and test again. And again we make sure to loop back with our participants, showing them how their input is shaping our product. It’s not just about finding flaws; it’s about constantly evolving and making our product the best it can be for those who use it.

What should you do next after collecting customer feedback?

Ok, so you’ve got ears and eyes all over collecting customer feedback, and you’re running feedback sessions and interviews. If what you’re hearing is positive, you proudly display what’s been said on your website as customer testimonials, and share it with your team as a morale boost. But… what if it’s negative?

Well, that’s when you act. Don’t get mad, get fixing! You need to take what people are saying and turn it into improvements where you make informed decisions that positively impact every customer – not just the ones giving feedback.

Let’s look at a few examples:

“I like what the product does but it’s too pricey for me in the long term.”

If this is a one-off criticism, you might be able to take it with a pinch of salt. But if this is coming from a handful of customers, you need to think about your product pricing strategy. Maybe you can offer a stripped-back freemium tier or a student rate. You could do worse than use this feedback as a jumping-off point to run a focus group on pricing.

“Too complicated. The app has way too much going on.”

You’ve got navigation issues. Sometimes what seems obvious to the team making the product seems alien and confusing to outsiders, and it can be difficult to see the wood for the trees. It would be worth combining this written feedback with some technical insight via eye-tracking software to see how people are navigating your app. Alongside this, why not workshop a more user-friendly set of tutorial screens, and look to improve your product onboarding?

“Crashes all the time.”

Red alert! Even one user claiming that your product is unstable should be enough to launch a full-scale QA investigation. If your product crashes regularly you need to find out what the variables are, and whether it’s a specific browser, chipset, or OS that’s rubbing up against your architecture the wrong way.

What’s crucial is that this becomes a cyclical process. You should be collecting customer feedback as often as humanly possible without it becoming a burden on your target audience.

The aim of the game is to collect feedback and opinions, act on what you learn, and then ask again. If you’re receiving fewer customer complaints about that issue, you can move on to a different priority on the product roadmap.

Developing a product is an infinitely long process, and customer feedback plays a vital role when it comes to closing experience gaps that you might otherwise miss.

And once you’ve used your new feedback-fu, and identified those experience gaps? It’s time to update your roadmap so that the whole team knows what needs to be tackled Now, Next, and Later.ong process, and customer feedback plays a vital role when it comes to closing experience gaps that you might otherwise miss.

And once you’ve used your new feedback-fu, and identified those experience gaps? It’s time to update your roadmap so that the whole team knows what needs to be tackled Now, Next, and Later. 

Top tips for collecting customer feedback

Finally, before we leave you to go listen really hard to your customers to find out exactly how to make them happy, here are a few final ideas to help you nail your feedback loop:

1. Timing is everything: Request feedback following all customer interactions or at relevant moments. Avoid times when it might be intrusive or irrelevant.
2. Incentivize responses: Offering rewards or incentives can help to increase response rates.
3. Target a diverse audience: Ensure you’re gathering feedback from a wide range of users to avoid biased insights. Consider different user types, demographics, and levels of engagement with your product.
4. Context is king: Choose the right medium (in-app, email, social media) based on the context and nature of the feedback you’re seeking.
5. Keep it short and simple: Lengthy surveys or complicated feedback mechanisms can deter users. Aim for clarity and brevity.
6. Acknowledge and act: Show users that their feedback is valued by acknowledging their contributions and, where feasible, implementing changes based on their input.
7. Continuous process: Regularly update your feedback mechanisms and keep the process ongoing, adapting to changes in user behavior and preferences.
8. Privacy and transparency: Assure users of their privacy and be transparent about how their feedback will be used.
9. Respond quickly to feedback: Reply swiftly to feedback, especially if it’s negative. This shows customers that their opinions are valued and taken seriously, and can turn a negative experience into a positive one.

Learning from your customers

Collecting customer feedback is one of the best ways to understand how your product is performing and if it’s meeting the pain points of your users. So, go forth, intrepid feedback hoovers! 

Unleash the power of your newfound knowledge, engage with your customers in meaningful ways, and turn their customer complaints and praise into the golden keys that unlock the potential of your product.

