A real example of product thinking
Last week you got to know the very basics of Product Thinking. As you probably remember, before coming up with a product hypothesis to test, you need to take three preliminary steps: Define your business goals, identify your business capabilities and understand your users’ needs. Once you have achieved these, you can create your product hypothesis and test it.
This week I want to share a real life example I’ve come across. This example is about a mid size college of engineering. A successful tech CEO came back to the collage as the president. Less than a year into his term as the president, he realized that there is no alignment among all the collage faculty and employees on what is the product they are providing to the students.
Once he realized that change is needed, he advanced in product thinking and looked at the users needs. As a techer, he talked to his users, the students. The collage also condacted surveys. He also had talks with other people on campus that had different interactions with the students.
The findings indicated that the users need their collage experience to increase their chances of getting hired and get promoted later on. The dive into the users’ needs also revealed that users are no longer fitted for the current way of frontal teaching (and to be honest, who is?).
Guided by the user’s needs, he went on to define with the rest of the faculty what should be their goal. Working with the faculty members and the staff, they decided to define the ideal graduate and agreed it should be something like this: A graduate that is a professional individual and capable in team work, a graduate that can communicate thoughts and ideas and has a moral compass that guides decisions. Now they had a business goal - creating that graduate.
Identifying the business capabilities was done done by “gaps filling” (I will describe this method in another post). They created a product hypothesis how to get to the Ideal graduate and every time they had a gap on the way there, they looked at different resources they already have and filled the gaps or created new resources that were the fastest to develop. For instance, they had many courses recorded in the past, they utilized them to free frontal time and create time for team work.
And the results? This is still a work in progress and graduates of this new collage experience are still students. But surveys show, that the change is already felt by students and faculty. The effect is also measurable, students come to the college more days per week and stay for longer each time.
As you can see, a great thing about “Product thinking” is that it is exciting at many points and it gives you a way to measure success quickly.
One great thing I love about this example is that it shows you how wide Product Thinking is and how strong are the tools you get when using it.
Start to product think today, take one of the steps that feel the easiest for you, and find a way to make it work for you.
Send me your thoughts and I’ll try to reply to you quickly tomer.m.sadeh@gmail.com
