The product manager’s guide to proactive risk management

How to mitigate product risk from building the wrong thing, poor technical planning, and bad process

Get product risk under control.

We have a saying in product development, "If everything is fine, you just don't know what's wrong." Technology alone can introduce a heavy burden of ambiguity. Combined with a fragile market, shifting sponsor priorities, and the proverbial need for ducks in a row quickly extend beyond what human planning can easily encompass. Risk can't completely be avoided (and the rewards wouldn't be as sweet), but we've worked to systemically define and track a set of metrics that will help you avoid fatal failures. Offense is the best defense when it comes to risk management in product development.

Generally speaking, obstacles fall into the following three risk categories:

  1. Product viability: the risk of building the wrong thing

  2. Technical feasibility and quality: the risk of poor technical planning

  3. Evergreen delivery: the risk of bad process

Proactive management of product risks will allow your teams to build useful, usable, maintainable, stable, and predictable products, further sharpening their abilities to respond to market needs. Download the white paper to access a comprehensive framework to help your product team strategically monitor, intercept, and resolve risks for all types of product development work.

Product-centric funding: Incentivize business outcomes

Product-centric funding: Incentivize business outcomes

Play video