Mixing up the format of this installment. Let me know what you think by replying directly to this email.
As product people, we naturally focus on tangible, swipe-able software we create. The product (ux, app, etc.) you manage is only a sliver of the Product (sum of the benefits you’re delivering) your company delivers.
Here’s a good foundation of this concept:
Shreyas Doshi@shreyas
Sometimes there's a difference between the product & The Product. "the lowercase-p product" is the thing you’ve been assigned to directly work on. But that’s not necessarily "The uppercase-p Product". The Product is The Main Thing that makes or breaks the user value prop. 👇🏾
7:53 AM · Nov 12, 2020
35 Reposts · 301 Likes
Shreyas Doshi@shreyas
Sometimes: product ≠ Product For example: If you manage the Netflix app, you are managing the product, but that isn't The Product The Product is all the content that Netflix has licensed. the product you manage is merely a delivery mechanism for the real Product for the user.
7:53 AM · Nov 12, 2020
1 Repost · 41 Likes
The complexity, context, and difficult stuff is hidden deep underneath the surface. Everything from minute technicalities to big picture strategy gets mixed up in the murky layers below the product. Acclimate yourself to this setting - it’s where you’ll be spending your most important thinking.
When you dive into these waters, a new picture will start to emerge. You’ll start to see your entire company as a set of systems for delivering your Product. It is a product in and of itself.
You’ll see the machinery actually ticking. Some parts may be well-engineered and precise:
Others parts are messy or adhoc. They may actually be “uncharted” until you map them out.
👓 Critical lenses to understanding how your product ticks
Product is a discipline of lenses. You need to see problems from many angles, all the time. To do product IRL, you need a holistic understanding of everything.
Here are some common angles you need to understand your Product from. There are many others based on your unique situation - but here’s a good foundation.
Map out a model (on a whiteboard, mindmap, or post its) for each of these sub-systems. If you find it too complex to fit into one view, create several separate maps.
Financial - How does your product actually make money? What are the fixed and variable costs of delivering your product and what drives them? How and when does money flow through the system?
Technical - How does the product technically work? Where are the limitations / opportunities? What happens in real-time vs. on a schedule? Even as a non-coder you need to intimately aware of how all the components work.
Operational - How does your business actually serve its customers? What does the engagement look like? How does the [cardboard package, white glove service, free stock trading] actually get from A -> B?
Distribution - How do customers find out about you? Whether by a direct sales force or app install ads, you need to be intimately aware of this system if not shape it directly.
Implementation - What does it look like in practice when a customer uses your product? Where are they, who pays for it, and what does success look like? You can think of this as a broader “experience” including - but extending beyond - the tactile UX.
Once you assemble some of these pictures, you will gain a meta-picture of how they all fit together. But how do tease out this information in the first place?
⛏ Going Deep
Whether you are inheriting a product or working on it for a significant amount of time, there will be an endless history to catch up and stay current on.
You need to piece together snippets of information from multiple sources to construct your own map:
Customers - Talk to them! Hang out where they hang out. Don’t just read what other product people are reading, read what you customers are reading.
Space / Market - Find super high quality blogs or podcasts from experts that can explain complex topics simply in small chunks. Avoid fluff about funding rounds and press releases.
Internal experts - Talk to subject matter experts from all over your company. When you’re new, use you naiveté as an excuse to ask for whiteboard sessions from experts like the CTO, VP of Sales, etc. Develop casual relationships with people that you don’t find yourself working directly with to see new dimensions of what’s happening in different areas.
External experts - Find experts elsewhere. Look to twitter, professional groups, and connections in your network to find people to follow and engage with. Remember that while reading or doing your own research are critical - you can often obtain higher density insights faster in a short conversation with an expert who’s seen everything that’s new to you.
Take a longer view - Read histories of your industry, whether that’s banking, advertising, retail, software. Dry material springs to life when it makes things your current situation click. Just because products are made and delivered differently (extremely online), doesn’t mean the current industries or business models (and all the challenges that come along with them) have never been seen before. Sometimes they are progressions, other times they are remixes.
🧠 Keep it all in mind
You will now have the context to make fast, nuanced decisions and create alignment. By seeing how it all works together, you can simplify decision-making and focus efforts on true impact drivers.
Once you have an understanding of how your Product ticks, you will also have a pretty good sense of how your Business ticks. The emergent patterns of your culture (who you hire, how people work, how decisions are made) will start to make sense from this context, as will all the product decisions that have been made to date.
This will inform your approach to not only building products, but releasing them successfully within your org. You will learn to see your place within the (possibly chaotic) system of your business. You will see new opportunities to improve the Product in ways that benefit you and your customers and you’ll learn how to partner with or leverage other components get there.
This holistic view will be critical in delivering impact to your Product. Remember that no single piece is disconnected from everything else.