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How Product Managers Can Keep Product Compliance and Legal Happy

July 3, 2014

3 minute read

Product Management sits at the intersection of customer, technology and business. The product manager’s role is a continual balancing act between each of these areas, which means involving the right people, in the right ways, at the right times.

Compliance isn’t a concern for every product management team. But for manufacturers handling complex products in regulation-ridden markets, compliance and legal restrictions can be a major obstacle for new product releases. To avoid disruption, redesigns, and even product failure, product managers should look to consult compliance and legal teams as early as possible in the product validation process.

Open Communication

Good idea management requires communication input from many different sources. With departments like legal and compliance this might be irregular or limited to specific details, but the specialist information they hold could seal the fate of new product ideas. Using ProdPad you can extend collaboration to absolutely anyone in your organisation without having to integrate them as a fully fledged user. Tools like Google Single Sign-On and email integration mean that it’s easy to call on colleagues for advice whenever it’s relevant, using @mentions. Comments can be dropped directly onto idea canvases and design mockups, so that pertinent information to an idea is accessible to everyone in your team.

Product Compliance: Impact vs Effort

Judging whether a new product idea is feasible is dependent on the big picture. Value brought to the business needs to be set against the effort or risk involved across the entire product process, not just development resources. Taking what you’ve learnt from conversations with compliance and legal, you can make an educated guess of anticipated effort to take a new product idea through to launch and set that against the business case and estimated value. ProdPad allows you to do this for every new idea using various scales including an adjusted Fibonacci scale, all of which is plotted on a visualized priorities chart.

ProdPad priority chart

Specs from every angle

Build product specs that take every factor into account. An important part of preparing requirements that are 100% ready for engineers and designers is to note any compliance concerns. Providing this information from the start will help you to avoid do-overs further down the line. ProdPad idea canvases provide a comprehensive template for the data your development team needs, including technical specifications. And with two-way integrations between ProdPad and project management tools, your developers can follow links to get all details of legal and compliant regulations shared directly by these teams.

Fully Audited Processes

Some regulations require that product processes are completely audited. When you manage all conversations, user feedback and design iterations in one centralized platform no details are lost, keeping your compliance and legal teams happy without any extra workload.

If you’d like to chat to us about how you can make product management processes more compliant using ProdPad, get in touch here

And if you’re new to ProdPad, you can sign up for a free trial here

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