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GETTING STARTED

Set up your first product: owner, health and objectives

Create a product, give it one owner and an honest health, and set the objectives it exists to move.

5 min readFor PMs

What you'll end up with

A product overview showing its owner, health, description and objectives, like Pulse Analytics in the demo.

The Pulse Analytics overview in the Meridian Labs demo.

Why it matters

A product is the home for everything your team does: objectives, milestones, epics, docs, risks and decisions. Setting it up properly takes five minutes and decides whether your roadmap and updates make sense later. Health is set by a person, not calculated, because numbers show progress but only people can judge whether it's on track.

Before you start

  • A workspace (see Create your workspace and invite your team)
  • A one-line description of what the product is for
  • One or two outcomes the product should move this quarter

Create the product

Your first product was created during setup. Follow these steps for each product after that.

  1. Open your department from the sidebar and go to Products.

  2. Press New product. Fill in Product name and Short description, for example "Pulse Analytics" and "Self-serve product analytics for internal teams", then press Create product.

  3. Open the product from the sidebar. It opens on its Overview.

Give it an owner and a health

  1. On the Overview, press Edit and set Product owner to the one person accountable for the product.

  2. Set Status to On Track, At Risk or Off Track. For anything other than On Track, add a line to Why is this status set?, then press Save.

    Status and Product owner on the product overview.

Add objectives and measures

Objectives say what the product should achieve. Measures say how you'll know.

  1. Go to Objectives and press New objective. Write the Objective as an outcome, for example "Every team can answer their own product questions", and choose an Owner.

  2. Press + Add measure and add one to three measures. For each, fill in Measured by, Baseline and Objective target, for example "Self-serve report adoption" with a target of 40%.

  3. Set the objective's confidence, then save.

    Objectives with their measures.

How it connects

Where the objective sits among the other records.

Troubleshooting

I can't see New product.

Products are created by department admins, from the department's Products page. The Products page in Settings lists products but doesn't create them. Ask a department admin or an Organisation Admin.

Should each team be its own product?

Make something a product when it has its own roadmap, its own owner and its own objectives. A team can own more than one product.

How many objectives should a product have?

One to three per quarter. More than that and none of them get real focus.

Next stepNext: Add milestones and break them into epicsTurn an objective into dated milestones, then split each milestone into epics your engineers can deliver.
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