Product vs. Project Thinking
Tags: productmanagement, productthinking
Published: 2023-03-23 19:54:08

I wrote up some notes based on a Shreyas Doshi talk on Product vs. Project Thinking, thought I’d share!🍹(also on [Substack](https://practicalproductdiscovery.substack.com/p/shreyas-doshi-on-product-thinking))

## Three big ideas

1. Explain product vs. project thinking.
2. Describe how you and your team can learn product thinking.
3. Encourage you to practice by applying product thinking to nearly anything.

**Product thinking is challenging to explain.**

Much like trying to describe the color orange, it is difficult to do without analogies. But once you see product thinking, you cannot unsee it.

On Twitter, people say: “Just friggin launch it and see! How can we be expected to know what works upfront?!”

- This is terrible advice.
- There are many methods we can use to get closer to the mark.
- Once you see product thinking in action, these techniques become easier to apply in your day-to-day.

## A Common PM Scenario:
A critical customer escalates a feature request to the CEO.

**The project thinking response:**

- Size the request.
- Recalibrate your roadmap to accommodate while attempting to make parallel progress on already-committed efforts.
- Recast launch dates.
- Ask the CEO to make a go/no-go call.

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/9ixzw67h62altwtlkltt.png)

**Project thinking is**

- Understanding expectations
- Formulating plans
- Marshaling resources
- Coordinating actions to meet said expectations

**Product thinking is**

- Understanding motivations
- Conceiving solutions
- Simulating their effects
- Selecting a path forward based on the effects you want to create



**Let us revisit the above common PM scenario, this time using the power of product thinking.**

PM speaks directly to <important customer> to deeply understand the ask. PM doesn’t rely on proxies:

- How does this help our buyer win?
- Or prevent them from losing?

**PM breaks the problem down into distinct parts:**

- Their ask is primarily to solve <problem one>
- <Problem two> is secondary and can be handled manually for the time being

**PM understands how a win with <important customer> could be parlayed into more significant gains:**

- If we build <requested feature>, <important customer> agrees to be featured as a reference customer. We’ll use this to capture more of <market segment>.

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/sgali8rneisqjjgu16ys.png)

**When done in excess**

- Project thinking produces heroic efforts lacking results.
- Product thinking produces great plans that gather dust.

**Scenario: a VP puts you on the spot about a proposed customer experience (!)**

- A project thinking response involves schedule and resources.
- A product thinking response involves motivations, insights, and strategy.

## How you and your team can learn product thinking:

1. Suspend the project-thinking mindset.
2. Prioritize your real goals. Not deliverables. Ask: Why? So what? What effects do you want to create for your users?
3. Understand your users’ needs. Pay particular attention to objections and friction points. The most important needs are those that the customer cannot directly articulate but come through indirectly via actions/stories.
4. Generate options. Don’t shy away from big ideas. Embrace creativity and differentiation. Copying competitors is the inverse of differentiation.
5. Simulate. Visualize how each option will play out. Ask yourself what happens next. Gameplan it out. Build prototypes or other testable assets.

## Study examples of product thinking in the wild 🐅

- Stripe’s checkout page builder allows you to create a custom checkout experience so you can envision it working in your product.
- The iOS feature copies in an SMS confirmation code with a tap.
- Cash App became a hit when it designed a card that didn’t make people feel poor.
- Duolingo uses gamification to help you learn a foreign language.
- Others? I feel like I should have a much longer list. Help good people - send me some examples of product thinking.

**Full post:**
https://practicalproductdiscovery.substack.com/p/shreyas-doshi-on-product-thinking