Building a Product Thinking Organization

At Versett, our team is built on the philosophy of “Learn Better, Faster”. As part of our continuous effort to enhance how we work on projects, one of the concepts that we have been developing is ‘Product Thinking’. This has become somewhat of a buzzword in tech. But there doesn’t seem to be a shared, global definition of what Product Thinking is, so we tried to clearly define what it means. I’ll go over our internal definition, the ways we have incorporated product thinking into our working model, and a few strategies for educating both internal and external teams on the value of it.

What exactly is Product Thinking?

Product thinking is an overarching term that we use to describe product-defining activities. This requires taking a multi-level view of a problem. You need to consider the holistic nature of products while consistently reminding yourself of the “Why?”.

When deep into execution, it’s often challenging to remind ourselves why we are on our current path and whether we are still doing the right thing. So it is helpful to ask questions like:

• Is this decision going to make the product better for the user?
• Do people really need this feature?
• How will people find out about this product?
• Why is this product better than what already exists?

Product thinking requires taking a multi-level view of a problem, and consistently reminding yourself of the “why”.

Product Thinking is a team sport

It requires commitment, dedication, and involvement from all members of the team. Each team member should take full ownership of the product they are working on. At Versett, our team is organized into three high-level disciplines: Product, Design and Engineering. Product thinking impacts each of these disciplines in different ways.

• Product managers should think about what’s best for the product as a whole, not just the project.
• Engineers should think about how they will measure the usage and success of each feature they develop.
• Designers should think about how a user will find and interact with a feature they are designing.

Particularly, we adopted a few strategies to build our product thinking muscles:

• We take a multidisciplinary approach to building products. We always try to incorporate thinking from other domains. We don’t always need to reinvent the wheel — the answers might already be out there.
• We work iteratively and try to fix things based on feedback, data, and analytics. We constantly ask ourselves, “What’s an experiment that will move us in the right direction?”. We constantly measure our progress, either through analytics or user research, and then pivot our efforts based on findings.
• We consider the business and user points of view simultaneously by having a strategic lens and considering both perspectives to answer: Why are we building this product? Are we solving the right problem? Are we solving it for the right people?

It’s a journey, not a destination

Effectively implementing product thinking initiatives requires support, commitment, and a shared understanding with regards to its definition, benefits, and strategies. Listening to a presentation or reading this article will not make anyone a product thinker. At Versett, we encourage and empower our team members to just keep practicing. We constantly remind and challenge one another. We are all still learning and continuously improving, but we put together a few strategies that we have found helpful.

• We ran our entire team through an “Intro to Product Thinking” workshop, collected their feedback and incorporated them into our definition to make sure everybody across the board is on the same page when talking about product thinking.
• We included this introduction in our onboarding resources for new hires.
• In the future, we plan to include the same material in our client onboarding resources too, to help build a shared vocabulary and way of thinking.
• We communicate and share knowledge regularly. The key to a successful product thinking initiative is being open about it across the organization. We talk about it during our weekly meetings and we share related resources with the broader team.

Do you practice product thinking in your organization? Have you used any other strategies to integrate product thinking into your working model? We would love to have a conversation and learn more. Leave a comment below!

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