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Your calendar is full of meetings when you're in the product development world. As tedious as they may feel, many of those meetings are important for your organization. At the executive level, you may be required to give approval on a new product or additional funding or provide feedback on a product in development.
One meeting to consider carefully is the product review meeting. While it may seem like just another meeting on the calendar, this meeting is important for your product teams. These sessions are their chance to scrutinize the product to catch problems and opportunities for improvement before launching to the market. Your organization's product review meetings are important for success. Here's what you need to know about product review meetings, when to hold them, and why you need them.
When to Hold Product Review Meetings
Your product management team should hold product review meetings when it makes sense for your organization. The cadence will differ between organizations and even within large companies making multiple product lines. For example, if your company develops software, your product teams will meet more frequently than product teams at a car manufacturer.
What Is the Value of a Product Review Session?
Each meeting should have an agenda and a purpose to keep the session focused and everyone on the same page. A meeting agenda is especially helpful in product review sessions to help keep everyone focused on the customer's perspective.
The point is to evaluate the product's performance, usability, and value for money from the customer's point of view. It can be easy for meeting participants to insert their own opinions and observations, forgetting the customer experience. With an agenda, the stakeholders can be reminded to reframe their input.
In addition to looking at a product from the perspective of the customer, here are other ways that product review meetings contribute value to the product development process.
A Chance to Analyze Your Priorities
Product review meetings are a great time to hold discussions and establish priorities for improving the product definition in the next iteration. The feedback from the product review should include ideas to consider, prioritize, and abandon altogether.
Ensures Quality Control in Your Products
These meetings are also an opportunity to review and assess the quality of a product along with its performance. These sessions provide a venue to identify defects, concerns, or areas that need improvement. All product stakeholders want to ensure that only high-quality products reach their customers.
Facilitates Gathering Feedback
Well-run product review meetings are the best opportunity to gather feedback on the product from a variety of stakeholders. This feedback can be used to make necessary improvements, inform feature selections, and fix any shortcomings, resulting in a better product to launch.
Helps Maintain Alignment
Product review meetings help ensure that the product's development aligns with the initial goals and objectives. It's an opportunity to check if the product is on track to meet customer needs while supporting business objectives.
Supports Risk Management
By regularly reviewing the product's development, teams can identify and address potential risks and challenges early on. With a flexible product roadmap, product managers can make crucial changes and adjustments before launching the product iteration. This proactive approach can prevent costly errors and delays down the line.
Strengthens Communication
Gathering different stakeholders together for product review meetings facilitates cross-functional collaborations. Rather than managing long email threads, combining documents, and completing extra paperwork, having everyone in the same meeting room (virtual or physical) and looking at the same information in real-time ensures that everyone is on the same page and working toward a common goal.
Facilitates Decision-Making
Product review meetings provide a forum for critical decision-making about a product's future. Whether it's deciding on additional features, release dates, or market strategies, these meetings bring together informed opinions to reach the right solutions.
Three Reasons to Hold Regular Product Review Sessions
The product review sessions are packed full of value when organized with intention and purpose. Here are three more reasons to hold regular sessions for your development team's benefit.
Reason #1: Provide Accountability
Scheduling a product review meeting gives development teams a deadline to meet and holds them accountable for their tasks. When your product collaborators have a mechanism for accountability, it helps keep them motivated and ensures the project stays on schedule.
Reason #2: Keep the Focus on the Customer
Product review meetings often involve discussing customer feedback and evolving needs. Holding regular meetings maintains the customer-centric approach and helps managers continuously tailor the product to customer needs and wants.
Reason #3: Create Consistent Improvement
Meeting and collaborating on a regular basis to analyze the product and assess its performance creates a culture of continuous improvement. By reviewing and reflecting on the product at various stages of development, teams can continually refine both the product and its processes and practices.
Running an Effective Product Review Session
There are steps product managers can take to run an effective product review session. As an attendee, there are also ways you can contribute to the success of the meeting. When both arrive prepared, everyone will get the most value out of the product review session.
Be Ready for the Meeting
The most effective product review meetings happen when attendees show up prepared. That means knowing what products are up for discussion and a general sense of what needs to be analyzed helps your stakeholders arrive in the right frame of mind.
Have a Scoring Alignment to Review and Assess
When product reviewers are asked for their opinions without any guidelines, the feedback you gain may be all over the map. One way to keep everyone focused on the same measures is to provide a scoring alignment to review and assess the product and its features.
Look at the Roadmap for Issues or Anomalies
Having the product roadmap visible during the meeting gives everyone the same real-time information. With Gocious product roadmap management software, we make it easy to present information on each product in a product line to any audience. Simply customize the dashboard view to show the details that are most relevant. You can even make plans to solve issues and prioritize the next features directly in the software to save time and reduce confusion after the meeting.
Keep Documentation
These meetings often involve documentation of decisions, feedback, and action items. This documentation can serve as a valuable resource for future reference and as a record of the product's development history.
The Tool You Need for Product Review Meetings
Product review meetings play a crucial role in ensuring that a product remains on track, meets quality standards, and aligns with customer and business needs. They are a key component of the product development process, fostering collaboration, accountability, and a commitment to continuous improvement. Gocious product roadmapping software makes facilitating your meetings easier. Schedule your free demo to see how it can work for your product review sessions.