Product Deconstruct - Part I

In the ever-evolving landscape of product management, the journey from ideation to creation represents a pivotal endeavour in building innovative products that resonate with users and stand the test of time. "Product Deconstruct - Part I" is not merely an exploration of product design; it is a comprehensive manifesto for product managers, engineers, designers, and visionaries aspiring to master the art of bringing products from zero to one. Inspired by the profound insights of Steve Jobs, who articulated that "Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works," this article ventures beyond the design to underscore the symbiosis of discovery, analytics, delivery and iteration at the heart of product innovation. It serves as a beacon for those committed to understanding the multifaceted process of product development, from empathising with user needs to ideating, prototyping, testing, and refining, ensuring that each step is aligned with the ultimate goal of surpassing user expectations.

This article is designed as a toolkit for innovation, offering insights into design thinking, practical methodologies, and actionable strategies tailored for product managers and teams dedicated to crafting solutions that not only solve real-world problems but also captivate and delight users. Whether you are a product manager striving to align your team's vision, a designer crafting intuitive experiences, engineering leader to crack solutions or a thought leader shaping the future of product development, this product deconstruct series will be your companion in the pursuit of creating impactful products.

Stage 1: Problem Context - Focus on the Right Problem

Empathize and Define

The foundation of impactful product design lies in deeply understanding the people you're designing for. This initial stage, Empathize and Define, sets the stage for the entire design process by focusing on identifying the right problem to solve. It involves a series of activities aimed at uncovering user emotions, anxieties, motivations, and the jobs they need to get done through your product or service. Here’s how to approach this critical first step:

Activities:

• Understanding User Needs: Begin by identifying user emotions, anxieties, and motivations. This empathetic approach is crucial for defining the problem space.
• Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD): Explore the causality behind user actions. What job is the user hiring your product or service to do? This framework helps in pinpointing the exact needs your product should fulfill.
• Engage with Stakeholders: Conduct interviews and focus groups, utilizing platforms like Pollfish etc., to gather insights from relevant stakeholders.
• Expert Consultation: Discuss with subject matter experts through platforms such as CleverX , Xperti, NewtonX , proSapient , Techspert , and Atheneum to deepen your understanding of the domain.
• Comprehensive Research: Undertake desk research to build a robust understanding of the competitive landscape and identify key user groups and personas.

Deliverables:

The outcome of these activities is multi-fold:

• A comprehensive document showcasing the research collected, offering insights into user needs and market dynamics.
• A detailed product brief (Please refer to Intercom's template), outlining identified pain points, success metrics, and scope, which serves as a blueprint for the design journey.
• Well-defined user personas, representing the diverse user groups the product aims to serve, ensuring the design process remains user-centric.

The culmination of this stage is a shared definition across cross-functional teams of:

Who we are building for: Understanding the user groups and personas guides the design and development process.

What problems we want to solve: This enables teams to align their strategies and priorities towards a shared vision, ensuring that the product addresses real user needs.

Core and related jobs: Identifying the jobs users hire the product to do helps in focusing on features and functionalities that truly matter.

Market trends and competition: Understanding the competitive landscape and how your product fits within it informs strategic decisions that can set your product apart.

By thoroughly engaging in these activities and achieving these deliverables, product teams can ensure they are not just solving a problem, but the right problem, setting a solid foundation for the subsequent stages of the product design process. This stage is about aligning vision, strategy, and execution towards creating a product that truly resonates with its intended users, informed by a deep understanding of their needs and the broader market context.

Checklist of Stage 1

Product brief skeleton

??????? What problem(s) are we trying to solve?

??????? What are the core and related jobs that our product is being hired for?

Market trends and competitors (direct and indirect)

??????? What other products/solutions exist that do the job

??????? SWOT analysis?

??????? Map out user flows and create user journeys for direct and indirect competition (tied with interviews and surveys)

Interviews and surveys?

??????? Interview potential users and users of other products/tools?

??????? Interview subject matter experts

??????? Collect quantitative and qualitative data using polls, surveys, interviews and focus groups

??????? Conduct card sorting sessions?

Who are we building for?

??????? Using data, flesh out distinct personas - with their goals, motivations, frustrations and behavioural patterns

??????? Ask who, what and why

Stage 2: Solution Context - Design and Build the Right Thing

Ideate, Prototype, Test, and Build

Once we have a clear understanding of the problem and the user needs, the next stage is all about generating, refining, and realizing solutions. Stage 2, Solution Context, encompasses the creative heart of the product design and development process, from ideation to building the final product. Here's how to navigate through these crucial steps:

Ideate

The ideation phase is where creativity flourishes. Teams engage in brainstorming, mind-mapping, and using job maps to collaboratively generate a wide array of solutions. It's about thinking outside the box and then narrowing down to ideas that are not only innovative but also feasible and effective in getting the job done.

• Activities: Engage in brainstorming, mind-mapping, and job maps for collaborative idea generation, utilising tools like Miro. Selection of ideas based on feasibility and effectiveness. Make critical buy vs. build decisions to streamline development.
• Deliverables: Creation of job maps (template given in the checklist below) to visualise the tasks users are trying to accomplish. Development of low to mid-fidelity wireframes with tools such as Figma, Balsamiq, Sketch, or Miro , laying the groundwork for design. Customer journey maps and user flows are outlined, providing a blueprint for the user's interaction with the product.

Design / Prototype

With ideas in hand, the next step is bringing them to life through design and prototyping. This phase focuses on collaborative design efforts to create interactive prototypes that closely mimic the final product.