And to manage all that juicy feedback, use ProdPad’s Feedback Management feature. Track all customer suggestions and use our innovative tool to find reoccurring, and highly valuable feedback to help you prioritize upcoming features and make better product decisions. 

Find out for yourself just how useful ProdPad’s Feedback Management is by playing around in our interactive Sandbox.

The post Collecting Customer Feedback in 2025 appeared first on ProdPad.

Conferences put you face-to-face with the leading experts in the field, keeping you educated with seminar talks, hands-on workshops, and even one-on-one mentoring. 

Plus, conferences can also be a great place to network and be the first to know about any new product releases in the industry. 

As a product person, UX is super important. It informs your product design decisions and keeps your skills sharp so that you can implement UX best practices into your process and improve human-computer interaction. Sure, you can read Product Management newsletters that address the topic, but there’s no better way to immerse yourself in UX than by attending some of the best UX conferences. 

This year, you’re spoilt for choice, with there being so many great UX conferences around the world. Here’s just a selection of what we at ProdPad think are the best options this year, and what we’re keeping a close eye on.

1. UX Brighton

UX Brighton is a firm favorite of ours here at ProdPad. Not only is it right on our doorstep in the quirky yet creative coastal city of Brighton, but it’s also always crammed with amazing speakers and valuable insights. 

At this year’s annual gathering, the focus of UX Brighton turns to economics, exploring how UX is changing due to AI, budget constraints in many industries, and more. In the conference, you’ll be able to explore the principles you’ll need to follow to thrive in a changing landscape and come out of it a better UX designer or Product Manager. 

The one-day event at UX Brighton has always been a platform for some of the best, most influential speakers in design and UX. Want a taste of what’s in store? You can check out my own talk at UX Brighton from back in 2022.

2. Leading Design

Leading Design brings together and helps connect lead designers from some of the highest-performing prodct teams in the world. This conference is designed for senior designers, focusing more on product strategy and techniques to help you grow and scale a product team.

Leading Design has gotten so big that it can’t be contained in just a single conference. In London, you’ll experience an event catered to networking and conversation, while New York will have a more prominent AI focus – which makes sense as the technology becomes more and more vital. 

Catering for UX designers and Product Managers from across either side of the pond, Leading Design is a fantastic destination. 

Many other UX conferences tend to be broad, with talks focused on multiple aspects of the role. Design Lead is much more focused, with topics curated on what you care about, perfect for those who want to hone on improving their skills as a lead designer.

3. UX360 Research Global Summit

Want to experience a UX conference from the comfort of your own home? Not keen on forking out on travel and accommodation? Then UX360 may be the conference for you. 

UX360 Research is one of the most popular digital-only UX conferences, attracting thousands of participants from all over the globe. This year, you’ll be able to hear from over 25 of the top UX speakers, including Kathryn Campbell, Director of User Research at Warner Music Group. 

What’s awesome about UX360 Research is that you’ll be able to learn from real-life case studies and examples from multiple industries, letting you see how design principles are put into action. Plus, you’re also able to attend 1-2-1 meetings with industry experts to get you inspired by UX design.

4. Design Matters

For thought-provoking and interactive panel discussions and lightning talks on important issues in design, there’s no better alternative than Design Matters. Each year, the conference organizers collaborate to devise interesting and relevant themes to focus on, giving the conference a curated feel. 

This year, after deep discussion with ex-speakers and a board of independent experts, Design Matters will be tackling themes on stepping forward and out of your comfort zone into a leadership role, the need to reflect on the ‘why’ behind your work, and how to re-skill for AI and other technology that’s taking over UX. 

Speakers include Anneli Hansson, founder of Brand Rebels for Good and designer with over 20 years of experience, plus Eason Yang, a leading designer and educator focused on ethical issues in design.

5. Ax-con

When building new products and tools, they need to be accessible to all for them to be a success. Axe-con is a conference that helps you better understand the importance of accessible product design while giving you the tools to create amazing digital experiences for everyone.

