Product Thinking
By: Namrata More
Tags: Product Design, Product Thinking, UX, Product Management, User Research

If you’re in confusion how far is Product approach or UX important, let’s first get to the ‘WHY’ of it, and yes this is the first step to product thinking ie. to know the ‘WHY’ of everything.

To know the Requirement | Market

To go for a product from a project, there are processes defined, but there is a different flow for every product, based on the target users. Understanding their perspective is vital to go with the correct direction.

UX Flow

Why UX flow? > To save time and money

Understanding the priority.

Eliminating non-required processes.

Following timeline.

Product thinking enables to understand the requirement and the priority in the given timeline. For example, chat functionality would be preferred over publishing stories and posts when it’s a gaming website.

Sprint planning [Reference]

And about sprint, a short race at full speed, for PMs a short, time-boxed period when a team works to complete a set amount of work. Sprints make you complete your work in steps, which eventually develops one cycle being a scrum, a agile framework. Product thinking gives us a prototype approach wherein approval of prototype before final build and launch gives the process an angle to grow exponentially.

For a sprint to work, the prioritization is based on some parameters, so the product is altogether a result of the three factors,

User, ie. need which raises the problem

Business, ie. market study and growth perspective

& the Technology, that connects both of these

Product thinking is basically the process initiated with the user’s need followed by the planning with respect to the growth perspective and the appropriate technological aspect.

“The only thing that matters for a startup is getting to a product-market fit” from “The only thing that matters” by Marc Andreessen explains us the importance of user’s experience study ie. understanding the user’s requirement and perspective.

Product thinking implies three questions -

WHY - Need of the product

HOW - Process to be followed

WHAT - The product

It’s vital that your process delivers a solution that solves a problem, a problem that the target customer has. Even if this seems very theoretical, the process implies correct for a bottom to top approach.

“In theory there’s no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.” — Yogi Berra.

Product thinking with respect to an idea > brand

Innovation is easy, however, product approach needs a focus on users using your product. We have seen a lot of similar ideas being launched in the market, but the one sustainable is the one with a study of the market at the first place. An idea to proceed from a concept to a brand has many stages of course and it’s not a one day stuff but has certain parameters to consider.

Three pillars of an idea

Desirability - is this what they want?

Feasibility - can we do it?

Viable - is it worth doing?

Your idea must fit into all of these to be the one. Feasibility or viability won’t even come into picture if we don’t create desirability at the first point. We achieve happy convergence of successful design, the sweet spot, by starting with desirability and then translating it through these other two dimensions.

There are many tools to depict the concept to planning stage. We’ll be going through the tools in the upcoming articles.