• Activities: Collaborative design of mid-fidelity screens using Figma , Adobe XD etc.
• Deliverables: An interactive prototype (mock-ups) that allows for tangible interaction and feedback.

Review / Test

Before moving into development, it's essential to validate the design with users. This stage involves rigorous review and testing to refine the product based on feedback.

• Activities: Review of the customer journey by the Design committee to ensure alignment with user expectations. Testing with a small set of customers and dealers using tools like Maze , UserTesting etc., to gather feedback. Iterations based on feedback to refine and improve the design.
• Deliverables: A sign-off document indicating approval of the design.Hi-fidelity screens ready for development. Developer handover documents, ensuring a smooth transition from design to development. Detailed user stories that guide the development process.

Build

The final step in this stage is the actual development of the product, where designs and ideas are transformed into a functional product.

• Activities: Development sprints involving both development and quality assurance (QA) teams to build and test the features.
• Deliverables: Regular show & tell sessions to demonstrate the features developed, ensuring alignment with the original design and user needs.

By embracing a structured approach through the Solution Context stage, teams can ensure that they not only design but also build the right thing. This stage is crucial for translating user needs and ideas into tangible solutions that resonate with users, validated through rigorous testing and refined through feedback. With a focus on collaboration, creativity, and user feedback, product teams can develop solutions that truly meet user needs and stand out in the market.

Checklist of Stage 2

Brainstorming and ideation

??????? Build job maps (template source: JTBD)

??????? Conduct design sprints and workshops for collective idea generation

??????? Select and vote on ideas and sketch potential solutions?based on feasibility

??????? Develop sketches into more sophisticated wireframes?

??????? Iterate?

User flow and interaction

??????? Piece together the wireframes and create user flow

??????? Experiment different user flows (collaborative)

Prototype?

??????? Create prototype of either low or mid fidelity screens which is interactive and captures user flow

Review and test?

??????? Test prototype with different stakeholders (first internally and then with users and personas)

??????? Iterate and experiment with user flows and wireframes, conduct ideation sessions, taking into account feedback and pain points?

??????? Create customer/user journey

??????? Draft user stories

High fidelity?

??????? Take the screens to highest fidelity and create full prototype

Build?

??????? Developer’s handoff

Stage 3: Learn - Launch and Iterate

Measure and Monitor

After launching a product or feature, the journey doesn't end. The third stage, Learn and Iterate, focuses on measuring impact and monitoring performance to continuously improve the product. This stage is crucial for understanding how well the product meets user needs and identifying areas for further enhancement. Anjali Sud , former CEO of Vimeo, offers a compelling reminder of the iterative nature of success: "Nobody gets the luxury of nailing a product out of the gate—it takes iteration." This insight underscores the essence of this stage, reinforcing the notion that the journey toward creating impactful products is continuous, marked by learning, adapting, and evolving.

Embracing this perspective, we delve into the critical process of measuring and monitoring our creations in the wild. The measure phase is not merely about tracking metrics but understanding the story they tell about our users' experiences, preferences, and pain points. This data-driven approach allows us to identify what resonates with our audience and where we need to pivot or enhance our offerings.

Here’s how to systematically approach measurement and monitoring:

Measure

The measure phase is about understanding the product's performance from a user's perspective. This involves defining key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with user satisfaction and business goals.

• Activities: Define and calculate north star metrics and other product KPIs across each stage of the customer journey funnel, using tools like Amplitude , Mixpanel , Pendo.io , Heap | by Contentsquare , Google Analytics etc. Collect customer feedback to provide guidance and understand user satisfaction, utilising platforms like Appcues. Experiment with different features and user flows to see what works best.
• Deliverables: Product analytics reports that offer a deep dive into how users interact with the product. Data on feature usage and adoption, pinpointing what's working and what isn't. An updated customer journey map, now enriched with metrics to visualise the user's path through the product. Net Promoter Score (NPS) and other metrics that gauge user satisfaction and loyalty. Results from A/B tests that inform decision-making on feature iterations.

Monitor

Monitoring allows teams to keep a constant eye on product performance, ensuring that any issues can be swiftly identified and addressed.

• Activities: Development of dashboards, either custom-built or through Google Data Studio, to keep track of key metrics in real-time.Installation of a web analytics monitoring toolkit, including tools like Google Page Speed Insights, and Azure App Insights, Cloudwatch, Chronosphere to ensure optimal product performance.
• Deliverables: Smart alerts that notify the team of any significant changes or issues that need immediate attention. Dashboards that provide a comprehensive view of product performance across various metrics. Recommendations and actionable insights based on data analysis, guiding the team on what steps to take next to improve the product.

By embracing a cycle of measurement and monitoring, teams can ensure their products remain relevant and continue to meet user needs. This stage is about using data-driven insights to inform iterations, making incremental improvements that enhance user satisfaction and drive business success. Learning from user behaviour and feedback is a continuous process that feeds back into the design and development cycle, ensuring that the product evolves in line with user expectations, technology and market trends. By continuously learning from our users and iterating on our products, we embody the resilience and adaptability that define successful product development.

Checklist of Stage 3

• Implement product analytics tool
• Define and measure metrics across all steps of the customer journey
• Test hypothesis with A/B testing
• Construct reporting dashboards
• Generate actionable insights from data
• Implement smart alerts for tracking resilience

Summary

In the next instalment of product deconstruct, I will walk you through how we used this framework to build one of the best SaaS product for the automotive industry. Stay tuned!