2020 Product Awards Categories

The Product Awards celebrates award-winning tools for product managers across the stages of the product lifecycle: Conceive, Collaborate, Design, Build, and Operate. We have created categories with in each lifecycle stage – these categories are hand selected and outline a specific solution for that lifecycle stage. Without further ado, here are the 2020 Product Award categories! 

Product Stage: Conceive

Categories: 

1. Solve Market Problems: How do you understand the problem and the market you’re addressing. 
2. Explore Solutions: How do you explore potential solutions (as prototypes) and define what is “good enough”. 
3. Communicate Internally: How do you make the business case to your team, collect feedback, and refine your conception of the product. 
4. Build a Roadmap: How do you sequence the product and market segments, taking into account impact, effort, and competitive dynamics.

Product Stage: Collaborate

Categories: 

1. Listen to Customers: How do you collect, keep track of, organize, and communicate always-on customer insights to your product team.
2. Track Trends: How do you collect, keep track of, organize, and communicate broader trends in tech, business, and the economy.
3. Analyze Competition: How do you keep track of and analyze the competitive market you are in. 

Product Stage: Design

Categories: 

1. Capture User Pain Points: Tools that help you capture pain points and challenges in your user’s journey. These tools help in developing “how might we” statements.
2. Ideate on Solutions: Tools that help capture ideas, play crazy 8’s for potential ideas that will help address user pain points.
3. Collaborate Internally: Tools that allow for further collaboratively distilling ideas and fleshing them out in terms of actual output.
4. Share Prototypes: Tools that allow you to prototype, get feedback from users and stakeholders and allow for rapid iteration to prepare for development. 

Product Stage: Build

Categories: 

1. Execute Ideas: Assess how you’re doing against your plan, decide whether to make adjustments, communicate, and document the new plan.
2. Create It Yourself: These days engineers aren’t the only builders, tools where PMs are implementing part of the experience themselves.
3. Build Teams: Sourcing, connecting, assessing, closing and growing your team.
4. Establish Culture: Establishing norms and process and ensuring your team has all the tools and knowledge to succeed in your organization.

Product Stage: Operate

Categories: 

1. Organize Knowledge: Tools that help you ingest all the user insights and organize it in an actionable way.
2. Analyze Impacts: Tools that help you understand what your users are doing. 
3. Deploy Code: Tools that product managers use to understand technical problems, or help you deploy builds to various channels.
4. Connect Teams: Tools that connect your team together to communicate, or to automate the dissemination of information across your company.