Move forward

You’ve already mastered the basics of product thinking. The first steps, the foundation of the product hypothesis you’re going to test are well understood and validated as much as possible. As a product thinker your business goals are outlined, you’re familiar with the relevant business capabilities and the users’ needs are clear to you.

This is where the next step of product thinking is happening, defining the product hypothesis, testing it, and iterating. But before we continue. with tactics and examples, you need to understand a basic concept of product thinking — Move forward.

What is Move forward and why it’s so important to product thinking?

Well, Move forward is the basic notion that any action leads you one step ahead. It’s really easy to demonstrate it with an example. You’re running a test campaign to bring more traffic to your coffee shop with google local ads. You set an amount and you test the ROI. Your test is a success, 20% more ROI from that test. You moved forward since you can now invest more money into this campaign and get more coffee lovers in your doors. Thanks to product thinking you’re now one more step forward from the place you were before.

But what about failures, how these are moving you forward? Well that’s why moving forward is so important to product thinking. Let’s take the same example, you run a test, and the ROI is lower by 20% from current campaigns. How is this moving you forward? You now know that this campaign won’t contribute to your bottom line, it even hurting your bottom line. But, in order to achieve your business goals, you need to run these tests, and they won’t all be successful in contributing directly to you bottom line.

So how are such failures are moving you forward? First, from the financial stand point, product thinking is all about big bets in small iterations, so instead of running a big campaign from the onset because you’re certain it should be successful, you did the smallest version of the campaign that would validate this hypothesis and you failed only with small investment, this is the “Alternative costs” moving forward. But that’s not the only way product thinking moved you forward, since you did the smallest effort to run this test, and it is clear what you’re testing, coming out of the failed test, you can iterate on what did work in this campaign — time of day, certain copy, certain offering or a certain barista that knows how to convert the users that do come through these campaigns.

A sceptic thinker, not a product thinker like yourself, would grin and say “Well, what about a total failure, no one, zero people came from this campaign, how is this moving you forward?” Well the answer to that is that product thinking is about questioning assumptions, and the fact that you have answered the question of “Is google local ads campaign good for us?” with a “not this way” frees you to answer other questions faster. And that’s most definitely moving forward.

Moving forward is one of the hardest concepts to grasp and practice when starting with product thinking. As humans, we’re used to looking at a failure as a set back, something that holds you back. But even in life, if you adopt this approach to things you’ll find that things are moving forward and faster. And that’s an amazing life to live, these are amazing projects to work on, and these are amazing teams to be part of.

Keep moving forward.

Image source: Designed by Freepik.com