Product thinking: The art of creating value for users
Why product thinking is essential for success
Product thinking is a crucial skill for product managers, designers and engineers. As someone who has pivoted from a software developer to a UX designer to a product manager, I know for sure that it’s one of the key dimensions of assessment in your interviews, sometimes also known as “product sense”.
But what exactly is product thinking? 🧐
Product thinking is a mindset and approach that prioritises the needs and experiences of end users when designing and building products. It’s about researching and gathering insights about their goals, and obstacles, and finding ways to help them overcome those obstacles and achieve their goals.
Product thinking can be applied to a wide range of products, including software, hardware, and physical goods. Product thinking also works for things and areas beyond building products, such as your career, fundraising, writing, team culture, hiring, presentations, and parenting.
Key elements of product thinking
- User-centred design: This means considering the needs, goals, and behaviours of the end user throughout the product development process. This can involve conducting user research, prototyping, and user testing to ensure that the product meets the needs of the target audience.
- Data-driven decision making: Product thinkers often rely on data to inform their decisions, such as analysing user feedback coming from user interviews, surveys and focus groups, identifying any existing solutions and how well they address the problem., and market trends. This helps them make informed decisions about what features to include and how to prioritise development efforts.
- Lean product development: Before building and launching a product, it’s important to validate that the solution will be effective and desired by the target audience. This involves iteratively building and testing prototypes to quickly gather feedback and refine the product before launching it. This can help product teams avoid building unnecessary features or investing in the wrong direction.
- Collaboration: It’s not just about the user — we must also consider the business goals and constraints of the product. Striking the right balance between user needs and business goals is crucial to creating a product that is both useful and successful. To be successful, we must be able to collaborate with cross-functional teams, such as design, engineering, and marketing. This helps ensure that all perspectives and expertise are considered when developing and launching a product.
- Continuous improvement: Product thinking doesn’t end once a product is launched. It’s a process of constantly learning, adapting, and iterating to create the best possible product for the user. This mindset helps ensure that products remain relevant and useful to users over time.
How is it different from project thinking
Product thinking is about understanding motivations, conceiving solutions, simulating their effects and picking a path based on the effect you want to create. Product thinking focuses on what & why, outcomes, effectiveness and creativity
Project thinking, on the other hand, is about understanding expectations, formulating plans, marshalling resources and coordinating actions to meet those expectations. Project thinking focuses on how & when, outputs, efficiency and discipline.
While both product thinking and project thinking involve some overlap in terms of planning and coordinating activities, the key difference is that product thinking is focused on the long-term success of a product, while project thinking is focused on the delivery of specific projects or initiatives.
How do you get proficient in product thinking 🧑🎓
Having known and worked with many exceptional product thinkers and leaders, there are many principles and lessons on product thinking that I have taken away so far in my PM career.
One key learning is that developing and honing product thinking skills requires training and practice. It cannot be achieved through shortcuts.
So how do you develop product thinking?
The two most important skills are empathy and creativity.
Building empathy
Empathy is a key aspect of product thinking. To excel at product thinking, we must be able to see the problem from the user’s perspective, paying particular attention to objections and friction points.
People with stronger product thinking are able to uncover unexpressed needs too, and eventually, come up with solutions that meet their needs in a unique and innovative way.
Improving your observation skills can help you build better empathy and in turn product thinking.
You can start by observing people and yourself while interacting with products and services in your day-to-day life, paying specific attention to micro details such as facial expressions and body language.
Look for moments when they are delighted, annoyed, or confused. When do they rave about the product? When do they complain?
Compare and contrast the same with your own experiences. Notice any differences or samesies.
Another effective way you can build empathy is by doing product teardowns.
This helps in going deeper in our understanding of a product as to why some products and experiences work for people, and why others don’t. Through this, you also come across common product design best practices.
A good way to do a product teardown is to pick up an app or a website or any product and ask yourself the following questions while you interact with it.
- What’s the experience of getting started or signing up?
- How does this app explain itself in the first minute?
- How easy to use was the app?
- How did you feel while exploring the app?
- Did the app deliver on your expectations?
- How does this app compare to other similar apps?
A quick run-through gives you a sense of whether the app provides value, is easy to use, and feels well crafted.
Frequent and close observation of people can provide insight into their motivations and needs, leading to an increase in empathy.
Creativity
Being able to think differently and able to come up with new ideas for how to address a particular situation or problem is an important aspect of product thinking. Many think that people are born creative. While this may be true in some cases, creativity is a skill that can be developed and improved upon with practice.
One of the best ways to improve your creative skills is to interact with people within your network who already have it.
Being around creative people, and bouncing ideas off them can expose you to new ideas and perspectives, which can help stimulate your own creativity.
Observe and take note of how great product thinkers in your organisation approach problems. This allows you to gain new insights and techniques that can help you become more creative yourself.
Domain knowledge is another powerful tool for enhancing creativity.
Having a deep understanding of a subject allows you to see connections and patterns that may not be apparent to someone who lacks that knowledge. It can help you identify new and creative ways to approach problems or challenges within that domain.
With a strong foundation of knowledge and expertise, you can also communicate your ideas in a clear and concise manner, which can be more convincing to others.
Key takeaways 🚀
- Product thinking is a mindset and approach to problem-solving where you focus on understanding your user’s needs, generate ideas and validate them and repeat until you converge on a solution that creates value for the user.
- The key difference between product and project thinking is that product thinking focuses on what & why, outcomes, effectiveness and creativity while project thinking focuses on how & when, outputs, efficiency and discipline.
- To become proficient in product thinking, focus on knowledge about your users, the competition and what they are doing, learn about emerging trends in technology, society, and regulations, and embrace creativity and differentiation.
Developing product thinking takes time and practice. Also, practising product thinking doesn’t necessarily guarantee product success. However, it helps in coming up with a better, well-informed hypothesis, instead of relying entirely on the gut. Something that also resonates with one of Amazon’s leadership principles.
“Good leaders are right a lot. You’re not going to be right all the time, but I think with practice, you can be right more often.”
You can read more about it in this tweet storm by Shreyas Doshi here:
Read more about how to do a product critique by Julie Zhuo, Former Product Design VP @ FB & Author of The Making of a Manager
