The most important pyramid in the world of product management

The “VMSPR”.

If you have spent any amount of time working on a product, either as a product manager, designer, analyst, or engineer you may have noticed that sometimes with some products, no matter how mature they are, something just seems to be missing.

Something that you cannot touch, feel, or see.

That invisible glue that holds the “great” products and product teams together even if they are less feature-packed and less successful. What could it be?

Well, I present to you one of the most important things that a product manager should ideally “own” apart from the user problems, roadmaps, etc. and that thing is Alignment.

In essence, alignment in this case is when all major stakeholders like design, analytics, engineering, QA, marketing, sales, content, etc. know and understand the answers to these simple questions:

• What is the problem/opportunity?
• Who are the users?
• How are we going to solve the problem?
• What makes our solution different/better than the competition?
• How do we know that the product is successful?

So, at this point you might be thinking —this is just dumb, definitely a lot of companies build tons of products without all this, what could go wrong?

Let’s look at few fun examples that could cost you or the company millions!

• Engineering — Product misalignment: You need to understand that the engineering team makes a lot of decisions behind the scenes in order to build what the “business” wants, most of these decision go unnoticed by the user or higher-up stakeholders. However, some of these decisions make up the “architecture” of the product, and down the road you could be limited by how the product can be manipulated without major changes to the technical stack.
• Marketing — Product misalignment: Let’s image that you are building a product that addresses a problem for a specific target segment of users. For example a social media platform for high school students. The marketing team decides to do their own research and they decide to target college students as well, because they know that college students are more interested in social media. Thousands of dollars poured into various campaigns, and as a result — negative marketing ROI. Why? Could it be because the feature set was specifically targeted at high schoolers?
• Content — Product misalignment: Imagine the same case as the one outlined above, with the social media app. Imagine that the content team needs to create templates for different types of posts that users can create on the platform. Once again, if they look at general social media audiences for inspiration you would have content that is not “targeted” at the segment that your product is targeted at, and could result in lower engagement with the templates, and impact post creation and consumption rates.

Of course the examples above are hypothetical, and exaggerated, however, the moral of the story is, if you add how much overhead each of these “tiny mishaps” can create down the road, you probably wouldn’t be very happy. The “lost” opportunity cost and very real actual money lost because of misalignment around the VMSPR (we’ll decipher this soon).

That is why you as a product manager should absolutely own this alignment, become the alignment manager, the invisible glue manager, become the glue.

Alright, but how exactly do you create alignment? Well, this is where the pyramid comes in, enter the “VMSPR” monstrosity.

1. Vision

What are you hoping to achieve in the future?

2. Mission

Why does the product exist?

3. Strategy

How are you going to achieve the Vision and the Mission?

4. Product Plans

What are the most important initiatives and the goals of this product?

5. Roadmap

What exactly do you need to build in order to get there?

Of course, each these points is a very broad topic of discussion, and requires a separate deep dive to understand the different types of strategies like Cost-oriented, Quality-oriented, or product plans and SMART goals, however, my goal in this article was to highlight how incredibly important this alignment can be, otherwise the pyramid might just crumble.

Be on top of things, own the pyramid, become the invisible glue.

Let me know what you think, do you see complete alignment as an important factor in product development? How do you achieve alignment?