TALE: Perspectives on Product Engagement (v1.0)

Published in

TALE500

10 min readMar 2, 2023

Theory-based Reflection

In the past two weeks, I worked on a new series of possible themes to connect my theoretical approaches with Product-centered Business Development.

Today I’d like to edit a possible book as a summary of my articles on these themes.

4 Parts
29 articles
Total 613 min read
Total 162,445 words (about 325 single-spaced pages)

Product-centered Business Development

Business is a large field of social practice, I only focus on Product-centered Business Development activity.

It is more about Startups, Founders, Products, User Experience, Design, Creativity, Ideas, etc. It is less about Enterprise, Management, Venture Capital (VC), Initial Public Offering (IPO), Merger and Acquisition (M&A), Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), etc.

These two are two different worlds.

In fact, I worked in the second world from 2001 to 2008. I have over twenty years of work experience which can be divided into three stages: the creative stage, the strategic stage, and the innovative stage. During the creative stage (before 2001), I worked for the advertising and media industry as a creative copywriter and designer. At the strategic stage (from 2001 to 2008), I worked for pre-IPO stage enterprises as a business strategist and fundraising consultant. At the innovative stage (after 2008), I worked on making brand-new digital tools and platforms as a researcher and designer.

Before 2014, I spent most of my spare time on digital nonprofit communities as a digital activist. From 2014 to 2015, I transformed my focus from nonprofit activities to theoretical learning. Since then, I have been spending most of my spare time learning ecological psychology, creativity research, and other related subjects.

2014–2020: Ecological Psychology and Creativity Research
2014–2018: Action Science, Activity Theory, and Cognitive Science
2018–2019: Practice Theory, HCI, Strategy and Work
2020: Social Theory, Social Media, Information Systems and Platform

The journey of connecting THEORY and PRACTICE is so amazing! Eventually, I wrote 18 books (drafts) from 2018 to 2022.

This year, I decided to return to the field of business. The Series “Product Engagement” is the new beginning.

The above themes are about Business, Products, Services, Ideas, Language, Founders, and Teams. I also adopted several theoretical approaches to reflect on these themes. The outcome is amazing! I made a series of new frameworks.

These frameworks are intermediate knowledge frameworks that aim to bridge theoretical approaches and domain practices.

The process of making intermediate knowledge is a typical activity of Theory-based Reflection.

Approaches, Perspectives, and Frameworks

If we use the Knowledge Discovery Canvas to reflect on the short journey of “Product Engagement”, we see a path in the diagram below.

For the Knowledge Discovery Canvas, I use “Approaches” and “Perspectives” for two blocks. What’s the difference between these two terms?

I use “Approaches” to refer to Theoretical Approaches.
I use “Perspectives” to refer to both Theoretical Perspectives and Practice Perspectives.

Theoretical approaches and Theoretical perspectives are the same things. For example, I mentioned the ecological approach in D as Diagramming: The Mind as Play Metaphor.

However, some knowledge projects are not about developing theoretical approaches but applying theoretical approaches to some domains. During the process of application, we can develop practical perspectives from theoretical approaches.

For example, Activity Theory is an established theoretical approach, I only selected “Mediating Instrument” as a practical perspective for the D as Diagramming project. See the diagram below.

Each theoretical approach could generate a set of perspectives. For discussing diagrams, I selected Mediating Instrument as a practical perspective. Though Mediating Instrument is adopted from Activity Theory, other social practice theories also emphasize the importance of Materials in human activity and social practices. Scholars even use the Materiality Turn to describe this trend.

I adopt the Mediating Instrument perspective to discuss the diagramming practice and highlight four essential issues for discussion.

Mean v.s. End
Past v.s. Present
Part v.s. Whole
Ambiguity v.s. Precision

Some issues are inspired by Activity Theory, other issues are defined by the “Diagram—Thought” curating practice. You can find more details here.

For the “Product Engagement” project, there are three major theoretical approaches:

The Ecological Practice Approach (inspired by Ecological Psychology)
The Project Engagement Approach (inspired by Activity Theory)
Ferdinand de Saussure’s Structural Linguistics

The theme of “Product Engagement” indicates a new creative space for connecting THEORY and PRACTICE.

In the past two weeks, I adopted 18 frameworks I made in the past years to the creative space.

The HERO U Framework
The Value Engagement Framework
The Project Engagement Toolkit (v1.0)
Cultural Projection Analysis
The ARCH Framework
The Project Network Framework
The Supportive Cycle Model (v1.0)
The Platform Genidentity Framework
The Attachance Framework
The SET Framework
The Lifesystem Framework
The Concept-fit Framework
The Anticipatory Activity System (AAS) framework
The Affordance — Supportance Cycle
The Curated Mind Framework
The HITED Framework
The “Modeling A Developmental Project” Framework
The “Curative Life Curation” Framework

I also developed 7 new frameworks in the creative space.

The “Product Engagement” Framework
The “Business as Engagement” Framework
The “Product as Thing” Framework
The “Service as Supportance” Framework
The “Idea Engagement” Framework
The “Founders’ Creative Life” Framework
The “Product Langue” Framework

In addition, there are some new canvases:

Idea Engagement Canvas
Code Engagement Canvas
Product Engagement Canvas

This is an amazing Applied Knowledge Curation!

Theory-based Reflection

Is the “Product Engagement” approach useful knowledge for practitioners?

There are two types of useful knowledge:

Directly Useful Knowledge
Indirectly Useful Knowledge

In TALE: Template as Knowledge, I consider Templates as Directly Useful Knowledge. A template of targeted landing pages is ready-to-use knowledge for a SaaS team. If you trust the template, the only thing you have to do is apply your knowledge about your product to the template.

