What Is Product Thinking?

Product thinking is the discipline of understanding, curating, prioritizing, and coordinating the myriad experience and design problems within an organization. In simple terms it helps identify the right problems to solve in order to create the maximum value for both the user and the business.

The Impact of Product Thinking

According to recent research published in Harvard Business Review, 75 to 95% of product launches fail every year. This is because most of these organizations do not focus on solving the real problems that matter. Product thinking will help you holistically understand and ensure delivery of the best product experience and the interdependencies across experiences by:

• Identifying the relevant users and problems before jumping to a solution;
• Evaluating how your user experience stacks up against other products in the market, to ensure that you identify the most significant, relevant problems;
• Aligning innovation with the vision and the goals for the product experience;
• Encouraging collaborative ideation, planning, and execution based on understanding the why.

Key Concepts

Here are a few key terms and concepts to understand before diving into the product thinking plays:

• Productization is the process of taking a design solution for an (or a set of) identified need or problem and developing it into a fully tested, packaged, and marketed product. A product in the context of this book is any digital screen, suite, platform, and/or service that is offered to the market to satisfy the needs of a user.
• The experience ecosystem incorporates the various users and their experiential journey in the context of the product. An ecosystem might include the users, objects, relationships, and interlocking technologies.
• The portfolio of problems is the spectrum of design problems you must solve in order to achieve your short‐, mid‐, and long‐term business goals in the pursuit of creating an effective product experience.

What to Expect in This Section

These plays will help you think about a broader product experience before the finer details. The product thinking plays will help you answer these questions:

• How do I define baseline and best‐in‐class product experiences? (Experience benchmarking play)
• How do I align for success at the beginning of the design phase? (Experience design brief play)
• How do I decide which problems to solve? (Design problem and opportunities play)
• How do I ensure the delivery of a great product experience? (Product experience planning play)
• How do I collaborate across the organization to drive seamless and informed product experience design? (Cross‐functional collaboration play)
• How do I catalyze great product experiences? (Product thinking program)

Users care more about experiences than features. These plays allow you to start differentiating designing experiences from the craft of detailed design.