Product proposal template
The team at Monzo, a British online bank, supercharges their product development process with thorough product proposals. Their template empowers them to tackle challenges head-on by defining underlying problems with data-driven precision and effectively prioritizing solutions.It encourages teams to get to the root of the problem by asking probing questions, prompting specific data, and addressing alternative approaches. By optimizing for success and thoroughly accounting for risks, Monzo's Product Proposal template empowers companies to make informed decisions that drive positive outcomes.
Product proposal template
What problem are you trying to solve?
- Introduce the problem statement here. This might be well-defined ('we need to tweak the parameter of a rule from X to Y to help reduce a certain type of abuse'), or more fuzzy ('we need to invest more in paying back technical debt').
- Focus on the underlying problem that needs to be solved, as opposed to jumping to how you will solve it.
Why should we solve it?
- Why is this an important problem for us to solve?
- Is it a big enough problem to solve?
- Should we solve it now, or later?
- Provide specific data (quantitative or qualitative) wherever possible.
How do you propose to solve it?
- Add details of your proposed change. This can be high-level as psuedo-code and sketches of the architecture, or as low-level as Protocol Buffer and interface definitions. Decide what the context of the proposal is, and write appropriately.
- Be explicit about what you are optimizing for in this proposed solution — for example, 'we need to hit this deadline, so we'll accept the tech debt this entails'.
What other approaches did you consider?
- In general, it's a red-flag if you haven't thought of a couple of different ways that you could approach the problem.
- What does your proposed solution give you that these approaches don't?
- What are they optimizing for that isn't appropriate in this case?
What could go wrong?
- What risks does your proposed change entail?
- How will you mitigate them?
- How could this system fail, and what would be the impact if it did?
The team at Monzo, a British online bank, supercharges their product development process with thorough product proposals. Their template empowers them to tackle challenges head-on by defining underlying problems with data-driven precision and effectively prioritizing solutions.It encourages teams to get to the root of the problem by asking probing questions, prompting specific data, and addressing alternative approaches. By optimizing for success and thoroughly accounting for risks, Monzo's Product Proposal template empowers companies to make informed decisions that drive positive outcomes.
