The E3 Product Framework

Introducing the how for the why and the what.

Introducing the E3 Product Framework, where established vision and strategy becomes tactical plans to produce compelling features for your business and customers. Comprising three integral elements - Envision, Empower, and Elevate - the E3 Framework provides an iterative roadmap to product management teams, leading the way from a mere idea to an operational feature on your digital platforms. By fostering a shared language, the E3 Framework enhances unified comprehension among product teams and collaborators, fostering synergy throughout the product life cycle.

Let's glance over each section from a broad perspective, observe examples that demonstrate the application of specific framework elements, and to delve deeper into the core of the framework you can pick up a copy of “Product Protege Guide: The Art of Product Management for E-Commerce and Beyond” on Amazon this week!

Envision

This portion of the framework is where product managers dream and craft visions for their products. The Envision stage is about probing customer needs, exploring market prospects, and chiseling out a product that resolves a real problem in a unique and compelling manner. It’s about loftiness of dreams anchored in reality.

In this stage, you'll engage with your customers, uncover their challenges, and visualize how your product can alleviate these issues. You're curating a solution built on market research, competitive analysis, and customer input. Once equipped with these insights, you'll design a persuasive pitch deck that aligns the problem and corresponding solution with your product vision and strategy. This alignment guides your stakeholders and team towards the goals of a particular feature and the calculated risks you hope to undertake. Prioritization is crucial here. Either due to resource constraints or insufficient value proposition, not all ideas make it past this stage and this is a common product management occurrence and completely fine.

Empower

The Empower stage breathes life into your vision. As a product manager, you are the catalyst that drives the team to materialize the product. This involves the creation of comprehensive epics and user stories that elaborate on the proposed development. The stage necessitates answering queries, spearheading efficient grooming sessions, closely collaborating with UX design and engineering teams, and ensuring the product's quality as imagined.

Empowerment is also about nurturing a culture of collaboration and transparency. You become the connector between different collaborators, aligning everyone around the common vision, and encouraging each team member to contribute their best towards the product's success. Embracing the 'fail fast, learn quickly' mentality is an asset, allowing you to concentrate resources on promising avenues. This approach will ultimately benefit your customers, business, and team.

Elevate

The Elevate stage is where your product ascends. As a product manager, your responsibility does not end with the product launch; it revolves around continuous monitoring of the product's performance, garnering feedback, and refining the product based on gathered data.

The Elevate stage involves tough decisions about whether to iterate, pivot, or retire features or products based on performance metrics and user feedback. It’s about ceaselessly augmenting your product's value for the customer and the business. It’s about maintaining a focused and open communication with your stakeholders, allowing them to grasp the shared successes, failures, and subsequent learnings to enhance their understanding of the business. At this stage, you should be primed to release the product, but remember, misalignment in the previous stages can result in costly products that make it this far but don't reach production.

Having this overview roadmap of how to bring the why and the what to life is not only beneficial for a single product manager; but to also share with your product team. Cohesive and repeatable approaches to bringing product to life no matter which product management team is engaging is critical for repeat success because now your co-creators know exactly what to expect each time a product manager on the team wants to utilize their expertise to bring products to life.

If you want to learn more about the E3 Product Framework, pick up a copy of “Product Protege Guide, The Art of Product Management for E-Commerce and Beyond”