Created by Deque, the Axe-con conference is the leading conference focused on creating accessible products for all. It has a focus on designing your UX with all users in mind, helping to push UX forward in a direction that values accessibility and to break down barriers between product. 

Axe-con is the largest online event of its kind, boasting 35,000 registrants and 75 expert speakers, all ready to equip you with knowledge on how to design with accessibility in mind. It’s an entirely virtual conference, meaning you’re able to attend regardless of timezone and location. 

In the 2025, three-day event, talks will focus on accessibility in development and design, and how to succeed as an organization while championing accessibility.

6. UX Nordic

Enjoy two UX stages, a host of optional fun activities, and various interactive workshops at UX Nordic, one of the biggest UX conferences in Europe.

From Directors of Product Design at Microsoft, Dragons Den investors (the European version of Shark Tank), and UX Managers aplenty, there are plenty of big hitters to learn from at UX Nordic.

UX Nordic is part of a wider, larger international event of Future Product Days, so you may be tempted to attend this double-header if you’re also keen on learning about e-commerce and digital products as a whole.

With a UX Nordic ticket, you also get access to additional stages and inspiring talks focused on AI and wider Product Management. All this in one ticket makes it a super valuable UX conference to check out. 

Plus, there’s also a trance concert with DJ Thode, if that’s your thing.

7. UXinsight Festival

UXinsight is a highly focused UX conference, honing in on UXR (UX research). Less stress is put on how to make amazing designs, but more on the tools and techniques you should follow that influence your product design decisions. 

UXinsight Festival is the 9th edition of this event, making it one of the longest-running UX conferences you can go it. That shows as the event is polished and well-organized, attracting exciting international speakers. 

UXinsight is unapologetically customized for UX researchers, with people in those roles making up the majority of those who attend. If you want to get better at the research part or are keen to network with industry peers, this event located in cozy Leiden is a great option.

8. Config by Figma

Config is Figma’s annual event focused on design. If you don’t know what Figma is, are you even a UX designer? Figma is a massive player in product design and for many, it is the go-to product design software for a lot of UX professionals. So, Config is often a pretty big deal. 

At this year’s conference in San Francisco, you’ll be able to hear from the world’s best product builders, sharing their practical insights on the future of design and product development. 

The conference will have a heavy Figma spin to everything, so keep that in mind. A major part of the conference is about connecting with other Figma users and learning how to best leverage the tool for your product design. 

And of course, this conference is also a great place to be the first to learn about new Figma products and features hitting the market.

9. UXDX Conference

UXDX is perhaps one of the most diverse UX design conferences on this year, with talks on a wide range of topics. Although there are many talks focused on user research and other aspects of design work, you can also get interesting and actionable insights into broader Product Management topics.

With UXDX, you’ve got another choice of where you want to attend, based on what’s easiest (or more exciting) for you. Plus, you can also access expert keynotes and content online, making it a good UX conference to engage with. 

Of course, the experience will be different depending on where you go. Over at UXDX USA in New York, you can expect talks about advancing your career, empowering your Product Teams, and designing for business impact, from senior leaders at companies like Uber, IBM, CapitalOne, and The New York Times. 

Plus, UXDX’s own founder Rory Madden has multiple taks at the event, making him a key voice to keep an eye on. 

As for the Berlin edition, that is still being finalized but you can expect a full agenda of exciting talks from leading Product and design experts.

10. Insight Out Conference

Emanating from one of the major design hubs in the world, San Francisco, Insight Out is an annual conference for people obsessed with customer experience. In this two-day event, you’ll have get a deep dive about how to improve the user experience with your product design and uncover the technology and tools available to help you do that. 

Organized by Dovetail, a customer insight hub, Insight Out connects you with 15 speakers from industry-leading companies. Plus, by attending their workshop day, you can gain Dovetail certification, equipping you with a new skill to enhance your product design capabilities. 

With workshops for beginners and experts, it’s a great conference for you to advance your professional development and leave with more experience in your role.

