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Change Management

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Products change. Changes can be driven by customer feedback, data collected, stakeholders, and more. In any case, Product Managers should expect changes with all projects. It is the reason why having a process for change requests is essential.

What’s an RFC?

A Request For Change (or “RFC”) is a proposal outlining the details of a change requested by stakeholders and explaining the impact of the change on the product and the development timeline.

When to Raise an RFC?

The Product Manager should raise RFCs every time a stakeholder asks for a feature or a change that was not part of the original work scope.

How to Raise an RFC?

  1. Create a new RFC document using the Notion template,
  2. Set the RFC number (simply increment by 1 from the previous one, starting at 1),
  3. Fill in all the details (or as much as possible),
  4. Send the RFC to the stakeholder(s) via email.

For closed-scope projects, a client representative must sign the RFC before anything else. Until then, the Product Manager must not act upon the change request.

The Product Manager can then proceed with the specifications work, create user stories, and schedule the change. The Engineering team can start development as per the schedule.

All user stories stemming from an RFC must be labeled rfc-<rfc_number>