Shreyas Doshi on Product vs. Project Thinking
The Oprah of Product Management opines on how to think like a product person
I once took notes during a talk by the legendary Shreyas on the art of Product Thinking. If you don’t know, I’m a huge fan and bonafide super follower of Mr. Shreyas Doshi, who I like to call my personal Product Oprah for his compelling and authentic takes.
I found his framing of product vs. project thinking fantastic and thought I’d write it up to share.
Three big ideas
Explain product vs. project thinking.
Describe how you and your team can learn product thinking.
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.
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>.
When done in excess
Project thinking produces heroic efforts lacking results.
Product thinking produces great plans that gather dust.
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:
Suspend the project-thinking mindset.
Prioritize your real goals. Not deliverables. Ask: Why? So what? What effects do you want to create for your users?
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.
Generate options. Don’t shy away from big ideas. Embrace creativity and differentiation. Copying competitors is the inverse of differentiation.
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.
MOAR Discovery?
I’m likely, pretty surely, going to announce the second cohort of Product Discovery Fundamentals soon, depending on if the little monster I call my son lets me sleep or not.
If you enjoyed this piece, check out my course on Maven. You can enter your email to be notified when I announce the launch date.
https://maven.com/justin-williams/product-discovery-fundamentals
Well said, Justin. Product vs project thinking.