Product Thinking: the most essential Product skill

Not restricted to Product Managers-only, Product Thinking is the one skill that helps you understand, analyse and build products with a more holistic and critical view.

You have probably read or heard one of the most famous phrases about Product Thinking if you have ever debated or searched something about this topic: “Product Thinking is problem solving”.

In fact, that statement is a great way to summarise what this crucial Product skill essentially is, but we need to break down many aspects of it to fully understand it and be able to train ourselves to actually develop this ability. Normally, most people — when thinking about a product — would first think about the solution itself and not who we are creating that solution for and the problem or pain we are trying to solve. That’s where Product Thinking comes.

A strong foundation is key to learning

Before diving into Product Thinking, there are some basic concepts and processes you should be familiar with to be able to understand, train and acquire the skill we are talking about. Some examples of important frameworks and methodologies you should know are:

• Design Thinking

Great Product people also have knowledge about business, design and tech; there’s one of the many reasons why Design Thinking becomes important to us. Whilst the name of this methodology might make you think it’s related to Design only, Design Thinking is more of an innovative and iterative way of thinking, approaching problems and solving them; it can be applied to anything and everything in your life.

We can divide the Design Thinking process in five stages: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. But it’s important to clarify that this approach is not linear, it’s rather an iterative process. That means we can go back to a certain stage even though we have already passed through it, it does not matter in which phase of the process we currently are.

The Empathize stage is where we understand the user, their needs and the problem we want to solve. This is the first and one of the most important stages of the Design Thinking process, specially because the use and the power of empathy is essential to it and is one of its biggest differentials.

The Define stage is where we gather all the information we learned in the Empathize stage and finally define our users and the problems we are going to solve. This is a decisive phase, because we need to think of everything we have found and choose the points we are actually going to work on.

The Ideate stage is where, given everything we have discovered and chose to work on before, we start to create possible and innovative solution ideas. It’s important to still use the power of empathy here and think outside of the box to innovate. This phase is also a huge brainstorming.

Still in the Ideate stage, we need to choose one of the solutions we thought of to be the product we are going to develop and its features, per example. However, we should always keep in mind that changes are a possibility and we must be open to them, specially in Agile teams, if we verify they are needed.

The Prototype stage is where we take our ideas off the paper and turn them into reality through a prototype. Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) are key in this stage, because we want to produce the simplest version possible of our product to be able to go to the next phase and test it.

The Test stage is where we test our prototype to validate our ideas with real users. It’s important to go through this stage knowing that it’s normal and crucial to change and readjust some things with the data and feedbacks we have gathered with the tests.

• Job to be done (JTBD)

Another important concept related to Product and Design is the Job to be done. This framework helps us understand the problem we want to solve and the user’s motivations to use our solution, since we are essentially solving problems when designing a product, as previously said.

As well as understanding the pain point, we need to understand what does the user need to do to overcome that obstacle to make a customer-centered product with a strong value proposition that actually attracts users and make them buy and stick to our product.

• Product Risks: The Four Big Risks

Even though building products is essentially solving problems, there are other obstacles we need to pay attention to in the process of designing a solution. In Marty Cagan’s book “Inspired”, we can get a hold of four big risks we need to think of: the value risk, the usability risk, the feasibility risk and the business viability risk.

• The value risk: will the users want our product? Will they actually buy it? Will they choose our product instead of one of our competitors? Do they have enough money to buy it? Or would they buy it for this amount of money?
• The usability risk: is our product easy and intuitive to use? Does it have a good UX? Does it have a good user onboarding?
• The feasibility risk: are we able to develop that product? Do we have the team, the budget, the tools, the knowledge and the time needed to do that?
• The business viability risk: is our product adequate to our business model and all the various aspects —such as stakeholders— of it?

Never forget those four risks when thinking of a product, specially when they can be the reason why your product fails when going to the market. According to the “Top 12 reasons why startups fail” by CB Insights, the four most common reasons why we see startups failing are, in order, ran out of cash/failed to raise new capital, no market need, go outcompeted & flawed business model. All of those reasons share relations to Marty Cagan’s big risks, so there you go with even more arguments to always keep them in mind.

• 5W1H

This tool is not only applied to the product field, but it is a useful way of understanding problems in-depth. All you need to do is answer six questions about the problem you are focusing on: What, Where, When, Who, Which & How.

Indeed, this is a valuable resource when it comes to product because it can give you — depending on how well you answer each question — many insights about important information and analysis you need before designing a solution, such as fully and deeply understanding the problem and who is our target (our clients or users).

How to master Product Thinking?

We are always in touch with many digital products, but it is not common for us to think about the job to be done, who exactly is the product directed to, what is it core value proposition, what was prioritized whilst that product was being built, what is the strategy behind it, what is its vision and many other important points that we should care about when designing a solution. Asking yourself those questions about products you use on your daily basis is a nice and simple exercise to start training your brain to develop Product Thinking. But the key to actually master that ability with this exercise is to answer those questions as well.

Furthermore, there are many free prompts and courses that help you create a product from scratch so you can learn and exercise your knowledge. One great example is the Product School’s Side Hustle for Product Managers course. The course guides you through crucial phases of product development — Ideation, Research, Development, Launch & Adjustments — with useful tools, content and lessons. This is just one of the various option the internet offers us nowadays to learn more about Product, but I decided to bring it to you because I have already took a look into some of Product School’s courses, including the one I have just recommended.

Without any doubt, one recommendation I cannot forget to give you is to read great books to improve your knowledge and give you valuable insights, such as Marty Cagan’s Inspired, Eric Ries’s Lean Startup, Nir Eyal’s Hooked and Carlos González’s The Product Book. Those are famous and well-written titles that you cannot leave out of your shelf or reading list.

Conclusion

In short, Product Thinking is a crucial skill to understand users, solve an important problem, develop great products and critically analyse the ones we use to sharpen our criticism and give us amazing insights. It is one of the key competences that makes us better professionals, specially when it comes to the Product field.

Lastly, to give you more food for thought, I will list a few topics you should read or study about if you are not yet familiar with them:

• Business Model Canvas
• Opportunity Solution Tree Framework
• MoSCoW Framework
• RICE Scoring and Framework
• INVEST principle (of User Stories)