In contrast, the “Product Engagement” approach is Indirectly Useful Knowledge that only offers a new perspective to reflect on things you are familiar with. It guides you to see things from a different view.

Practitioners tend to use Practice-based Reflection to learn from their experiences. I encourage Practitioners to adopt Theory-based Reflection to explore unusual perspectives.

In the field of Product-based Business Development, most people are not familiar with the Ecological Practice Approach (inspired by Ecological Psychology), the Project Engagement Approach (inspired by Activity Theory), and Ferdinand de Saussure’s Structural Linguistics.

I wish the Product Engagement approach could inspire you to start a new journey of knowledge engagement with theoretical approaches.

Now it’s time to edit a possible book as an outcome of the “Product Engagement” project.

Part One: Theory-based Reflection

Introduction
Platform Innovation as Concept-fit (49 min read)
Theory-based Reflection

I consider this book an example of Theory-based Reflection. So I select the article Platform Innovation as Concept-fit as the core of Part One. You can find a pattern in the article:

The article uses the theme “Passion Economy” as an example of Practice-based Reflection and moves to Theory-based Reflection.
In the beginning, I define an intermediate concept called Platform Innovation.
I adopt the Project-oriented Activity Theory and the Ecological Practice approach as theoretical resources to develop the Concept-fit framework.
I also introduce several related theoretical approaches or frameworks as references for thinking about Platform Innovation.

This pattern can be seen as a template for theory-based reflection.

Part Two: Intermediate Frameworks

The “Product Engagement” Framework (link, 8 min read)
The “Business as Engagement” Framework (link, 18 min read)
The “Product as Thing” Framework (link, 25 min read)
The “Service as Supportance” Framework (link, 13 min read)
The “Idea Engagement” Framework (link 1, 22 min | link 2, 12 min)
The “Founders’ Creative Life” Framework (link, 17 min read)
The “Product Langue” Framework (link, 14 min read)

The above links are frameworks I developed in the past two weeks. These intermediate frameworks connect theoretical approaches and product-based business development.

The theme of “Business as Engagement” connects “Activity System” and “Project Engagement” with business development. There are three theoretical resources behind the theme:

Activity-based view, Activity System, and Value Chain (Michael E. Porter, 1985)
The Activity System Model (Yrjö Engeström, 1987)
Activity as Formation of Concept, and Project as a unit of Activity (Andy Blunden, 2010, 2012, 2014)

I also use the Project Engagement approach (v2.1) to define three keywords, six units of analysis, and six guiding questions. In this way, we can start a new journey of knowledge engagement with a rough framework.

The above diagram connects the Project Engagement approach (and Activity Theory in general) with Business Development. We can see three types of projects and six guiding questions. You can find more details in TALE: A Possible Theme called “Business as Engagement”.

The above diagram leads to three types of projects. You can find more details in TALE: A Possible Theme called “Idea Engagement”.

Project 1: the project that aims to discover new ideas for business development.
Project 2: the project that belongs to daily work activities of the Business Value Chain.
Project 3: the project that aims to turn ideas behind business into concepts for the development of culture and society.

You can also see different members’ positions and preferences in TALE: Idea Engagement, Members of Projects, and A New Canvas.

Finally, I also define 14 types of Thematic Spaces from a Linguistic Perspective. The diagram below represents the thematic space of “Product Design”. You can find more details in TALE: Product, Langue, and Speech.

The “Product Langue” framework only uses two roles for one thematic space. Thus, these 14 types of thematic spaces also represent 14 types of “Zone” of Product-based Business Development.

As the first unit of analysis of the Project Engagement approach, the “Zone” refers to a social space that is shared by two people or two roles.

Part Three: Heuristics

In TALE: A Possible Theme called “Idea Engagement”, I introduced three types of projects with the following keywords:

Project 2: Incremental Innovation and Activity System
Disrupted Activity and Normal Activity
Project 3: Radical Innovation and Social Change
Object and Concept

These keywords inspired me to develop a tool called Idea Engagement Canvas. See the diagram below.

I also developed a canvas called Product Engagement Canvas which identifies five major thematic spaces for developing collective tacit knowledge.

This canvas is inspired by Life Discovery Canvas (Oliver Ding, 2022).

Founders and people who are working in the field of product-based business development, their Creative Life is defined by their projects of building products.

Thus, we can use four areas of “Life Discovery Canvas” for Product Engagement.

Think
Learn
Say
Do

In fact, “Life Discovery” is a type of “Developing Tacit Knowledge”.

The uniqueness of Life Discovery Canvas is that it adopts the perspective of Activity Theory and considers the whole thing as an activity. Moreover, it uses inner space and outer space to represent the “Internalization — externalization” principle of Activity Theory.

For the Developing Tacit Knowledge, I call it “Objective — Subjective” Knowledge Curation. While Objective Knowing refers to outer space, Subjective Knowing refers to inner space.

For Product Engagement, the inner space is named “Workfield” which is a Product-centered knowledge engagement space for team members.

I am working on some details of this new canvas. So far, you can re-visit Life Discovery Canvas:

Finally, I also made a canvas for the software development team. See the diagram below.

Code Engagement Canvas is a tool for developing collective tacit knowledge of software development.

Part Four: References

As mentioned above, I adopted many theoretical approaches or models for the project. Part Four features some significant models and their original links.

The Product Engageement Project highlights the following themes. I will select 3 articles for each theme.