3 Product Questions

Building a product requires considering (and brutally triaging) an enormous number of potential enhancements. Deciding how to advance a technical product is hard, especially in the face of context switching and decision fatigue. Diving deeply into every prospective enhancement would completely drain a team’s resources, both in terms of time and energy for making decisions.

To help wrangle this chaos, I like to use 3 questions for initial prioritization. These questions are designed to view product decisions from multiple perspectives, and in combination help to triangulate the best way forward. There isn’t a magic book you can read that will teach you to make the right product choices, but these 3 questions provide a framework to start from.

I think of it as analogous to picking out fruit at the grocery store — you can’t (legally) taste every single orange at Whole Foods, but you can inspect their color, squeeze them, or maybe even smell them to quickly decide which are worth trying. Similarly, a few quick questions can help steer you towards the juiciest product direction with minimal effort.

Will we lose (or win) a customer if we don’t make this enhancement?

Generally speaking, customers use a product for only a few central needs.
Enhancements that meet these needs are the stars of the show; all others are extras. If customers’ core needs are met well they’ll generally be happy advocates, but if there’s a critical gap they’ll never buy, or at best churn quickly.

This first question aims to establish whether the issue at hand — say, a functionality gap or an annoyance in a common workflow — is so critical that it would actually gain or lose a reasonable customer. This approaches the product decision from the angle of highest impact, and can surface several key factors:

• Is a feature ultra-important, or a nice-to-have?
• If we build a feature, will we compromise the core product for other customers?
• Is a product request really the full story, or just the tip of a deeper, more fundamental need?
• And finally — is this the best place to be spending our time and effort right now?

Establishing whether or not an enhancement will gain or lose a customer is a key step when triaging — without this, you risk chasing a lot of rabbits down a lot of holes.

What’s the minimum valuable solution?

All else being equal, it’s better to have a simpler product. Simple products are easier to use, and easier to understand. Unfortunately, “all else” is not even remotely equal — a product that is minimal to the point that it lacks key functionality is worthless, and you don’t get paid for not delivering value. In particular, many products (especially enterprise B2B products) have a strong tidal pull towards adding more features and complexity.

When considering a customer need, I like to conceptualize the ideal minimum valuable solution that would fully solve the problem. Many ideas that sound great in isolation look crazy in the context of a complex platform, and this question aims to cut scope as aggressively as feasible. Envisioning a minimal solution helps to refine your goals, and is a key step towards determining whether potential enhancements are worth the risk of added clutter.

What does this product look like in ten years?

This question views the product through the lens of longterm product strategy. Many customer requests lead to solutions that are fundamentally band-aids, trading a weaker foundation for short-term gains. There isn’t a universal right answer for every given question, but I like to frame decisions in terms of longterm solutions, even if they aren’t feasible or necessary right now.

Most importantly, this question encourages you to create a mental path from where your product stands today to where it should be years from now. It reframes the enhancement under consideration in terms of whether it’s on that road or not — enhancements that follow the right path are great, but ones that diverge from it are dangerous as they both jeopardize product coherence and also back you into a corner, even if they might be the right choice for now.

Conclusion

Hopefully this simple framework is helpful. None of these heuristics are hard and fast rules, but in an environment where we’re making dozens of decisions per day, these questions have been valuable as both an efficient orienting process and a quick shared language.