Developing Product Sense: A Structured Approach Through Product Teardowns
Compounded development of product sense
In this article. learn more about how a Product Teardown can help improve your product sense. Interested in joining me and a small group of like-minded individuals in a monthly product teardown session to collectively enhance our product sense? Just share your interest by clicking the button and sharing your interest.
There is a lot written about Product Sense and its importance for Product Managers. Product Thinking, Product Intuition, and Product Sense all describe the same concept. Product Sense is simply the ability to creatively build products and solutions that solve customer jobs and outcomes. Product Managers can do that when they have a deep understanding of the customer, industry, business, and their own products.
However, the word “sense” might indicate that people innately have it. While some people might be naturally better at it, Product Sense is something that can be developed over time. I wrote about a few ways to develop product sense here. In this article, you can find a structured way to develop product sense through “Product Teardowns”
Join me and a small group of like-minded individuals in a monthly product teardown session to collectively enhance our product sense. If you'd like to participate, please fill out this form to sign up.
How to do a Product Teardown
Developing product sense requires continuous effort. Conducting product teardowns is an effective way to cultivate this skill over time. It is recommended to perform this exercise frequently, either on a weekly or monthly basis. You can do this on your own or join our small group on a monthly basis.
To get started, select a product that you want to deconstruct.
Sign up for the product and use it for a few days.
Take note of everything, from the sign-up process to onboarding, and how you use the product.
Delve into the product's website, read customer reviews, explore its marketing efforts, and research competing products and companies.
After spending a considerable amount of time with the product, contemplate the following questions. The duration of this step can range from a few hours to several days:
Questions to think through to understand a product
These are some framing questions to be thought through.
Customer and core job to be done
Who is the target customer?
What is the customer's job to be done?
Product
What is the product's value proposition?
How does the product solve its target customers' problems?
How does this product help you understand its value in the first interaction?
What’s the signup and onboarding process like?
How intuitive is the product's user interface, and does it require any additional training or a learning curve?
How easy or hard was it for you to complete the job you set out to do?
How did you feel while exploring the product?
What are the product's unique features?
What is the call to action (CTA)
How reliable and durable is the product? Are there any potential issues or defects?
Go to Market
How are customers discovering the product?
Do you observe any product-led growth tactics?
Business Model
How do you think the product is going to monetize it?
If you were an investor, would you invest $100k in it?
What is the product's pricing model? Is it a one-time purchase, subscription-based, freemium, or something else?
Are there any upsell or cross-sell opportunities within the product?
What are the ways the company is generating revenue? - adding on premium features, ads or sponsorships, affiliate marketing, partnerships, licensing or white-labeling the technology to other companies, in-app purchases, data monetization,
Competition
Who are the main competitors of the product?
How does the product compare to its competitors?
How are they solving the problem differently? What is their unique value proposition in comparison to competitors?
What are the weaknesses of the product in comparison to its competitors?
How does the product compare to its competitors in terms of price, features, and quality?
What is the market share of the product and its competitors?
How long have the competitors been in the market and what is their history?
How does the marketing and branding of the product compare to its competitors?
What are the reviews and ratings of the product in comparison to its competitors?
Improvements
What are the product's shortcomings?
If you were the product manager, how would you improve it? What would you change?
How would you improve the user experience?
Are there other customer segments or personas that could find this product useful? How can they be targeted or captured?
What product-led growth tactics would you propose?
By systematically answering these questions, you'll gain a comprehensive understanding of the product, its strengths, and weaknesses, and its competitive landscape.
Product Teardown Workshops
I host a monthly product teardown for a small group of people to help collectively develop product sense. If you are interested in signing up for one please fill this form. If you want to run your own session, here is how I found it to be effective.
Create a backlog of a list of products proposed by participants. Participants can keep adding to this list but we pick the one to focus on in each session.
Everybody tries the selected product before joining the next session. To do this well, I encourage everybody to try the product, browse through the site of the product, do some online research to understand competition and customer perception, read through app reviews, etc,
When the session starts, we remind everybody about the format of the session. If it is a group of ~8 people we run it as one big group. If there are more than 8 people, I suggest you break out into groups of 4-5.
Each group will then go through a tear-down of the product using all or some of the question prompts listed above
After 60 mins of small group assessment, everybody joins back the main session
In the main session, each group talks about their key observations and findings.
This article shares a lot of detailed ideas on how to improve product sense. Even if you observed one or a few questions about a product every week, you will see compounded results in improving your product sense.
Some Other Helpful Resources
Product Teardown by The Product Folks
All first-time UX teardowns by User Onboard
How to improve product sense — a practical guide by Austin Yang
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This is very helpful! Thanks for sharing.