Questions that product manager should ask for all teams: Numerous responsibilities keep the product manager confused, specially the coordination between teams like, sales, engineering, leadership, support, and customers, tedious to be organized and confused to get prioritized. Product manager should have clarity about the topic to be discussed and the agenda should be clear enough to get the right points discussed in the meeting. Majority of the times more than 50% of the topics to be discussed are common. Set of well prepared questions would help to prioritize the topic.

Asking right questions will drive into the right direction to understand the state of the product and it’s performance. Irrelevant questions will drive into wrong direction. The way of asking questions and the subject of questions indicates the clarity and vision of the product manager.

Questions for sales

1. Is our product fulfilling the customer needs? What are the gaps between the features of our product and customer’s expectation?
2. What are the strong features which makes our product sellable?
3. Which existing features are less prioritized by customers?
4. Who are the competitors always getting compared by the customers?
5. What is the technology expectation from customers?
6. Out of 10, how many customers are expecting customizing our product?
7. How is usability? What is the customer experience and response about it?
8. What are top five common features expecting by majority of the customers which doesn’t exist in the current version?
9. What are the current trends following by the customers?
10. How many customers are not interested to take our product and why?
11. How many customers are interested buy the whole product and how many are interested to take the module/part of the product?
12. Is the customer happy for the value they are getting for the price?
13. How many of the existing customers are contacting sales for enhancements and customization?
14. What is the percentage of sales generating from our customer reference?
15. Do the newly added customers expect training? How long?

Questions for support

1. Can I have a consolidated report of customer escalated issues, bugs and suggestions?
2. Which part of the product has more complaints in terms of technology and functionality?
3. What is the rate of defects getting injected for every release?
4. Did any of the customers challenge the core functionality of the product?
5. How smooth is our installation process? How many customers are depending on customer support to install the product?
6. What are the technical challenges while plugging in our product into their existing system?
7. How many of the customers are using the most upgraded and latest version of applications? Does our application compatible for it?
8. How many of the customers are using older versions of the applications? Does our application supports it?
9. Who are the toughest customers to handle and what is their expectation?
10. Are you up to date with all of our latest features and functionality?

Questions for the engineering team

1. How complex is the feature to implement? If it is not feasible to implement why?
2. Does we have any architectural limitations to implement the features?
3. How robust if the current architecture?
4. What is the methodology you are using for effort estimation and capacity planning?
5. Are you preparing the design for each features which is being implemented?
6. Are you clear about the functionality to be implemented?
7. What is the additional information needed from my end a part from the feature functionality?
8. Are the user stories detailed enough to develop the feature?
9. Which core functionality would be impacted by implementing new features?
10. What could be the impact and effort estimation if we migrate the application into latest technologies?

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Narasimha Mohan

He is the Author, Product Specialist, Business Consultant, Entrepreneur, Public Speaker, Thought provoking writer, and Joke writer. Follow him on Twitter