How 'Product Thinking' Could Help Rejuvenate Businesses

Anyone who has worked in a product environment will recognise the term 'Product Thinking’. Outside the product community however, the term ‘Product Thinking’ either isn’t known or isn’t understood.

Covid-19 has changed the world and we are all seeking new solutions and approaches as we look to drive economic recovery. Companies need to respond fast and/or change direction and never has Product Thinking been more relevant to business survival. The central tenants are sound and proven to drive pace and true transformation.

So from personal experience, here are my thoughts on the key principles and behaviours of Product Thinking that can shift transformation up a couple of gears. Even better you don’t need to apply a pure product approach or to apply it across the whole organisation to get results!

5 Key Principles of Product Thinking

1.      The Customer is your Guide

Use the customer as your guiding light, not internal pre-conceptions or simply copying competitors. Too often I have heard senior managers and executives come up with solutions based on their own opinions and beliefs. They are not the customer, probably not your target audience and are likely one or more steps removed from their customer.

Build a customer journey map to give a great tool as an anchor to see the customer experience holistically and end-to-end. Spend time listening to customers and non-customers, through research and through spending time in the front line on the phone or on the shop floor.

Always have someone put the customer hat on in decision making and truly value that input. Circle back over and over to the customer view to check for deviation into personal or ‘inside out’ thinking.

2.      Problem Solve

Define the problem you are trying to solve clearly and succinctly. Make sure to articulate the customer pain point, the customer ‘job to be done’. If you have a defined business problem, take it and look through the eyes of the customer to help solve it more effectively. It is absolutely possible to solve a business problem and in doing so impact the customer negatively with overall consequences on the business KPIs, so take care!

Assign a decision maker to avoid endless debate about the problem or ideas. The decision maker has the role to keep the team aligned to business strategy and to make the tough calls on priorities. A decision maker steers the team away from the dreaded ‘analysis paralysis’. The decision maker should be someone with a clear view on the business strategy and has a good knowledge of the business and the customer. Rarely should the decision maker be an Executive member and avoid problem solving by committee.

If the problem would benefit from generating some ideas to test, you can use ideation techniques and voting methods. 

Diverge & Converge:

Diverge creating ideas and use the power of the team to stretch these. There are some great techniques for ideation so explore different approaches. Personally I love ‘Crazy 8’s’ and applying ‘Rose Bud Thorn’ to ideas. Thanks must go here to Code Computerlove for great ideation workshops.

Crazy 8’s

Rose Bud Thorn

Converge to narrow down the ideas to test a manageable number using dot voting - who doesn’t enjoy the activity of using sticky coloured dots! Don’t throw any ideas away though as you may want to come back to them later.

3.      Engage Cross Functional Teams

Engage is a deliberate word here; an interactive emotional word rather than the more functional terms of ‘build’ or ‘develop’.

When you look to solve a problem, how often do you leave out some department inputs at the initial stages? Finance, compliance and legal teams are often seen to be blockers to innovation so are side-lined. This is NEVER the best way to achieve success. These are the teams that can help find solutions early and avoid work that has to be thrown away at a later date. Don’t forget your customer facing teams in the Contact Centre or your Fulfilment team. Having worked recently on a new digital gifting product, one of the absolute joys and benefits was involving representatives from across the business right from the first workshops.

Engage the cross functional teams continuously – invite them to stand ups, run showcases, put the customer journey map up in the office, run a themed competition.

4.      Focus on Outcomes

Outcomes has been defined as a change in human behaviour that drives business results. Rather than focus on a whole system, product features, a set of processes or content for a new campaign, focus on the outcomes of the actions you are taking. Measure success by outcomes not outputs and be comfortable to adapt the outputs to achieve the desired outcomes (more on outcomes over outputs in my next post). Allied with an outcomes focus, use the approach of test, learn, iterate…

5.      Test, Learn, Iterate

To move at pace and respond to real customer needs in real settings the test, learn, iterate approach has huge benefits. Avoid crystal ball gazing and reduce investment risk by applying this agile principle. Be comfortable with a solution that is low grade to test and learn, be prepared to throw things away and be prepared to admit the original assumption (or your personal view) wasn’t validated. And never stop the continuous development approach - your customers’ needs will continue to change and your competitors won’t stand still.

5 Key Behaviours of Product Thinking

1.      Happy in the Grey

Look for people that embrace uncertainty and are comfortable with ambiguity – not as easy as it sounds by the way! Those with a keen mind to learn through experimentation and not afraid to get some things ‘wrong’ on the way. Every failure is an opportunity to learn and grow from might be clichéd but it has great merit.

"If uncertainty is unacceptable to you, it turns into fear. If it is perfectly acceptable, it turns into increased aliveness, alertness, and creativity.”

Eckhart Tolle

2.      Nosy

A curious nature is key to learning and taking risks to learn. Nosy people love customer research and want to understand customer behaviours and needs. Look for people who seek qualitative and quantitative data to learn from, those that just keep asking questions and put forward hypotheses to test.

3.      True Grit

One of the key attributes I have seen in strong Product teams is the need to be gritty and resilient given the number of unknowns, the experiments that disprove a hypotheses, the undesired outcome from a test, the challenge to product ways of working within the organisation. The work to glue together the cross functional team without authority is hard and requires personal resilience - this soft outcome largely goes unrecognised but it is crucial to success.

4.      Ferrets

Look for problem solvers. People who ask ‘how might we’; people who engage others in solving problems; people with open minds to find solutions. Avoid those that put up barriers when a problem arises, shoot people down and talk about what can’t be done rather than find solutions.

5.      Leadership

I don’t mean leadership in terms of the Exec at the top. I mean leaders in the one or two levels below that inspire others. Those that create followership – those that people want to work with and for whom they will go the extra mile. Followership can be seen in the film Dead Poet’s Society with the character John Keating (played by Robin Williams), a teacher who inspires his students to look at poetry differently and who is wrongfully sacked. When Mr Keating returns to his classroom to pick up his things, the ‘O Captain, my Captain!’ scene is a great representation of followership, as one after one the students show him their support.

Followership

A good leader needs to take risks and show gumption! Avoid command and control styles and seek an engaging humble leader with empathy and a strong mind to provide clear direction through the unknown.

So to the future

Never has a Product Thinking approach to growth been more relevant than in 2020, as businesses look to create new opportunities in a very different world. Many businesses have been focused up to now, rightly, on preserving cash and managing furlough, people and operational issues. This protects in the short term but will not provide growth through the continued restrictions we will have on our lives. Consider setting up a team that will innovate at pace using product thinking approaches. Select a leader with the attributes and behaviours above and treat it like a start-up. Give it room to breathe and build an even better business exiting Covid-19 than before.

About the Author

Jacqui Rigby (PhD) has more than 20 years’ experience in transformation in product, marketing and business development roles. She has worked in sectors as wide as legal, insurance, retail, financial, travel, pharmaceuticals and funerals. For the past 6 years she has provided specialist senior interim skills, bringing together teams across the business to drive change using both product and project approaches.