By: Tapan Vora, Associate Director – Product Engineering

Curious about how can we build a Product Thinking Culture? This blog explores the nuances of Design Thinking Culture and how it can benefit organizations.

The world is embracing one technology after another. User experiences are increasingly being confined to the digital realm. This reiterates that modern organizations cannot consider digital experiences as the second option but must also embrace a design thinking culture. The centrality of a product thinking culture can no longer be challenged. All product-based companies today know the significance of culture for a sustainable model.

You may ask: “How important is a product thinking culture?” It would be more accurate to ask: “How obsessed should we be with building a product thinking culture?”

At first, obsessing over a product-first culture may not make much sense for many companies. The product is not the only thing that gets affected by design thinking culture. Therefore, it takes multiple products to make a business viable.
You cannot deny that your organization’s success depends on how well you can keep up with new digital trends. Invest enough resources into working on them and how well you can retain your users over time.

A product-first culture should be a priority no matter what industry you’re in. It’s just a matter of time before we start abandoning non-digital alternatives en masse.

Traditional vs. ‘Product Thinking’ development cycles

Traditional development cycles emphasize a project management culture. Specifically, where development teams analyze the requirements and deliver ready solutions that meet them. They are then offloaded to a separate operations team for maintenance and support.

In the new-age ‘Product Thinking’ model, teams need to rethink their entire development cycles. This includes how they source insights about user needs, understand the business objectives, embrace the concept of design thinking culture, and plan out the quickest way to roll out new feature sets during new product development. This will only be possible if teams own their products throughout their lifecycle, including stages such as:

• Product envisioning and discovery
• Product delivery
• Product optimization
• Product evolution

How to Build a Product Thinking Culture

Building a product thinking culture is all about empowering the development teams.

You need to give the teams enough autonomy and resources to imagine, build, and deliver solutions. This is also required for potential problems that may materialize in the future.

On that note, let’s explore the framework that will empower you to build a product thinking culture in your organization.

Phase 1: Understanding the Users

This phase is all about validating assumptions and spotting opportunities.

As a product leader, your first challenge is to make the development teams understand the users deeper. You can do this by delegating them to user research tasks that will help them interact with various user groups. This is mainly in an objective setting to embrace a design thinking culture instead of having one-sided conversations.

This would also help them re-evaluate how they feel about certain features on their platforms. For example, there might be some features that most users have never used.

Gathering user insights will help teams identify potential opportunities and redefine the scope of their projects. They will also understand what is required from a user’s perspective.

Some product thinking example questions to answer in this phase include:

• Who are the direct users?
• Who are the impacted users?
• What are the users trying to achieve?

Phase 2: Unearthing Market Gaps

This phase is all about validating the opportunity in the market after understanding your users. The proposed solution may be for new product development, enhanced features of an existing product, or even rationalizing products that already exist on your platforms. This is where teams will get an opportunity to experiment with their ideas. They can test them against market data and user insights they’ve picked up earlier.

Questions to answer in this phase include:

• What are the user problems that exist in the market?
• What potential opportunities or market gaps can help you generate revenue?
• Are the market gaps big enough? Are they worth solving?

Phase 3: Finding an Innovative Solution That Can Address These Gaps

This phase is all about creating a solution to fill the market gaps and help you acquire new users. Teams will have to work together with the business stakeholders to understand their product vision. Additionally, they can define specific user problems within that market or opportunity and develop a solution to address these gaps.

Questions to answer in this phase include:

• Does our solution address the gaps so that value is created for the users?
• How can we make the solution sustainable by monetizing it correctly?
• Have we identified any innovation that can bring in 10x ROI?

Phase 4: Building and Testing the Product

This phase is about testing the initial idea, creating a hypothesis, and building it into a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Once the MVP is delivered to users for testing, product teams will need to collect data and iterate. Then, if the solution is validated, you can move to the next phase. If it is invalidated, you will have to go back to the drawing board and develop a better solution.

This might seem counterproductive, but it is better to validate an idea as early as possible and de-risk the solution, especially if it has the potential to bring in huge returns.

Questions to answer in this phase include:

• What is the best way to test the solution quickly, efficiently, and affordably?
• Can we test new features using a closed beta program?
• How can we fix the gaps in our product before making it public?

Phase 5: Identifying and Following the Right Metrics

It is essential to understand how your existing users behave and their problems. You can do this by setting up the right metrics to help you track user behavior at every step of their journey. Data from these metrics will be instrumental for product managers to make informed decisions on the future of their products and prioritize new features.

Testing a product with a small set of users is the best way to determine if new ideas will work in the market. Teams need to focus on qualitative and quantitative data. Both data types can give varying insights into how users engage with their products. They should also ensure that they don’t fall for vanity metrics such as app downloads, page views, etc.

Questions to answer in this phase include:

• What are the performance indicators that show whether our solution is working?
• How can we measure user engagement metrics at each step of the funnel?
• Are there any vanity metrics that teams should be focusing on?
• What metrics will tell us if we are on the path to maximum value creation?
• How can we build the instrumentation to track metrics continuously?
• Do we have enough granularity to know why products or features fail when and if they do?

Phase 6: Data-driven Decisions And a Culture of Experimentation

In the previous phase, product managers will understand how their products perform in the market. They should collaborate with teams and develop several hypotheses to drive future decision-making. Next, they need to identify whether actionable data can help validate their ideas. Once validated, they return to the drawing board to test new hypotheses in real time.

Questions to answer in this phase include:

• What are the best ways to experiment with our metrics?
• How can we prioritize which stories should be tested first?
• How do we efficiently run tests within our development cycle?
• Finally, how do we constantly recognize new avenues of value creation?

Product lifecycle from solution fit to scale

To implement product thinking at scale, you need to have a constant backlog of ideas and allocate resources dynamically. A culture of ceaseless experimentation and a strong leadership commitment to every product’s vision is also required. Every product leader and their respective team must understand why products must be built with users at the center.

The best way to meet such needs is to have a streamlined technological foundation central to all product teams. It should be easily reusable with the same technology foundations and design components. It is done to get every product on the same page. It also needs to be comprehensive enough so that product managers can get actionable data at every step in their decision-making process.

Conclusion

To build a product thinking culture, enterprises need to identify and follow the right metrics. They must also create a data-driven decision-making process and have a culture of experimentation as advocated by a design thinking culture. This will help them make informed decisions about their products and prioritize new features.

Additionally, enterprises must have a streamlined technological foundation that is easily reusable across all product teams. This will aid in ensuring that all products are built with users at the center of their design ideology. Enterprises will only then build a product thinking culture that drives sustainable growth and value creation.