5 magic questions for building great products

What if you could solve almost all creative product problems you face, just by writing down great answers to five questions?

Every 2-3 years (and even that is too long!) I try to update my productivity and creative toolset. Over the years I’ve noticed that I have accumulated a lot of three kinds of tools: a) A place to organize notes and ideas, b) A place to visualize ideas and flows quickly, c) A place to track what I need to get done.

I have multiple of those things now in my toolbox* and my preference depends on the context. I know many product managers people swear by visualization tools. I used to too, and still use those tools extensively. But when I tracked my usage, I found that I use note-taking tools far more extensively. And I’ve finally figured out the reasons why:

1.     Writing takes way less mental energy than anything else I can do to register creative ideas.

That’s it. There is no other reason. But if we must, here are some other supporting thoughts:

• When I need to create, I need my brain to focus 99% on the ideas and less on anything else. Writing is the only thing that affords that for me.
• Generally writing takes less energy that drawing – my mind gets distracted from getting all the lines and images right, sucking away creative energy.
• It also takes less energy than dictation – I’m sure this one is controversial for some people (let me know if you disagree below in comments).
• Writing = lo-fi drawing. With modern writing tools (I’m looking at you VI and Vim users!), and affordances like tables, bullets, numbering, dashes, and text emoji, etc.; you have low fidelity drawings at your fingertips.

I see clear writing as the foundation for all professional creativity and a lot of personal creativity. There are some things writing can’t do and eventually you may need to escalate to pictures and flow diagrams. But all of that becomes better when you have the great foundation of clear textual expression.

So, while some people need to visualize to get clarity, I write. For product problems, I especially use a trick I learned years ago --> Turn product frameworks into simple questions and then answer them in words. Below I show a pretty versatile framework for building great products, that is just five simple questions you can write down on a couple of sheets of paper. Caution, these questions often lead to other questions, but once you start answering them, you’re creating positive creative momentum!

The five most crucial product questions:

1.     Who am I solving for? - This is the most crucial question and is important for building technology that works for people (vs. making technology that is user unfriendly). You cannot build products for people that you cannot describe across a few dimensions. There is no such thing as "building for everyone"**. Some examples:

a.    What is their role? Their title?

b.    Whose approval do they need to be successful? Who do they report to?

c.    Can they buy from you or do they need approval?

d.    What is their day like? What do they spend most of their time doing or trying to do?

e.    Who do they work with regularly? Who are their “customers”?

f.     What are the things that frustrate them and make their work tedious or difficult?

g.    What aspect of their work brings delight or joy?

h.    Psst, by the way, if this customer is a consumer you should dig into their preferences and behaviors deeply vs. how they behave and are motivated at work.

2.    What are their problems? – Once you’ve answered the first question (usually multiple answers), this is the next crucial question. There are two ways to answer this question – scoped and unscoped. If you have an existing product that you want to improve, you should scope your answer to the intersection of the customer and the workflow you are trying to optimize. If you’re building a new product or tackling a new value proposition, go broad and try to figure out the biggest problem to solve that you are able to identify.

3.    What is the solution? – A full understanding of the first two questions helps a creative product person start ‘sketching’ out a solution. The best way to think about this is “what properties does the solution have to be great?” Of course there are different ways to answer this question and its iterative anyway, so just get started writing something down and starting the collaborative creative process with your team.

4.    What should the solution look like and how can it deliver value? – This is a question about form and function. Any solution can take different forms – a web app, a mobile app, an API, a speech interface, AR/VR, etc. If you pick one, should it be hip, staid? What’s the design language? What are the key objects and menus? It’s hard to keep this one as text. Once you have some basics, go to visuals stat! This question is very connected to #1. Bias for form and function that will work for the 'who'.

5.    What should you do first? – Every product journey starts with this question, the roadmap question. What comes first, second and third? There are multiple levels to this question; even the smallest widget has a best sequence for building it. But on another level, you have to decide which widget comes first, and on and on. Before you know it, you’re figuring out sequence on multiple products and product lines

For whatever practical product problem you face***, putting pen to paper and taking an honest whack at these questions is the key to product greatness. Do it****!

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Tools I use*

· A place to organize notes and ideas — Standard A4 sheets of white paper. Moleskine, Textpad, Notepad++, Onenote, Bear, Notes app, Confluence, Google docs, Office 365,

· A place to visualize flows and ideas quickly — Powerpoint, Balsamiq, MindJet, G Slides

· A place to track what needs to get done — Todoist, Email flags, Microsoft Tasks, Google Tasks

Building for everyone ** 

This looks a lot like building for a lot of different kinds of people in one interface. It’s a summation, and has to be earned over time.

This framework***

This is NOT a strategy framework. Or even a proper roadmap framework. It’s for when you have some intermediate knowledge of the problem domain to focus on. If it was this would be titled, “5 questions for building great businesses”. 

Doing it****

Its frankly unbelievable how little time a product manager may have to do some creative thinking in any given week, what with coordination and meetings. Start by taking a “workation” of 4 –12 hours, when you have pending creativity to do. Deputize and unplug. Ultimately you’re rewarded for great results and that cannot come if you don’t spend this creative time.

x-posted on medium - https://medium.com/@Okosisi/5-magic-questions-for-building-great-products-3e58e1ed1ee6

#product #productmanagement #design