Product Management Glossary

A pivot strategy is when someone in a leadership position decides to change things up and shift gears into a new strategic direction regarding the product or overall business.

Planning poker is a fun and effective way for software development teams to estimate the effort or complexity of tasks, especially in Agile environments. It helps avoid the biases and inconsistencies that can mess up…

A portfolio roadmap is a tool used by product managers and portfolio managers to visualize and communicate the strategic direction of a portfolio of products. It is a graphical representation that provides a high-level view…

A product is any component that requires a vision, strategy, objectives, and a set of outcomes for a team to reach. This could be the actual software of the physical products your company offers, or…

The Product Adoption Curve is a fundamental concept in marketing and product management that demonstrates how a new product or technology is accepted and adopted by the market over time.

Your product architecture serves as the blueprint of your product’s functional elements demonstrating how the pieces that make up your product interact and work together.

The backlog is a list of items your team may have decided to work on. In product management, it is often recommended that you break this up into a list of potential opportunities (the product…

Product design is the process of crafting a product from the ground up, focusing on solving user problems and providing a delightful user experience. This involves everything from the initial concept and defining the product's…

Product differentiation is what makes your product different from your competitors, both in terms of its characteristics, and the strategies you use to encourage and exploit those differences. Common methods include developing unique product features,…

Product discovery is all about validating your assumptions, identifying the user problems you want to solve, and exploring potential solutions. It’s an essential phase of the product development lifecycle, focusing on understanding user needs, market…

Product Experience (PX) is a concept used to refer to the entire, holistic interaction and relationship a user has with a product.

Product failure is when a product or service introduced into the market doesn’t achieve its intended objectives or fails to meet the performance standards and expectations set by the product team.

A product line in software development is a range of related products that are owned by one company and typically share a codebase, making for lower development costs, faster updates, and increased customer loyalty.

The Product Management lifecycle is a framework that details the different phases of work involved in managing a product through each stage of its development

The job of a product manager is to discover market problems, and then define what should be built within their product to solve these problems. Their goal is to improve outcomes for the people who…

Product mix is the term used to refer to the strategic choices, composition, market positioning, and product life cycle stages that make up the entire array of products and services a business offers. It represents…

Think of product onboarding as the warm welcome your new users get when they first interact with your product. It's the initial journey you guide them through, making sure they feel at home, understand the…

A product portfolio is the umbrella term used to describe a company’s entire collection of products. For a product portfolio to be considered successful, all the products within the portfolio must be profitable and aligned…

Product portfolio management (PPM) is the process of orchestrating, managing, and delivering a business’s strategy across its entire product line. It’s about ensuring all the products within the portfolio collectively drive profitability and align with…

A product qualified lead (PQL) is a potential customer whose possible intent to buy your product has been judged based on qualification criteria that relate to activities and behaviors they've displayed inside the product.

Requirements are a set of documents and processes needed to move an idea forward. It usually involves running discovery, analysis, and validation of an idea – then distilling that into specs that will help your…

A product requirements document (PRD) is usually written by a product manager and explains the purpose, requirements, specifications, and release of a product or feature you want to build. The document will serve as a…

A product roadmap is, above all, a communication tool. It is used to describe what you are working on, why you are working on it, and what the benefits of this work are. ProdPad CEO…

A Product Strategist is a role that focuses on developing the long-term vision of a product or product portfolio, making sure that it aligns with the overarching business goals of an organization.

Your product strategy is the path you will take to achieve your vision. Your strategy will often outline things like your target audience, what your objectives are, and even what marketing channels you will be…

Product velocity is a measure of how quickly a Product Team can bring an idea from concept to launch. It’s an indicator of how fast things move from the discovery to the launch phase of…

Your company’s product vision is the overall idea of what the organization should be and do, and how it fits within the market as a unique offering. Often set out by the founders, it will…

Product-market fit is the validation that your product fulfills a crucial need or solves a significant problem within its specific target market.

A proof of concept (PoC) is a mini experiment for your product – a smaller, focused test designed to validate a specific part of your solution. Instead of building everything at once, when making a…