Improve Product Strategy through Product Teardowns
A unique way to look at your problem space
A compelling Product Strategy outlines how to dominate the market for the target customer segment. As a Product Manager, you are constantly iterating over strategy and refining till you find a product-market fit. However, the process to identify what needs to be done and what to iterate over is not simple. Before we can figure out what we want to build for tomorrow, it is important to start with where we are today. One of the ways to understand where your product stands today is to do a collective exercise of Product Teardowns of your product and your competitors product.
What is Product Teardown ?
Product Teardown is a process to align all stakeholders to focus on the user pain points and go through the user journey with empathy (without bias) and understand how the product solves user pain points. It is a process to see if the features built are actually solving the pain points that they intended to solve. It is a process to understand a product’s current state.
It gives a collective understanding of the customer behavior , the market, identifies reasoning and assumptions behind product features built and scraped, identifies unfixed problems of the past and helps build foundation for what’s next.
The Process and Outcomes of a Product Teardown
Product teardown process can be collectively achieved over a period of time through dedicated research and understanding. Here is a quick framework for understanding the customer journey and building competitive benchmark.
- Identify the stakeholders for the product — Product Manager, UX & Engineers
- Identify the goal of the product (both yours and your competitors — direct and/or indirect )
- Identify different user personas and problems to go after (based on the product metrics)
- Identify features which solve this user pain point/problem and understand to what extend they solve them for each user persona (better done through numbers) and empathize with the user experience in the journey
- Identify how the feature has evolved over time and rationale behind product decisions
- Identify the customer journey of a competitor product and see how they solve for that problem as compared to your product.
At the end of this process, you would have a list of ways that work and don’t work for a customer problem for different user personas. Identify through prioritization frameworks what problems to solve and how to. Document the outcomes and present the findings to all stakeholders.
How to integrate Product teardown into Product strategy ?
Once you have completed a cycle of product teardown, you could replicate them for different user problems. With multiple such sessions, you can build a exhaustive list of user pain points and to what extend you solve them . This will then feed into your product strategy and help you build hypothesis of why you think certain problems need to be solved and the kind of solutions that will work.
By making product teardowns a quarterly process, you will be able to revisit product strategy and iterate it based on new information and continuously grow in a customer centric way. With constant focus on the problem space, you will be able to iterate and ensure product-market fit as you grow and build features with better depth thus ensuring a successful product strategy.
