Product Design Thinking Framework | What is the focus of product decision-making?

The author of this article focuses on some ways of thinking and behavioral habits in product decision-making.

The products I have made are roughly the following types: commodities (wine, home textiles, small appliances, creative gifts, etc.), platforms ( e-commerce , SAAS, social networking ), service-oriented apps (cold chain, finance, medical care, last-mile O2O services). No matter which type, when they are classified into the large category of Internet products, I almost think that these products are tools to satisfy users through the Internet, and the key word is "satisfying user needs." Therefore, I once had a very superficial understanding that the core of product decision-making is "user demand driven". Take user needs and product positioning as the premise of product decision-making. Once user needs and product positioning are clear, you can start the product decision-making process.

Shouldn’t the product decision here be centered on “user demand driven”? Because if user demand is the driving force, then decisions on competition, internal and other resources can be made. In this way, we can objectively drive product decisions based on user needs rather than based on personal experience, leadership decisions, or competitive pressure.

This theory will always be correct unless applied to other business scenarios, because the basis of the viewpoint is objective and without any subjective environment. But when you add this point of view to the commercial factors of the company's survival, commercial value users, effective traffic and other products, let's think about this point again.

I once shared that "the value of a company lies in its users, but our goal is not to maximize user satisfaction." The real difficulty in making product decisions is not what to do, but what not to do? Not doing something means that your way of thinking, theoretical framework and implementation ability must be very strong.

I once told my company’s product manager :

The most important thing for a product manager is empathy.

The user group has simple thinking, is impulsive, emotional and follows trends. No matter how complex the background is, what is presented to the user must be simple. Making product decisions is about ensuring that the decisions you make are simple in terms of user presentation.

In the past year, I have met nearly 500 product managers. Most of them think of those very interesting, simple, beautiful and user-friendly small features when designing products. These interesting designs are certainly worthy of recognition and they have their own value.

But in reality, we cannot deny that these tiny features are only a small part of the product, and most of them are designs that solve some of the users’ “itch points”. If you want to become a more mature product manager, you can't just be smart about these little itch points. How to more clearly determine the driving force behind each product design decision?

Analogous to many current C-end user products, most of them are driven by user needs and use data feedback to assist decision-making. The most important thing to do or not to make a product decision is to understand the objectivity of the demand:

1. The size of the demand;
2. The whole process of demand;
3. Consistency of requirements.

Prioritize and stratify products

By judging the needs, we can sort out the priorities and levels of products:

1. Prioritization

I won’t discuss the specific method of prioritization here, as there are many articles on this topic. I will only talk about the way of thinking. In product decision-making priorities, scarcity is a fundamental issue in product design and user experience (more on user experience in the next section).

Mali once said:

Resources are scarce, both from the perspective of equipment (hardware) and users.

In terms of devices, screen size and interaction technology are limited. We need to "cram" the interface and data into a limited space and only allow users to use them in limited interaction methods (such as touch). On the user side, human cognitive abilities are scarce, and their understanding, memory, existing experience and knowledge are all limited.

Therefore, the first thing that product design needs to solve is the problem of optimizing the allocation of these scarce resources. This relies on the ability to prioritize, know what is important and what is less important, and allocate the right resources to the right objects.

This is a decision-making issue, and it is based on the cognitive judgment of demand.

Development resources, operational resources and marketing resources are also scarce. No matter the size of the company, there is always more that needs to be done than the existing human resources. This also determines that we must use the best steel where it is most effective and allocate resources to areas where the user experience utility is large enough. Therefore, we must also understand the priorities of various objects in product design and development. I am in "What do product managers in startups need to do? 》 contains a sharing about “knowing how to explore product solutions and make judgments on product opportunities”.

We often talk about subtraction, but the core is actually dealing with priorities. The grasp of priorities in design allows us to put the truly important functions, content, and interface elements in prominent positions, display them with the most interface resources, weaken and hide the secondary parts, and simply cut off the tertiary parts.

Therefore, when we are faced with a product, we should have a clear structural priority in our mind, including visual priority, interaction priority, content/information priority, demand priority, and user priority. Just like a butcher cutting up an ox, this is the first step to truly delve into the product.

