Unboxing the Power of a Product-Mindset: Why It's Essential for Success

A Product Mindset is a way of thinking that focuses on creating product solutions that provide real user value. It’s the foundation of Product Management, really. Good Product Managers know that keeping the customer front-and-center is the best and most sustainable way to create successful products. 

Developing a Product Mindset means pushing yourself to understand users and revisit your value proposition on an ongoing basis. People with a Product Mindset aren’t interested in creating products and pushing out features for the sake of it; rather, they are wholly focused on how effectively their product solves the user problem they set out to solve.

---

I have done a lot of workshop and webinar on Product management and Agile ways of working. I get asked a lot of questions about the “Product mindset” in my organisation at Deloitte, as Product Master. I have interacted with lot of clients looking to build the right thing for themselves and their customers. They often see “Product Mindset” as a magic wand to enable it.

Before diving deeper into the topic, “Product Mindset” has 2 words, “Product” which according to scrum guide is a vehicle to deliver Value and “Mindset” is an established set of attitudes of a person/group concerning values, philosophy, frame of mind, outlook and disposition. Combining these two means A Product Mindset is a way of thinking that focuses on creating product solutions that provide real user value.

Pretty Simple, Isn’t it. But most people don’t realise that product mindset is a bigger shift than they realise. The current worldview of the product mindset is that if you just think (smartly) about something enough, you will figure it all out and be successful. If you don’t do this, you will fail. That is why we need to have everyone thinking through things as much as possible with their superior product sense.

Unfortunately, this just isn’t true. No amount of thinking (smart or otherwise) will figure everything out before it happens. Especially when you are building something new, as most product people are.

Training Product mindset

Having worked in consulting, we often asked “So what” quite frequently to our associate consultant in order to synthesise insights from the facts. We are asked to ask “why” more. The reason for asking yourself “So what” and ask “why” more to the client is because you will be able to ask better questions and you will be better able to understand something about the true outcomes of the client are trying to achieve.

Let’s say you are an aspiring product manager, given a development team for developing a Music/Movie Streaming application on the Internet. You would transverse through a decision tree which is how you go through a set of decision points to get to a successful business.

However, in that process there will be many variables some may be known/unknown to the self and some maybe known/unkwown to others.

The Idea maze

The Idea Maze is a concept from a 2013 paper Market Research, Wireframing, and Design by Balaji S. Srinivasan.The Idea Maze is how you go through a set of decision points to get to a successful business. Netflix is often cited as a series of decisions that were needed before you could get their successful model (at least the one in 2013).

However, This is in the scenario where you have good domain expertise and industry knowledge. But, when the idea is completely novel, which is the most common scenario when we are building. The idea maze has lot of uncertainties and it may look like this:

Imagine you are building a live event streaming application for your organisation, which streams events from sports, rangoli and other to the members of your organisation. In this scenario, you may take cues from YT stream, FB Live but the use case is different, thus making a different problem to solve.

The thing that is missing is that you don’t actually know what’s beyond your current idea or decision. You need to employ your Market research skills, rapid prototyping and rapid experimentation skill to see what sticks to the wall.Let’s take an example of trading. You start out at 7:45 AM, see the trends of the market in US and other developing countries. You go through some of the market reports, Fed meetings Conclusions and what not. On the basis of facts, you identify some target shares and a strategy. You become certain as you transverse through the facts, insights, but when it comes to execution, you may find a downpour of buyer/seller targeting that stock, causing it to move against your expectations. You will have to do some firefighting, hedging to prevent your downside. You realize that market is unknown but ahead of the time[ driven by Illuminati]. This is the same scenario with idea Maze.

When you are working with a product mindset, you should realise that some of the factors are defined by the market forces, either you should do work around those factors, circumvent those factors or if you want to try something bold, change to factor to explore a niche blue-ocean opportunity.

But the intent is to progressively evolve. Vacuum tubes eventually lead to computers, bacterial life on earth led to humans. There was no plan to get from these very early stages to higher-level capabilities.

---

Okay, let’s do a thought- experiment, Imagine you are trying to cross a lake using stone:

In this picture, user is able to see the next step. However, in reality it looks like this:

You can’t see how to cross the lake or even what “crossing the lake” would mean as an end goal most of the time.

I deal with a wide range of people in my day-to-day work with products who are adamant that we are heading in the correct direction and achieving our goals. When someone is said to be good at "doing" a product, it is related to both product sense and taste. This confidence is not what the product mindset is about. This assurance is probably incorrect, which is why we ask “why" and “so what” so frequently.

The fundamental problem

Without the product mindset you would believe so much about the world that would be wrong. That is because the fundamental problem that the product mindset helps address is dealing with uncertainty.

You need to be less certain about a lot of the things you take for granted in product management in order to become more product-minded and adopt the product mindset with following methods:

• Objectives and Key responsibilities (OKRs)

• Goals

• Vision

• Strategy

• Design thinking with User persons

• Features and Epics

• User Story and Story Points

How to be less certain?

Although there are many tools and techniques to remove uncertainty and be more surgical about the product [we can cover those in later blogs]. But since we are sticking to mindset in this blog, one key aspect of being less certain starts with the growth mindset. If you believe that you can continuously evolve and grow, you can deal with uncertainty with greater confidence.

After imbibing the growth mindset, you can break free from your previous certainties with confidence. This is where it becomes tricky and extremely difficult to adopt the product mindset, because all our life we have been trained to be gauge and be certain in this world with a fixed schedule, to-do lists.

In my experience, working with the product teams, There are activities will help you get rid of certainty:

Be more curious: Try asking more questions about people, processes with the customer, sales and development team

Share uncertainty: Share the uncertain variables with the stakeholders with trade-offs

Practice it: This can be done with idk cards, case studies, decision-forcing games and other techniques you can use to build experiences of states of uncertainties.

This is a constant state of development! You always have another set of presumptions that are out of date.

I would like you to have less confidence in anything you are doing. Certainty could be comforting. Fear and anxiety can arise from uncertainty. However, there will always come a time when the certainty will not help you achieve your goals.

Embrace the product mindset, be more uncertain.