What is a good product mindset?

I still find it a bit crazy how many developers, business analysts, or engineering leaders don’t believe that product thinking is critical to their overall success. Having a good product mindset will help smooth out “agile” processes, drive team ownership, and produce overall better results.

Everyone in engineering needs a product mindset

So what is The Product Mindset? In its simplest form, Its a way or thinking, about being curious, using critical thinking skills, and in the end about providing value to the products customer. For anyone who has worked with a Product person in the past, it can be easy to think that Product Mindset is for... well.. Product people. That really couldn't be further from the truth.

Just about any job, function, or process, in the end, has an end user or customer. Say you're a barista at my local coffee shop, whom I couldn't live without, the patrons would be your end user. If you're in maintenance at a local recreation center, keeping all of the parents and children happy falls on your shoulders. If you have an end user or customer… then you have a product. Thinking about it this way can really drive overall improvement for whatever it is that you do.

If what you have is a product then you will want to understand the users/consumers of your product. What group or groups of people are your target audience? What drives them to your product? What is their age or demographics? In the product management or user experience space, we would refer to these as personas. While it makes sense to understand your target audience, it also makes sense to understand the groups of people that may not use your product.

An easy jump would be to "give the customer what they want", while that might seem like a good slogan it can really miss the mark if you are not careful. If you where to give people what they want, you could lose out on a lot of innovation or miss a market trend. There are many times in the past where polls would show a outcome that completely missed a market shift.

Let jump in way back machine and talk about late 1800 and early 1900. One of the big issues of the day was how to travel from one city to another, getting across town, or from a farm into the city. There were two options at this point, trains which were great for long cross country trips or horse and buggies. Both of these options had pros and cons but the overall sentiment of the 'customer' was that they needed a faster horse. As we all know, a faster horse never came but the automobile changed the world as we know it.

This leads to one of the primary goals of a product mindset, understanding the customers pain points or problems. This is the key to unlocking the potential of your offering or service regardless of what you selling. If you run a coffee shop, understand your rush hours and the people that come ruing them. Maybe you could double your traffic by having a drive through or express lane for certain brews. This will be hard to know if you don’t understand your customers, what drives them, and they value they expect. This delivery of value is why your customers show up or not.

Great so now you are thinking about delivering value! Now lets go off and make a bunch of changes to our product/service.... right?!? Unfortunately, no, not yet.

How certain are we that people really have the problems you are describing? There are mountains of instances where people have places a high level of certainty about a perceived problem that just turned out to be false. Us humans are really bad at estimating and also tend to fall into the trap of certainty bias, or believing something as fact even if its based on a hunch. Let take a look at a couple of examples. How many people drink coffee or tea every morning? How many people live in Australia are left handed? Or an interesting interview questions, how many man-holes are there in New York City?

The one thing that I know for sure is that you will most likely get the answers of these questions wrong. But thats Ok, I would as well. This leads us to another critical piece of the product mindset. Validated learning through research and experimentation to validate a hypothesis. Validated learning will allow you to be certain that people actually experience the problem and are looking for a way to solve it. This is commonly referred to as Product Market Fit.

So what would something like this look like? The first piece is to gather as much data as possible. This can be done through research mechanisms like Google, industry research analysts, or any other trusted source. The best source, in my opinion, is to gather information from people that already use your product or service. This can be done through surveys, analyzing sales trends, feedback forms or any other mechanism that makes sense in your situation.

This data will then be the foundation for your next hypothesis usually stated something like this; I believe that x will lead to y and impact metic z by n. This format, or something very similar, is very important. Take this example, I believe that fixing all new software bugs in less than 48 hours. This sounds great! Right? This will not turn out well. How do you know if your successful? Having the metric included lets you know if your hypothesis is true or not.

I believe that fixing all software bugs in less than 48 hours will improve customer satisfaction from 45% to greater than 55%. This is a much better way of looking at it! But is it perfect… unfortunately not. It handles the primary goal of driving customer value but has a gapping hole. Say you are successful and you validate your hypothesis but your support and engineering costs double. This would have a serious impact to any organization and the margin they are trying to hit.

So lets try this one more time. How about this; I believe that fixing all new software bugs in less than 48 will improve customer satisfaction from 45% to greater than 55% while keeping our support and engineering costs < 5% increase. This is now a fantastic hypothesis that has bounds put on it and can be validated true or false.

Now it is time to rinse and repeat for future hypothesis and validation. In this example, the things that jumps out at me is the 48 hour mark. Would there be any difference between fixing bugs in 2 weeks vs 48 hours? Would that have an impact on the overall costs? This iteration is how you can drive the most value for your clients while still controlling your costs.

This cycle of building a hypothesis, testing it out, deriving the best outcomes, and repeating is the key to having a good product mindset. Get to know your users, understanding that just about everything is a product, and having empathy will help you drive into the future. In practice, it can be much harder than this article makes it sounds but this mindset is a good set of guardrails to use for the future.