Building a Product Mindset? Things you can try!
Product mindset is not something which you can build overnight. In order to a be a true product person and to be a better one at it, is a continuous process. There’s a very famous saying which goes perfect in this, “Everyday is a new learning” and that is so true for every profession you’re in but for product that’s a must.
When we see product mindset, it is not necessary to be Product Management. Today, we can observe every successful engineer, designer, researcher, quality assurance need to have a product sense. I have observed if you are surrounded by people having product thinking, you become a better version of yourself and most important, your product becomes the best version for your customers.
So what exactly is Product Mindset?
You have seen engineers work on highly complex features. But if you have heard them ask questions like:
- Why are we building this feature?
- What is the impact of the feature we are planning to build?
- What could be the possible next version of this product? (so they can plan a better scalable architecture)
- How does this feature ease the lives of our customers?
then you are working in the organization with a product mindset among engineers. Same goes for other teams that you work with.
Product mindset is basically a “culture” where not just product managers but everyone in the organization contributes to making sure whatever they are building is a solid customer use-case along with being a business case. It is a thought process to drive the business goals by not letting it get affected by short term wins.
No single activity which is being done is done in vain or at the cost of anything that affects the business,customers, or product.
We have seen tons of examples where multiple teams work in silos. Design is focused on best design elements, engineering is focused on delivering projects faster, quality assurance on a bug free release, and so on. But in a product mindset driven organization, there are no silos, just one goal, one team and one purpose: Business, Customers, and Product.
This is all easier said than done!
In real world, every team has their own KRAs and they are mainly focused on delivering them in the best possible manner, if just one element is added to it, it’ll eventually be converted to a product mindset. That element is “no goal should be achieved at the cost of long term goals and every activity should contribute to business, customers, and product ”.
So, naturally the next question comes, how do someone build a product mindset?
Product Mindset, How do I build one?
Well, generally, there are a few things which one can follow in order to start developing a product mindset. Here are a few of my favorite ones.
Evaluate every product as if it is your own!
This is my most favorite technique. Whatever product you use in your daily life or any product you come across randomly, evaluate it or think or it like this is the product you work on.
Put yourself in the executives’, business decision makers’, customer’s (or user, which you are) shoes and try to understand why did they build it. How are they monetizing it, what could be the business case, what problems the product solves, why is this specific feature built, how does this ease the lives of people using it and ask a 100 more questions to yourself.
Try to understand the objectives and answers to the questions. Expand your thought process and apply the learnings to the actual product you’re working on at the moment. See what all cases fit in. And see how good and diverse ideas you might come across.
Rain Check: While doing this exercise, you might come across 99% of the cases where you’ll not be able to fit this in the business you’re in. Make sure to keep that thought in check. Since it never is one shoe fits all.
Read, read, and read
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” ― Dr. Seuss,
You are your best teacher. So, keep reading a lot of books, articles, blog posts, news articles, whatever good you come across. Follow some people who have honest and factual opinions about diverse stuff. Consume healthy information and apply this to your business, product, and customers’ problems. It’ll help you develop opinions, evaluate multiple sides to one particular topic, and widen your horizon to think.
Subscribe to a few good websites and authors regularly follow them. Evaluate their thinking methodology and decide for yourself, what is the best.
Rain Check: There is a lot of false information over the internet these days. Make sure whatever you consume is from a reliable source.
Ask a lot of questions, to yourself and to others
There are a lot of people around you. Always be curious. If you are a designer, ask the questions. If you are an engineer, ask the questions. If you are a researcher, ask the questions. Ask a lot of questions, don’t hesitate.
If someone throws you a problem, ask why we need to solve it? What would be the impact? Is it even worth solving? How does this align with the larger business goals? There are a tons of mercenaries around, don’t be a one. Think like a missionary, act like a missionary.
Don’t just ask questions to others, don’t be afraid to ask yourself too. If you come across a problem, start first by asking questions to yourself. Keep asking until you are reaching to the atomic reasons of the problem because that’s where the answer lies. That’s thinking from the first principles which is a very important skill to build a product mindset.
Rain check: Always make sure you ask the questions at the right time, else this could also turn out to be a bottleneck.
Don’t forget to evaluate risks in every step you take
Whatever project you are working on, take a step back and evaluate the risks. Make sure you are able to cover as many as risks you can.
Could this somehow impact my business negatively? Could this cause a decline in my customer experience? Am I seeing a metric that could change for worse due to this change? Ask questions, evaluate risks and do a second order thinking in every step you take.
Rain Check: Don’t let the risks be your bottleneck. It is always good to evaluate and take corrective actions/precautions but don’t let it cripple your thinking process.
Product mindset is not a culture one can develop by just saying it out loud. One day your CEO comes and says to implement it, you can not! You need to gradually incorporate this in your daily life, in your thought process and also need to make sure people around you also follow it. It is a cultural change, which could take days, weeks, months to be inculcated in one’s thought process. But once done, it could bear results which will help a business thrive like anything else. So what are you waiting for?
