Introduction
In today's growing and evolving competitive landscape, the ability develop successful product capability has become a crucial skills for both individuals and organisations. Building successful product and/or software products requires more than just a good idea or technical expertise and to excel in the field of product development, product management, professionals must adopt a product mindset - a way of thinking that deeply focus on value proposition creation, problem identification, and remaining in the problem domain.
Purpose of this article - In this article, we will explore why product thinking is essential and will share the key elements to develop product thinking as a capability.
Product Thinking is a mindset that focuses on creative valuable and impactful software / products by deeply understanding user experience / needs, aligning to business goals and continuous enabler for the technology [concept illustration using 3 dimensions of the triangle] as in the image below.
Before, we move further and discuss more about What, let's build our understanding about Product Thinking and Product Mindset.
Product Thinking and Product Mindset are often used closely and have close related concepts, moreover, they have slightly different focuses. While they share common principles, understanding the distinction between the two can provide the clearer perspective of their usability and applicability in the product capability and development.
Product Mindset - refers to the individual mindset / approach of the product professionals involved in the product development. It encompasses attitude, belief and values the helps to drive their decisions and line of actions.
Product Thinking, whereas, refers to the overall approach and mindset that guides the process and lifecycle of building products / software / digital products. It focuses more on holistic understanding of users, their challenges, user needs, business goals, focusing on solving problems or creating opportunities using technology as an enabler to assist businesses. Eventually, Product Thinking involves deep user research, empathy, data-driven decision making, cross-functional collaborations in the entire product life cycle.
Why we need Product Thinking?
User-Centric Approach: Product Thinking utilised user-centricity at the time of envision, development and product life cycle. By empathising with users, understanding their pain points, and identifying their needs, challenges, desires, product thinkers can create solutions that addresses to those problems which are identified during user research and customer-need research.
Business Alignment and Purpose: Product Thinking helps to align with the business needs, their goals to know with the WHY part of of those objectives. Instead of solely focusing on technical capabilities and Only Technical approach, product thinkers ensure that the product life cycle contributes to the overall objectives of the initiative / organisations.
Continuous Improvement: Product Thinking embraces the concept of continuous improvement through the product development and product life cycle. By collecting feedbacks, measuring key metrics as customer, user and business metrics and by analysing, product thinkers can make informed decisions to enhance their product over time.
Sustainability and Maintainability: Product Thinking embraces a crucial role in ensuring sustainability and maintainability of the product in the product life cycle. It helps a product thinker to identify what is a fit for the solution considering which stage of the product life cycle.
For an example - If a technical product thinkers come up with some solution, it's always great to make a shift in only technical to product thinking and work to re-validate your own assumptions as:
Desirability
Feasibility
Viability
Sustainability
Maintainability
Product Thinkers may use following kind / set of questions that may assist them bring better perspective in the product life cycle:
- Is it really needed? - is it a wishlist or need or desire? - what are the relevant data to support for this? - What benefits it will give to user and business? - what value add it may assist to the technical enablement?
- will it help to work for the user experience or user engagement?
- will this solution / feature / functional behavior will bring ROI?
- will it bring more business or relative ROI
- are we planning to expand these offerings to the internal market / brands?
- what would be our scalability?
Based on the stages of the Product Life Cycle [Introduction, Growth, Maturity, Saturation, Decline, Re-Design], a product thinkers will design nad validate their assumptions so that they can work better towards the holistic view considering the product vision and alignment towards the organisational objectives.
Following are few set of reasons Why Product Thinking is needed:
User-Centricity - Product Thinking places the user / customer at the centre of the product life cycle. By thorough analysis and understanding customers / users' need, pain and gain, behaviours, product thinkers can design and create solutions that resonates with the target segment / audiences.
Problem Solving - Rather than jumping on identifying and solving real problems faces by users, product thinkers do not directly jump for the solutions building, they take the time to remain in the problem domain to understand the underlying challenges and constraints.
Market Relevance - The business landscape is constantly evolving with changing customer preferences, technological advancements and competition. By having continuous explorations and continuous learning approach encourage product thinkers to stay updated with the market trends, collect feedbacks and iterate on their product.
Strategic Decision and Product Strategy - This requires deeper sense of involvement considering the long term vision and strategic goals of the organisations. Product Thinkers align their product life cycle strategy with the overall business / unit strategy, ensuring that every product decision is aligned towards org objectives and product growth.
Conclusion
In summary, product thinking is the overarching approach and methodology for building products, while product mindset refers to that mindset and mentality of the individuals involved in the product life cycle and product development.
Product thinking provides the strategic framework, principles and practices, while product mindset encompasses the attitude, belief and value that drive the behavior and decision making of the product people.
Cultivating a product mindset is essential for individuals seeking to excel in product capability uplift. With the right approach, concepts, frameworks, canvases and other skills, product people can make a significant impact and drive their product needs and growth during the product life cycle.
About the Author
Anubhav Sinha is a Co-founder as well as the Course Developer of the Product Capability Uplift. In this role, Anubhav leads the development of the PMA as well as works as the Product Thinker of the Product Capability Uplift PMA [Product Management Academy].
Anubhav Sinha is a Product Coach, a product management practitioner and technology product geek with around one and half decade of the product management and development experience that ranges widely in the B2B and B2IB product space. He is known for contributing and creating products majorly in the start-up space, helping start-ups in their early stages and contributing industry product organisations as user-experience flow optimiser. He had served industry as Principal Product Owner [co-founder], Product and Design Thinking Coach, Product Owner and Transformation Coach.
Anubhav also has a rich experience in Designing and Crafting Product Culture Transformation for the large enterprise organisations that involves a deep know-how of the principles and practices involved in building and nurturing a strong product-thinking focused organization.
Anubhav holds a Post-Graduation in Marketing - IB and Bachelor of Engineering in Electrical and Electronics.
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