2. Hierarchy

Hierarchy means strong and weak. If there are elements that need to be emphasized, there must be elements that need to be weakened. The best way to highlight an object is to weaken the surrounding objects, so that there is a subject and a background. It sounds simple, but this is often where problems arise, because there are too many temptations, and people want to emphasize every element and are reluctant to give up any of them. In the end, everything is trying to attract attention, and no place can be eye-catching.

Similarly, products all have core functions, which are the reason for their existence. It either meets the needs of users or helps users solve some problems, and therefore it is a meaningful product. But if we list all the functions of the product in the end and find that they are all core functions, then no function is a core function. Here I introduce a few of our ways of thinking:

In this way, the hierarchical framework of the core functions is completed, and then the functional focus and key factors are listed. Let's briefly talk about the last two:

• Functional focus: demand analysis + product positioning → basic function list, understand user behavior → function decomposition + determine user flow → determine functional focus;
• Key factor: The first two steps are the same, just emphasize the word "more" in the last step.

Let me say a few more words about the concept of hierarchy. When making product decisions, sorting out the hierarchy means grouping and organization. It is somewhat similar to a technically open product development document, which turns scattered points into surfaces and then combines the surfaces together. Product design is sometimes like mind reading. You need to predict in advance which elements users will think should be together, just like in daily life, the medicines in your home are placed together, and the tools are in another place. Allow users to find the major categories and directions first, and then go deeper into the next level to find the exact location.

Product logic is the cornerstone of product decision-making

Having good product logic will help you make product decisions more efficiently, and most good product logic is honed in actual combat. In my own entrepreneurial project, I once made a lot of invalid product feature decisions due to confusion in product logic.

For example, in medical projects, the active and passive choices of doctors and users, the information matching between investors on the capital side and bearers on the asset side in financial projects, and the display ratio, degree and depth of diners, merchants and logistics information in catering O2O have all been sorted out to a certain extent. However, this also allows me to have a set of product logic that suits me when I am making products:

1. Product user scope : When making any product, I will first clarify my user scope, that is, how many people will use this product or function;
2. Frequency of product use : For example, in the medical projects I work on, the frequency of doctors’ follow-up visits and patients’ scheduled visits, the frequency of the upstream and downstream of the same scene line within a unit of time, can determine which end is easier for me to acquire users;
3. The relevance of usage scenarios to existing products . To give an analogy, in the Internet finance industry, the segmentation of the asset side has become a general trend, and the optimization and scenario-based nature of the asset side correspond to the investor attributes of the funds. What kind of asset allocation, what kind of investment users, and a high degree of scenario-based nature will greatly increase the user stickiness of your product.
4. Product personnel are discoverers of needs rather than creators . It was great that Steve Jobs invented the iPhone, but he also killed almost all of Apple’s products before that. A product is not necessarily better if it has more functions. When making decisions, saying no is much more important than saying yes. A product person must learn and have the courage and logic to reject many ideas in order to truly produce a valuable product concept.
5. What resources are available for cooperation ? How much technical, design and operation support are available to you? Do you support your plan?
6. In terms of competitive barriers , in addition to technical barriers, the more important ones are business barriers.

A few additional points:

1. In the logic of the entire product decision, it is necessary to understand whether an oligopoly situation has been formed in the competitive landscape.

BAT are all keen on plagiarism, and often think they have the advantage of controlling traffic. But even with an entry advantage, it will still be difficult to succeed if an oligopoly has already been formed. For example, imitate Dianping.com. It is impossible for an ordinary company to succeed in entering an already oligopolistic market. Unless you are engaging in a flanking attack, concentrate your energy on one area. For example, Toutiao has dominated the news browsing users on mobile phones with its automatic recommendations, and has gained a large number of users as the four major news portals firmly dominate the market.

2. Pay attention to user group segmentation

Product users are often clearly divided into: new users, loyal users, negative users, tired users, churned users, high-frequency users, high-income users, low-income users, older users, young users... A product scenario may have two or three different main groups, or main roles. What are the purposes of these different roles using the product? What will the usage process be like? What expectations and demands will there be for the product? What is the key point? Can it be integrated?

Conclusion

When making product decisions, it is necessary to understand user needs, but it is important to understand the essential motivation of the needs rather than the needs; do not make decisions based on strategy, but from thinking about specific needs; do not start from the functions of competitors. When chasing girls, the key point is that girls are not rivals in love.

The most taboo in product decision-making is calculating users. Don’t try to show your intelligence on the product at all costs. Instead, show your kindness.

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