Why Product Thinking is essential for Developers and how to apply it?
You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. — Steve Jobs
While developing a software product, product thinking is really important. There is a significant amount of considerations that must happen before an application reaches the market (and even if you are building a Personal Product/Project).
Product thinking is a critical process we should take into account as a first step, even before you think about your application’s interface. So, the big question first-
What exactly Product Thinking is?
Product thinking allows you to create features that matter for the users of your products. It lets you see the product in context and not as a combination of features and design efforts.
And you know very well that Context is essential even in small Personal Projects. Because at the end of the day all want to make sure that they are tackling meaningful problems.
Now, you may ask -
What is the difference between Product Thinking and Project Thinking?
Project-oriented mindset (Project thinking) has been around for a long time and was indeed good at what was required of it. The Project Triangle includes — Project Scope, time, and budget. The project itself includes every component of development — from the idea to bug testing and release. Project thinking still works incredibly well, just on a different level than it used to.
But, project thinking alone is not enough for a significant market victory?
Why -
Because, as mentioned above it easy for developers to get bogged down in developing features. It’s not that features aren’t important but that they are often secondary to the reason a customer or user buys our product. That reason is simple; the user buys the product to solve a real-world problem for themselves.
It is important to acknowledge that project thinking becomes much less useful when it comes to broader success.
Product thinking is not about local, but about global and grand.
Innovation clashed with legacy and product steadily takes the place of the project. — inVerita
Product thinking = Problem Solving.
So, What is a Problem?
The first step of product thinking is to determine the problem that your users are looking to solve. That’s the reason that they will buy your product (or even give feedback about your product).
If the problem you choose doesn’t actually exist or the solution you propose doesn’t actually solve the problem — your products are going to be worthless to users.
Sure, there’s the possibility that if you get the solution wrong — you can fix it but if you solve a problem that doesn’t exist; there’s little you can do about that.
The Structure of Product Thinking
You begin with the user and determine:
- What the problem is that you need to solve
- The audience that you’re going to solve the problem for
Then you look at the job to be done:
- Why are you doing this? (Vision)
- How will we do this? (Strategy)
Finally you reach your outputs:
- What exactly will you achieve? (Goal)
Therefore, developers should think about products first and features second. A smart combination of the project thinking and the product thinking is an optimal strategy for dominating your niche and reaching the set target on time.
How Product Thinking can be applied while working on Projects as a Student?
Shift your focus from — The product you can create easily because of the resources and tutorials present to — The products that will add some real value to the people who are using it.
And at the end of the day, if you don’t find your product useful yourself, you can’t expect other people to use it.
So, build useful stuff while keeping the End User in MIND! 😊
Thank you for taking out time to read this article.
Do you have any questions about Product thinking? Ask them in the discussion below.
If you got some resources that can add more to the perspective of this article, share them below as well :)
