Product School - Product Analytics

Product Sense

ability to make correct decisions even when faced with considerable ambiguity.

Goal Practice

  1. Write down all of the goals you can think of for the product.
  2. Consider who built the product. For example, for the US Highway system is owned by the government. The government has goals like fairness. Add any new goals to your list
  3. Who purchases and who uses the product? What motivated them to buy or use it? Is this a luxury good or a mass market good? Is it for entertainment or productivity? Add those goals to your list
  4. Look at the PR & Marketing material for the product — do any new goals come to mind?
  5. Repeat with another product. Consider technical and non-technical products, and be sure to pick mostly products where you are not the target audience, since those will stretch you less. Try it with your own product and competitive products. The more variety the better.

Product Teardown

Use a lot of products and pay attention to how they work, what they’re doing that’s new or unique, what they’re doing that’s common. Form your own opinion on how their design helps or hinders them in achieving their goals.

Our goal is to build an understanding of how the app onboards and engages users, how it solves the users’ problems, and what the company’s underlying strategy seems to be.

first things we evaluate is the user onboarding experience, specifically, how the value proposition and the UI of the app are conveyed to the user.We try to understand not only what we are seeing, but also why the product was designed as it was — what were the goals and which tradeoffs were made.

After the onboarding, we experiment with a broad a set of functionality of the product. We try to observe the interactions, whether we intuitively understand how the product is meant to work or whether we are constantly surprised by outcomes we didn’t expect. We also try to identify which UX paradigms the app adheres to and which it deliberately breaks. We look at whether interfaces are simple or complex. And lastly, we try to see how the product re-engages users (e.g., through push notifications, emails or an in-product notification mechanism).

we turn to strategic questions: Why did the creators of the app build it? What goals were they trying to achieve, and what hypotheses are at the center of how they are trying to achieve it? Who will use this and why? What tradeoffs were made? Do we think the product is going to be successful and why? How could that be measured?

The teardowns have an open, ad-hoc discussion format where people call out things they noticed, or raise questions that come to mind. At the end of the hour, though, we wrap up the discussion by asking some pointed questions so that we can both capture a summary of what we learned and also think about what we will do with this information.