Product Management 101: 8 Steps to Design Better Products
Learn the fundamental steps to designing products as I guide you through an example for “building a better car”.
If you were asked to build a “better” car, where would you start? Some people might start brainstorming new features, such as a supercharged engine, bigger tires, adding backup cameras, etc. But what does better really mean? Does it mean better gas efficiency? Adding more capacity? Making it faster? Going electric?
Without understanding the goals for your product design and aligning those goals to back to user pain points, you may end up building a voice-activated 800-horsepower mini-van with monster truck tires…. that can fly! Though that might sound pretty cool, all the user really wanted were better seats. Alright, enough of my exaggerated hypothetical imagination — let’s go through 8 steps to design better products.
1. Define main goals for the product design
So what does better really mean? Defining main goals upfront helps you understand what better actually means and keeps you focused on WHY you’re designing in the first place. There are generally 4 categories of product goals:
- Acquisition: Capturing customers/users
e.g. # of active user, % of friend referrals, # of sign ups - Engagement/Activity: Getting customers to actively use features and/or promoting them
e.g. # of social media mentions, % of users using feature, # of users completing workflow - Retention: Keeping existing customers or getting them to buy/upgrade your products
e.g conversion rate, churn rate - Monetization: Making or saving money
e.g. profit margin, revenue, growth, customer acquisition cost
More often than not, you will tackle multiple goals at once; understanding and prioritizing these goals will enable shorter-term wins. Over time, your priorities may change depending on the lifecycle of the company and business needs.
For instance, in the early stages of Tesla, they prioritized Engagement goals to drive adoption of the electric vehicle market. They released a low-volume, high-cost product (Roadster) to prove the range and performance potential to consumers. After proving the market, they can now focus on Monetization goals with the shift towards a high-volume, lower-cost product (Model 3).
2. Identify users and customers
Knowing WHO your users and customers are will set the foundation to WHAT you should build. Let’s continue with the car example.
Cars are operated by the driver, but are they the only users? Did you think about the passengers? How about the service technicians maintaining the car? It’s important to think about how users may interact with the product to address the full potential of user personas. But don’t stop there… you can continue to refine these personas to achieve greater granularities.
How will driver needs be different from teens, parents, elderly, or disabled? How about kid vs. adult passengers? Or novice vs. professional service technicians? Lastly, who are the customers? Aren’t users and customers the same? Well, not necessarily. When I used to work for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), they provided government-owned vehicles for employees to drive to client meetings. In this situation, the U.S. DoD are the customers and the employees are the users.
You can imagine how all of these personas can have drastically different goals and pain points to address in your product design.
3. Identify pain points to establish use cases
A common mistake in product design is building a solution with super cool features — then finding problems that it solves. You may get lucky, but in most cases, your product will fail. Identifying user pain points will help you establish the most important use cases to tackle. This is the time to be empathetic and think about WHY a user would want to use the product or feature.
For the purpose of continuing our car design example, let’s say we further refined our main goals from step 1 and 2 to be:
Design a better car to increase retention and engagement for parents.
Some pain points parents may have are:
- Installing a carseat
- Loading a stroller
- Making sure kids are seated properly
- Keeping kids calm throughout the ride
Since our main goal is to design for parents, does that mean they are the only users? Absolutely not! Parents also buy cars (customer) for their kids (user), which will have a different set of pain points:
- Checking that the car is safe for child
- Preventing teen driver from driving recklessly (joyrides)
- Problems contacting them safely while they are driving
Again, always try to think about the different user personas and how they may align with your overall goal.
4. Validate user pain points and assumptions
If you were to take only one thing away from this blog, take this:
No matter how much time you spend thinking about the users and their pain points, you are NOT the user!
It’s not good enough to just come up with a list of pain points — you have to check that your assumptions are correct and the only way to do so is by listening to your users directly. Here are some ways you can do this:
- Conduct user focus groups/validation interviews
- Read reviews or public chat groups of current solutions(e.g. social media, Reddit, etc.)
- Talk to your sales team
- Send out surveys
Here are 9 Tips for Better Customer Validation Interviews.
Make sure you have a high level of confidence that you’ve accurately captured and prioritized your user’s needs before thinking about what to build.
5. Brainstorm potential solutions
This is the fun part — coming up with ideas to solve your validated user pain points. Get out your post it notes, gather the troops, and start brainstorming. The purpose is to come up with WHAT you can build, not answer HOW you would build it.
I won’t go in too much detail here, but I suggest keeping an open mind on all ideas— no matter how crazy it may sound. The point is to get your juices flowing and kick off conversations with your team. The more ideas you can gather and share, the more ideas will be generated within your team. The best solutions are those that can solve multiple use cases and pain points at the same time — so always strive to kill two birds with one stone. Let’s brainstorm some solutions for the listed pain point:
Preventing teen driver from driving recklessly (joyrides)
- Send notifications when the car leaves a specified location radius
- Enable security feature to cap how fast car can go
- Set hours or time of when car is allowed to operate
- Enforce auto pilot and allow specified destinations only (school, home, gym)
- Send recap of each drive to parents showing drive path, start/end time, max speed, etc.
6. Evaluate and prioritize solutions
Organizing, evaluating, and prioritizing your batch of ideas is the next step. Start by prioritizing your pain points and then work down to your solutions. Some things to consider when prioritizing your list are:
- Impact to user
- User reach
- Cost/time to implement
- Confidence of success
- Risks/barriers of entry
There are plenty of methods you can use for prioritizing, but my preferred method is the Weighted Scoring Model. Here’s what a scorecard may look like for the brainstormed solutions.
7. Check yourself — Are you still aligned with the goals?
Product Management is an iterative process and it’s good to always stop and check if you are still aligned to the identified goals. After you check yourself, you may have deviated from the original goal and have to go back a few steps. This is part of the process and there’s nothing wrong with doing that.
Based on the scorecard above, the solution we’ve prioritized is
Send recap of each drive to parents showing drive path, start/end time, max speed, etc.
Think — does this solution align with our goal to Design a better car to increase retention and engagement for parents? Here are some potential examples of how this feature accomplishes each of the goals:
Retention
- Parents can upgrade or subscribe to this premium feature
- Keep parents from buying a different car with safer solution
Engagement
- Parents and child can share their drives via social media (e.g. sharing a long road trip/vacation)
- Parents are can track daily drives and destinations of their child
- Parents can track the health of the car by obtaining maintenance info (e.g. oil levels, gas levels, brake life, tire pressure, etc.)
Remember, the best solutions are those that can solve multiple use cases and pain points at the same time. The last Engagement example actually solves another pain point we identified: Checking that the car is safe for child.
Based on our analysis, this particular solution reveals that we not only achieve our retention and engagement goals, but also solve multiple pain points — making it a viable solution to pursue.
8. Define success metrics
How would you know if your product design was better if you had nothing to measure? Defining metrics will keep you aligned to your goals, give you a path to measure improvements over time, and indicate whether or not the product was successful.
By this point, you should know what’s important for your product and what should be measured. Using the list we created in step 7, we can create metrics for Retention and Engagement goals.
Retention
- Conversion rate of using premium feature
- Churn rate of parents canceling premium feature
- Churn rate of parents switching to competitor
- % of Customers buying more than one vehicle
Engagement
- # of social media shares per day
- # of daily active users for trip info
- # of daily active users for maintenance info
- # of users scheduling maintenance appointments per month
Key Takeaways
After you complete these 8 steps of product design, you can finally start product development. Understanding the product’s goals early on will pave the path on what to build and how to measure success. Remember to always think of who the users and customers are and what problems you are solving for them. You are NOT the user and you have to validate your assumptions by listening to them directly. Brainstorm crazy ideas and prioritize which solutions you should pursue first. Product Management is an iterative process —always go back a few steps and check if you’re still on the right path to achieving your goals. Lastly, define what success looks by leveraging metrics that align to those goals.
What do you think about these 8 steps? What methods have you used to design a product? Are there specific steps you’d like me to dive in more detail? Let me know in the comments below. 👇🏼
