The Product Manager is responsible for the overall directing and ongoing development of one or more products under their remit. They are ultimately responsible for gathering ideas and feedback, ensuring pitches are prepared and prioritised, and for handing prioritised pitches to the development team.
The Technical Director is responsible for ensuring that accepted pitches are well defined and contain enough information for development teams to implement them. They will also often be preparing their own pitches relating to products, especially around things like infrastructure, code quality, et cetera.
Project Managers are not directly involved in the product development cycle, but are responsible for the delivery of pitches within the same processes they use to deliver existing piece of client work.
Development Teams are likewise not directly involved in the product development cycle, but do work to implement pitches in the same way they currently deliver client work. That said, they are welcome to develop pitches for the products they are working on if they have a new idea or see a need for improvement.
Product development works on a six-week cadence (see Product Cycles).
At the start of each product cycle, the product development team gets together at Pitch Meetings to review and consider pitches for inclusion in the upcoming cycle, based on our known capacity for product work over the next two development cycles.
Approved pitches are prioritised, groomed, planned for and implemented within the existing development process, as for any other piece of client work.
Key to this process working is ensuring that pitches are carefully researched and refined, so that teams can easily pick them up in their development cycles. More detail on the lifecycle of a pitch is provided below.
Once pitches are in the development cycles, the author of the pitch takes over the role of the client for the external UAT phases. It's their approval that's needed to consider something ready for production release.
In parallel with the development work being done on approved pitches, during the product cycle the rest of the product development team is working on the development and refinement of future pitches and doing the work needed to bring previous pitches to market (like documentation and customer comms).
The bigger-picture direction of each product is captured on a high level Roadmap, which lives on its individual product page.
Anyone can write a pitch, for any product (although obviously it makes sense for the author to have some degree of familiarity with the product). There's no approval process and no one needs permission to get started, although it makes sense to run any big ideas past the relevant product manager as a sanity check.
It's anticipated that the majority of pitches will be put together by the product manager and/or the technical director.
Before a pitch can be approved for implementation, it must be fleshed out to the required level of detail. This involves: