Product thinking creates growth engines

Product thinking is all about not knowing. Assuming that you don’t know anything leads you to greater curiosity and that leads to greater understanding of the combination of goals, capabilities, and users. But product thinking is also about creating hypotheses about the solutions that can be in the middle of these three components. But how we can keep iterating on a successful product? How can growth come from a product that has achieved leadership? A product we have confidence that it’s working?

By going back to the three elements and adjusting them. Let’s use an example, ski resorts have a very successful product (the ones that are successful of course), in the winter they are full of happy skiers and other winter tourists, all the elevators are full, the restaurants on all stops are vibrant and social media is exploding with people tweeting and putting stories about the great time they’re having. How would you build a growth engine in this situation?

Sure, you can keep growing by adding more facilities, and you can grow by adding value to more users during winter, but it’ll take up many resources.

Significant growth comes from widening or diversifying the three basic elements.

To seize this as a growth opportunity you need to come back to the three elements. Ski resort’s goals are to make money by facilitating people’s vacation at ease, these are really good goals because they are directive and easy to understand but not restrictive.

Ski resorts have amazing capabilities, they have facilities that can take people and things to great heights, they have cleared trails down the mountains they have places to dine and sleep many tourists with their equipment and they have business owners and employees that perform at the highest level even under the pressure of many customers at once. But they are missing users in the summer. The skiers are all gone. Because after all once the snow stops, all things come to a halt. This is a growth opportunity.

This is where product thinking gives you focus and gets you results.

Ski resorts need to look for users that need to get to high places that will use the elevators, hotels, and restaurants during the summer. The off-road bicyclists are such users.

Now ski resorts can start hypothesizing and testing products that answer the needs of these users with the capabilities they already have. This is all still a hypothesis, even the fact the ski resorts can appeal to off-road bicyclists. You need to test such a hypothesis rigorously, will they come? What adjustments are needed to the capabilities? Are they coming as families alone or with friends? And many other questions and hypotheses to test. But the bottom line is that this is a valid growth theory that came from focusing on the three basic elements.

Such a growth theory ignites many iterations and iterations are the fuel of great products when using the product thinking toolbox.

Ski/bicycle resorts have created a growth engine with products that focus on the business goals, using their business capabilities already in place answering the needs of new users. Ski resorts have been investing in adjustments to the capabilities and the bicycle-riding community is not as large as the skiing community but the beautiful thing about product thinking is it can be used again and again to hypothesize about other users with needs that will be solved by-products that will advance the goals using the capabilities.