Start to “Product think”
Think of any good products you know, it is a solution to your needs, that advanced the goals of the business, using the craftsmanship of creators. While the craftsmanship is harder to transfer between industries, business and users are almost universal.
Product thinking is the process of defining the product based on the most important business and users aspects. This is what this blog is all about.
In this post, you will get an intro to product thinking. It’ll be short and general and in later posts, you will find more accurate definitions and many examples from different fields.
When reading this post, try to think of anything that comes to mind that has someone behind it and people that are going to use it. It can be an app from a big know corporate and it can be your preschool’s next science fair. This is how widely applicable product thinking is.
Above, you’ve already noticed the definition of a business is really wide and it includes anyone or anything that wants to create something that someone will use. When looking at a business, the basic 2 aspects you need to address are goals and capabilities.
The business goals are the main motivations that bring them to create new products. These are the basic foundations this whole initiative is based on. Clarifying the goals and focusing them is one of the things product thinking is addressing because good business goals drive the business and the product to better performance and long term benefits.
Another aspect of the business is its capabilities. This concept can feel a bit restrictive, but it actually just the things that would let you create the product easier and better. The business capabilities are the advantages of the business when coming to create the product. It can be a strong legacy of amazing print ads or a strong community of users or any other things that have been tested and learned in the past. Understanding the business capabilities is not trivial, and it’s a great tool of product thinking but after you practice and get it right, it is the cornerstone of the next step to take with your product.
Product thinking about the users can be intimidating at first, mainly because product thinking places a great emphasis on the users, an aspect of the product you neither control or can fully understand or predict. Even in cases where the business talks about the users, it’s either based on general notions that are uncontroversial or based on the people that are creating the product. Product thinking of the users is strict but easier to align with. When you “product think” about the users you’re focused on their needs, and you break your concept of the users into a small and testable hypothesis that you quickly test, once proven you can build on them and move on in improving your product.
To sum up, product thinking is how to hypothesize and test quickly the best solution for the users’ needs that advances the business goals using business capabilities.
I hope this post left you thinking About how product thinking can be applied to your product’s next step, in the next posts you’ll discover more about fast iterations, how to hypothesize, what goals really are and much more.
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