Chris Stone, Chief Product Officer at Acquia spoke at the MassTLC Growth Conference on product management best practices and launching a product encore.

1. ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary
Products @ Acquia
Chris Stone, Chief Product Officer

2. ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary
Our plan is to invent some sort of
doohickey that everyone wants to
buy.
A "visionary" in a Dilbert cartoon strip
Source: Pragmatic Marketing Training Material

3. ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary
Alignment to the Pragmatic Framework
Product
Management
Product
Management

4. ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary
Key Tenets of Product Management
–Customer Focus
– PM owns the “customer problem” meaning, requirements are written in terms of what frustrates or creates
pain for the customer
– Requirements do not start with “I need”...it starts with “what frustrates me is…”
–Data Driven Decision Making
– Priorities are based on Urgency, Pervasiveness, Financial Impact, and Strategic Fit collected from
customer discussions and surveys
– Sales, PS, and customer support teams also provide input using the same framework
– Sense of Urgency & Ownership
– PMs are accountable for the growth of their products
– PMs help keep teams on path for immediate and incremental improvements vs. delayed perfection
– Collaborative leadership of the core team
– PMs lead and influence multidisciplinary core teams to be accountable for the business

5. ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary
Moving from 1 product to a “Portfolio” of Products
1. Align on a simple prioritization framework and standardize how you collect
and synthesize inputs for the framework
2. Ensure you have one individual responsible for the product’s business who
is responsible for the prioritization decisions
3. Align each PM to a solid program manager who can absorb complexity and
know how to focus people on forward progress and are good
communicators
4. Align PM to business growth goals and engineering and program
management to launch efficiency goals
5. Build scalable skills within field teams and prioritize and plan for GTM work
in the roadmap

6. ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary
Prioritization Framework
Engineering
Vectors
Dev Effort
Dev
Complexity
Business / Value Vectors: Urgency, Pervasiveness, Financial
Impact, Strategic FitLOW HIGH
LOW
HIGH
Strategic Vision
No Brainer
Why?
Utility
Typical distribution...
– Majority will be Utilities. No Brainers are rare. You WILL HAVE SOME
“Whys?”
– ...means you will spend a lot of time trying to get your products to be
stable, feature complete, and market accepted
– Whys are good candidates to combine with other Initiatives or Just NOT
BE WORKED ON

7. ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary
Repeat process 4 times a year for 4 launches
Launch Predictability
Launch Planning
Starts
7/15
D - 90
Publish Launch details with
“commits” to field teams
6/15
D-120
Review priorities with core
team and finalize launch
package including
engineering commits
7/15 - 10/14
Sprints - This is the dev, test, release phase
GTM - prepare docs, marketing and sales material, PS
enablement, and training
10/15
D-Day
Product Launch
Complete
Press Release + FAQs
+ User Stories
Dev + Launch Readiness
Launch
Day

8. ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary
Handoff to Engineering
1. Product Managers enter and prioritize roadmap in Aha!
2. Epics are pushed from Aha! to Jira
3. Program Managers create Launch plan that includes cross-functional
groups: Marketing, Finance (pricing), Enablement, etc. and tracks key
deliverables (Acceptance criteria, Beta plan, etc)
4. Agile - Product owners (Eng) break down the epics into stories and they
are scheduled for sprints (2 or 3 weeks)
5. Stories are coded and tested, and released

9. ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary
Success Measures & Monitoring
– Business Growth
–New Revenue, Total Revenue, NPS Score
– Release Velocity - Time to Value (scope to launch) measured in days
– For features tied directly to Revenue growth
– Product Quality
– # Bugs found within 30 days of launch & Service level objectives and error
budgets. You need a “Quality Score” - like NPS
– Team Morale
– Feeling of ownership & win satisfaction with combined focus on external forces

10. ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary
Dashboards
–Team enters data into Google Dashboard every Friday

11. ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary
Dashboards
–Information is extracted into Acquia Operational Metrics Dashboard and deck

12. ©2016 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary
Thank You!