The Product Master Plan is a living, evolving collection of information. It can include plans, documents, and other artifacts relevant to the product’s business.
Purpose: The document repository and its archives serve as a plan of record for current and future activities. This collection of plans and information for an institution is called the Master Plan. For the product manager, it is called the Product Master Plan. The content of the Product Master Plan serves as a mirror into the past, a bookmark for the product as it is currently situated, and as a roadmap to the future.
Note that the Product Master Plan is not the strategy. Many government development programs have a life span far beyond that of a single individual or administration, but the strategies may change with each election. So how do these projects and programs ever get completed? Obviously, long-range programs get completed because the previous administration not only did its homework but also captured that homework in a repository for the next officials to inherit. The content of that repository is what makes up their Master Plan. At the end of an implementation cycle (which could be a fiscal year), the Master Plan is updated, filed, and archived—never discarded. It needs to be available so that future generations of employees, residents, students, or historians—or anyone for that matter—can look back to see how the organization, institution, or municipality evolved over time. They can use it as a learning mechanism or as a way to communicate. They may even come back to it to implement some phases or activities that were never completed due to budget limitations, turnover, or unexpected changes in priorities.
THE FORMAT OF THE PRODUCT MASTER PLAN
The Product Master Plan represents the “must-have” platform to establish plans of record for a product organization and the cross-functional team driving product success.
An appropriate (proper and sufficient) amount of documentation for the planning, development, and management of a product is critical to the product team’s success. Notice the word appropriate; it is an important distinction. Having the appropriate amount of documentation helps to capture the product’s business goals, clarifies roles and responsibilities, and serves as an archive for the product across the life cycle. A Product Master Plan is the perfect holding document—the meta-archive or master control plan for any product.
Some of the key benefits of a Product Master Plan are as follows:
- It’s the perfect communication platform among cross-functional product team members because it serves as a standard way to capture their commitments, both to the team and to each other.
- It is the ideal archive for major product-related documents such as strategies, Business Cases, Marketing Plans, financial documents, and project plans.
- It can be constantly updated so that any team member can quickly sort out the current state of the product, which is especially useful for existing products.
- It is a learning mechanism for new product managers and other team members.
- It is a great continuity tool. Accumulated wisdom shouldn’t be ignored. With enough care, the Product Master Plan can act as this “tribal knowledge” from one “generation” of product managers to the next.
- It is a perfect tool to build a “community of practice” among product managers in your firm because it contains information about process usage and performance management and inspires organizational learning in general.