Thinking Beyond The Product: How Understanding Context Transforms Product Development
“The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.” — Peter Drucker
I often go on walks as those are the times I do my best thinking. It is also good exercise when you live near a mountain. Although it is occasionally distracting when you are thinking while doing your best to make it up a 45-degree hill that seems to go on forever.
On a recent walk, overheating as it’s summer in Atlanta, I listened to a podcast from McKinsey about digital and how companies can compete in the age of AI. Despite the content being geared toward the C Suite, something I am still determining if I want to reach, there was a brief diversion on building successful AI products.
YES! McKinsey used the word product in a conversation about digital and AI. I’ve arrived.
And while they did spend a hot minute talking about product, that’s beside the point.
Despite the heat melting my brain, one word stood out. CONTEXT — and the need to have big picture context when building an AI-first or digital product.
You might say, “duh,” what’s so special about that? Isn’t that obvious?
Yes and no. It depends on how you define context. Often, terms like ‘business’ context or ‘market’ context get thrown around. I’ve been guilty of this myself. Sometimes even using it in a passive-aggressive way.
But what does context really mean? And why is McKinsey, the world’s premier management consulting firm, talking about it?
Good question.
The Search for Meaning… of Context
When I returned from my walk, I scribbled “CONTEXT?” in my notebook. There is something magical about scribbling, doodling, and writing in a notebook. In this case, I wrote a note to explore CONTEXT after my cool down, some water, and a shower.
When I returned to it later, I started with good old mental gymnastics rather than turning to Google, Bing, CHATGPT, or some other magical AI tool. Why did this word stick with me? And why was its meaning eluding me?
I could look it up in the dictionary (eyes rolling). Wait, that’s a solid start.
According to Webster, context is 1) the parts of a discourse that surround a word or passage and can throw light on its meaning -or- 2) the interrelated conditions in which something exists or occurs.
Ok, maybe not so helpful. But a few more words stuck out — “can throw light on its meaning” and “interrelated conditions.”
And then something popped into my head — an end-to-end ecosystem.
Hmm. That’s it! In product management, we focus on a problem. That perplexing issue a user has. Unfortunately, we often look at the problem in isolation without looking at the interrelated conditions that illuminate the problem’s meaning.
While it is true your user needs to be center stage, they are on a stage with other actors, with influencers, with action going on around them and a story unfolding.
Therefore, to build a truly amazing product, you need to understand how that product fits in the end-to-end flow surrounding it — the ecosystem.
Guilty as charged. I’ve cut corners before when it comes to truly understanding the end-to-end flow, the ecosystem in which a product I built exists.
And this is where most products break — enterprise and consumer, professional and personal. They break because they don’t fit in the company’s ways of working, the department’s process, the person’s day, the flow of life, you name it.
Uber, India, Cash, and the Importance of Context
In the bustling streets of Mumbai, India, Sati finished a long day at work. Sati was eager to get home but dreading the thought of navigating through the city’s notorious traffic. At that moment, he took out his phone and opened the Uber app, a service he frequently used in San Francisco. But there was something different; hmm, he thought… the option to pay in cash? Intrigued, he selected the option and confirmed his ride.
Uber, a company born in the tech-savvy environment of Silicon Valley, initially tailored its services for a market comfortable with digital payments and craving convenience. As we all know, the app was a hit, and the company set its sights on global expansion. But as they quickly learned, what worked in San Francisco wouldn’t work everywhere.
Back to India — As Uber entered markets like India, the company faced new challenges. Credit cards and digital payments were less widely used in India than in the United States.
If they hadn’t paused and sought to understand this big picture, the context, the results could have been disastrous for Uber’s expansion plans. Instead, they adapted. Introducing a cash payment option in the app was a must for many Indians like Sati.
As they expanded further, they always sought to understand the local context, their riders’ lives, and the market conditions.
