Questions to Help You Shape Your Product
Product Managers are usually in charge 3 important tasks: shape the product, ship the product and synchronize the people. Each of these is a vast domain of expertise and also a very abstract term. So in this post I’ll take a stand on what shaping means to me and maybe it’ll help you build the right product.
Product Shaping: from ideation to experience
Shaping a product means getting out of the fuzzy, uncertain and uncomfortable “ideation zone” to head to the “experience zone”, a place where you start to have some clues about who will use the product, what for, and what will be its impact on people’s lives.
Ideation zone is made of generalizations, assumptions, preconceived ideas, quantitative data and off-ground studies and personas, and no experience whatsoever on the field.
Experience zone, on the opposite, is all about heuristics, tests, insights, qualitative data, precision, fine targeting, nuance. You know when you are in Experience zone when you keep learning about your users everyday, when you gain “experience”.
This post contains most of the questions I keep asking myself when trying to get from ideation to experience.
Why Product Shaping?
Ideas, especially product ideas, are fragile. They need to be nurtured, worked on and chiseled, and that’s precisely what shaping is for. Shaping is probably the hardest part (and most important one) of Product Management. There is no shaping without experiments. Shaping is giving structure to the experience you gain. It’s a combination of
- vision : depicting the big picture and the impact of the product on people’s lives. For this you need a sense of reality and a fine understanding of your customers’ context.
- positioning : deciding where — and when — to stand in the value chain and in people’s lives. For this you need a solid business culture and an genuine interest in history and brands.
- value : expressing value and purpose in tangible outcomes for users and customers. For this you need to go out in the field and meet with them.
- strategy : how to keep the other three in balance while reaching product market fit. For this, you need to love the people you are working for (your customers) and have an acute sense of observation.
Shaping = vision + value + positioning + strategy
1. Vision
The product vision should be an inspiring phrase that gives strong direction and purpose. It should be unique, non-transposable, and divisive. One product cannot please everyone (and should not please everyone) and the product vision should reflect the product’s take on this.
Vision is a bet you place because you’ve understood something no one has yet about the future, people, trends or society. Vision is your intuition speaking out loud.
“We want to change the way people consume coffee so that it becomes a luxury product and a reflection of their social status.”
“The number of websites is growing exponentially and very soon no directory will be able to list them all. So we’re going to index the content of web pages and find a way to search through them easily.”
Vision questions and tools
- What do I observe and understand, that no one / very few people have understood?
- What are the weak signals that corroborate my intuitions?
- What’s the purpose of the product I want to build?
- What similar product or service do I admire and why? What is their vision?
- How am I going to build it and have the impact I want? This question is less about strategy, tools or means (money) and more about mindset and attitude: are you going to be an aggressive player? A cooperative one? What do you want to be remembered for?
2. Positionning
Products land into existing ecosystems of competitors, partners and related products. As a Product Manager it is your role to understand this ecosystem and have a bird’s-eye view of it to be able to answer those questions.
- What market do I want to land on? why? and most importantly, when?Is it the right time to build it? are we early on the market? late? Lots of products fail due to lack of momentum : good product idea, good execution but bad timing. Have a look at Killed by Google or Startup Graveyard or Autopsy for examples.
- What does the ecosystem of my product look like? Who are the other players? who is the best right now and why? conduct a Competitive Audit
- What is the role of my product in its ecosystem? replace a major player? coordinate actors? how’s the competition answering this question?
- When does my product show up in the life of my user? What particular event could trigger the use of my product by the users?
- If the market changes how will I have to adapt? (make a wild assumption) Will I have to reposition the product?
Questioning your product position in the value chain is not something you do only once at the beginning of the product lifecycle. It’s something you have to challenge all the time because an economic market is a complex living creature.
Keep challenging your position (or adapting it), document your thoughts and experiments in a journal (whatever the format) and map the ecosystem so you can analyse the slight shifts you will have to make. Draw simple diagrams to explain your positionning. To kickstart your thinking you can take a look at these models
Monopolistic model
You create a new position “upfront” in the ecosystem : you place your product in front of other players as the only entry point and, to succeed, you must be able to propose the entire offer to your customers.
That’s what Booking or Doctolib do. This position is very lucrative but risky and hard to reach because
- there can be only one (as the name “monopolistic” suggests). You succeed only if you can offer your customer the entire range of the offer. Booking makes no sense if it only displays half of the available hotels. Doctolib will have succeedeed when all doctors are present on the platform.
- it generally means acquisitions as growth engine and thus a lot of cash to sustain the growth phase made of competitors fusions & acquisitions to concentrate the power.
- it takes time
- it is potentially subject to (current or future) anti-monopoly reglementation
Marketplace model
With this position in the ecosystem your product makes matches between supply and demand.
A popular model (Blablacar, Airbnb, Uber, Tinder, etc.) but hard to reach because
- you have to be on a mass market in order to have both Supply and Demand in great quantity and be able to make a good match
- one side generally performs better than the other, you‘ll have to start with it: hard things first.
- two sides = twice as much work in terms of understanding your customers, delivering value, marketing energy, etc.
“Shortcut” model
The role of your product in this model is to bypass or eliminate one or several existing actors in the value chain. This has been the realm of “destructive innovation” and all products that tend to digitalize a practice or squeeze an intermediary.
Bypassing intermediaries is the essence of most online business and this model is popular since the dawn of the Internet. And will still be relevant, unfortunately, with the advent of AI and robots.
Interoperability model
The role of your product in this model is to coordinate all the actors in the value chain towards the same goal. For instance, you might want to create a platform to ensure traceability for food ingredients. Then you’ll have to coordinate farmers, producers, cooperatives, buyers, transformers, etc. on your platform to provide traceability and transparency to your users (just as Tilkal does).
Interoperability is a powerful and very promising model boosted by the rise and maturity of APIs everywhere (it is the core business of Zapier, n8n or integromat to help you interconnect platforms and data). But it is also quite long and complex to achieve. The main pain point then is to decide between cooperative and adversarial interoperability (also, Steh Godin made a very good episode in his Akimbo podcast about adversarial interoperability). Both takes are hard to achieve.
Of course there are tons of other positioning models and you can come up with yours. Just don’t forget to map it :)
3. Value
Value is easier to express, though always subjective.
There is a before and an after your product and value expresses the shift between before and after.
A bit more operational and tangible, it explains the promise, the expected outcomes of using your product. there should be a before your product and an after your product in your customers’ lives and that’s what your value proposition should frame.
Value questions and tools
Here are many questions to work on your product’s value proposition
- What’s the deep psychological reason my users will want my product?
- When does my product comes into people’s lives? When do they stop using it? Is there a product before or after me?
- What changes do I want my product to bring to its users lives?
- What do I want users to say about my product when they speak about it to other potential users?
- What is the real value of my product, what will users will really use it for?
- Ask yourself (and your prospects) the metaphorical question and try to fill in this assertion “our product is actually like X but for Y”
- Whenever possible show and incarnate the usage of your product. Video is a very good way of showing your value proposition.
The important thing to check is that your value proposition contains mostly outcomes (benefits for the user). Learn to make the difference between outcomes (the “what for”) and the features (the “what”).
Your role as a Product Manager is to keep reasoning in terms of outcomes so that teams find more granularity and flexibility in implementation. It is also to make everyone aware that not all solutions are code-related ;)
As for tools, you can use the Lean Canvas or the Value Proposition Canvas but the process I like most is Working Backwards from Amazon described here or there. Also, a good notepad does 99% of the work : write down all your ideas and refine often.
4. Strategy
Last part of product shaping is strategy : “knowing why we want to do what we want to do, how do we get there?”. And because products are much like human beings, it’s never good to separate the head from the legs, strategy (the legs) is something that you want to think of very early in the process.
Strategy questions (in no particular order)
- Are there any events that could create momentum for my product? (like a world cup / a trade fair / elections / etc.)
- Does my product depend on the life cycle of another product?
- How can I grow my product with less effort? Is there a locomotive I can hold on to to get traction (like a network / another actor) ? Think about Tabby, an open source vehicle that made the deliberate choice not to design a body for their car, thus allowing the emergence of an ecosystem of body builders around its concept, who use Tabby as a locomotive.
- Are there any partnerships I can activate now?
- Are they any changes in regulations I have to anticipate? surf on? fear?
- Is there a niche I can address rapidly?
- Why not go B to B?
- What’s my growth engine? (sticky / paid or viral ?)
In Short
To sum it up, product shaping includes many mid and long-term activities: thinking, benchmarking, mapping, exploring, prototyping, refining.
- vision : what is it that you have understood about the future / your users / society and that you want to have an impact on?
- positioning : where, when and how do you stand in the value chain?
- value : what does the life of your customer look like after using your product? what triggers its usage?
- strategy : how are you going to accomplish your vision while delivering value early and often to your users?
It takes time and it’s not uncommon to change directions while giving shape to a product. Though many people think that failure is part of the process, that failure is good and inevitable, I don’t agree. The ones who shape good products are the ones who learn faster than others ; sometimes learning happens through failure but there are still other ways to learn. Trying to answer all these questions is a good start.
If you like this article, you might be interested in my “Working on Work” newsletter. Because there should be a space and time between “this is what we have to do” and “let’s do it”, I’d like to offer you this time to think about *how* work can be done.