11. DDX San Diego

DDX is a UX conference put together by the fine folk at Fresh Form. For 2025, the overall theme of the one-day event will be exploring where digital innovation meets impact. Here, you’ll get a deeper understanding of how your UX can become outcome-driven.

But what kind of speakers can you expect at DDX? Well, past conferences have been graced by Product leaders at Microsoft, Google, Indeed, EA, and loads more. The talks at DDX will help you gain a better understanding of what’s needed to improve your leadership and communication, while also detailing the best methodologies and processes to solve product design problems. 

You’ll also be flooded with inspiration from real-world case studies, to see how to apply those methodologies in a realistic setting. As a hybrid event, there’s no excuse not to go.

The DDX conference is also a good place to learn and explore new job opportunities, as it has an emphasis on growth. You may walk in as a UX designer or Product Manager, but what will you walk out as?

12. Pixel Pioneers

Listen, UX conferences are very useful and great experiences, but many are pretty expensive, and can price out UX designers from smaller businesses from attending. Pixel Pioneers is an option for those in the UK looking for something cheaper, that’s still quality. 

Pixel Pioneers tours the UK, with this year’s edition located in Bristol, perhaps one of the most creative cities in Britain. Here you’ll get loads of actionable insight for not only UX designers but front-end developers who are making those designs a reality. 

Pixel Pioneers want to help you make better websites and digital products. All their conferences feature a line-up of exceptional speakers, and welcome industry professionals from household names, so you’ll be in good company.

13. Advancing Research 2025

Advancing Research 2025 is another great option for UX designers looking for a conference focused on UX research. And, unlike UXinisight, this is an entirely online event, meaning that you can attend no matter where in the world you are. 

Advancing Research is created by Rosenfeld, who believes that UX research is the driving force for building successful products. In this year’s conference, speakers will discuss the need for UX researchers to evolve and adapt to new technology and to leverage the tools that are built for the future. 

Speakers include Robin Beers of Wells Fargo, and Robert Fabicant, a UX specialist with over 25 years of experience working for clients like Nike, GE, and UNICEF.

Why should you attend UX conferences?

So you know about all the great UX conferences happening this year – but why go? Well, there are plenty of reasons. 

Innovation and inspiration galore

UX conferences are hubs of creativity and innovation, buzzing with fresh ideas and cutting-edge concepts. They’re always pretty immersive and that really helps you to break away from your day-to-day and get some space to think – dare I say it – ‘outside the box’.

With workshops, presentations, and interactive sessions led by industry leaders from product roles, you’re bound to leave with a brain full to the brim with innovative strategies and approaches for you to implement in your product.

Your network is your net worth

Rubbing shoulders with industry leaders, seasoned professionals, and like-minded peers can open doors you didn’t even know existed. UX conferences are a great place to make some sweet connections that could help you build your professional network, and even find potential collaborators for your next big project… or even a side hustle or two.

Stay up-to-date with the latest trends

UX never stops moving, and new technologies and trends emerge at a rapid pace. Attending UX conferences will keep you updated on the latest tools, techniques, and methodologies that are shaping the user experience landscape.

From AI-driven interfaces to immersive virtual reality experiences, you’ll get a comprehensive overview of what’s hot and what’s not in the world of UX.

Skilling up

With a plethora of workshops, masterclasses, and hands-on training sessions, UX conferences are a great place to sharpen up those skillz.

Whether you’re looking to polish your design skills, improve your understanding of user behavior, or learn about ethical product design, you can often join a specialized session or workshop on whatever interests you most.

UX conferences: insightful by design

There’s nothing quite like the energy of a room filled with passionate and like-minded UX designers who get their kicks out of creating exceptional user experiences. These are the people you want to network with and learn from. 

As a product person, education is one of the main ways to improve and get better. And being a better Product Manager helps you create better products. 

At ProdPad, we get that. Our Product Management tool is filled with helpful prompts, best practices, and frameworks built-in to ensure you’re operating at your best. Plus, with our AI integration designed for Product Managers, you’ve got a product coach in the palm of your hands, ready to help you learn and improve. 

Our tool improves your Product Management process. Check out our interactive Sandbox to sample what you can do with ProdPad.

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