Uber’s context-driven approach continued beyond payment methods. In cities plagued by traffic jams, Uber introduced motorbike taxis as a quicker, more efficient means of transport. In regions where safety was a heightened concern, Uber implemented features like “RideCheck” to ensure the well-being of both drivers and passengers.
By paying attention to the local context in which it operated, Uber could offer a service that felt both global and personalized. This approach increased user adoption and ensured compliance with local regulations, thereby reducing the risk of legal complications.
As Sati stepped out of his Uber, cash in hand to pay the driver, he couldn’t help but appreciate the convenience he had just experienced. It was a small but significant reminder that even in a world driven by technology, understanding the human context is critical to product success.
Note: I’ve loosely mapped this story to facts about when Uber entered the Indian market, creating characters and wrapping a narrative around it.
Gathering Context as Critical Input
So, as you construct your story, consider the context around your users when they use the product. Context is the set of physical conditions and events that surround your user. For instance, your user accessing your product from a desktop at home or a smartphone in a supermarket is part of the context. This context is also important to share as part of the roadmap.
Imagine for a moment you were told to drive somewhere but not given the context of why or how. You were simply handed a set of discreet increments to piece together into a journey. If you could reach the destination, and that’s a big if, can you imagine your trip being delightful and/or efficient for you or your passengers? Absolutely not; it would be full of stress and delays. Yet piecing together discrete increments is exactly what we ask teams to do with roadmaps.
So, without exception, your job as a product manager is to enable your team to see the whole journey and put themselves in the user’s shoes through the roadmap.
Here are a few steps you can take to gather the right context:
- Look at the landscape and document it. This includes the flow in which the product exists, the ecosystem in which it operates, the end-to-end user journey in which it will be used, and the market in which it will exist. Do a thorough analysis and share the results with the team. The more they understand why, how, and where the product fits, the better their result will be.
- Work through an exercise I like to call ‘what would change if…’. Ask what would change in the landscape if your product entered? How would your user’s life look different? Pay particular attention to the impacts on the landscape around your product and the flow it interrupts. Then, write down how you will mitigate any negative impacts as context for the team building the product.
- Conduct user research. Ask the standard questions and then ask the ‘what would change if’ questions to get at the heart of the product impact within the flow of the user’s day. Think through with your team how you will minimize disruption and make the product fit seamlessly in the user’s day.
- Understand the business context. How will this product impact my company and support its strategy? It’s also important for your team to understand the impact and consequences the product will have for your company. Will it increase call volume? Will it require resources to be added to the customer success team?
- Develop a change plan with an aim for net zero impact. Whenever you ask a person, user, or company to adopt your product, your goal should be for it to slip into their flow seamlessly. To enter without interruption. Achieving this requires forethought by the team building the product, significant planning, and effort by the team launching and supporting it.
- Create feedback loops. Even though you will invest the time upfront to gather the context as input to the product development process, you will miss things. Make sure you develop a plan to gather feedback to add to the context for the team to enrich the product development process.
Wrapping it up — A reflection
Something important hit me on that walk. User problems exist in an ecosystem that must be balanced once your product is a part of it.
In nature, you can’t introduce a new species to an existing ecosystem without careful planning. And even then, there is a high, almost certain risk of some disruption to the balance.
When developing your product, you, therefore, need to understand the user’s problem deeply but also the context surrounding it. The flow. The ecosystem in which the product will operate and the balance your product cannot disrupt.
The story of Uber in India and beyond highlights the importance of context to product development and adaptation. You clearly can’t focus on the user’s problem to be solved and generalize. Understanding the bigger picture and the environment in which the product will be used is critical. You need to get into the user’s world, experience their flow, and focus on minimal disruption. Context enables you to do exactly that.
In the end, it’s not just about building products; it’s about building experiences. And to create meaningful experiences, we must embrace context’s power and importance. So, shed light on that which surrounds the place your product will exist in your user’s flow and plan to adapt.
📌 Follow me on:
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-utz/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@prodlabio/featured
Twitter: https://twitter.com/prodlabio
