7 steps to analyse a Product from an External Standpoint

Often when we are new to product management, what seems most difficult is having a product mindset. While struggling with product mindset I think analysing certain products in few of our favourite industries might help us. After doing a few product research documents myself, I have built a framework that is helped me bring structure to my approach. Each of the steps can be modified & detailed further according to the use cases such as building a new product in your current company or working on a new product as a side project. 

Our Users - User Profiling

We can't make a product for all. Here identifying users & the gap we want to fill in is the most important. Segmenting & profiling the users will help us pin down on the users we want to target & understand the users we want to capture through our app. This is usually for the apps that are to be launched and don't have an existing user-base. For understanding the existing users we look at the data generated by the company's analytics system and conclusions drawn from the customer funnel. 

The Problem

The biggest challenge is understanding the user problem. This problem can be identified through customer surveys, repeated customer emails, face to face meetings with the customer or data analysis. Whenever we have listed down the problems faced by our users, we need to prioritise the issues that need to addressed immediately depending on the product goals & business goals.

The Feature

Once we have understood the problem that we are picking up, the solution needs to be built. We must also need to quantify the success that we expect to achieve once the feature is made live. This comes in handy in the case in of improvements & tracking the features lines in a product.

Competitors

Once we have decided the feature or app that we want to build, it is very important that we understand what apps are already present in the space. Having an idea of the features that are present helps us confirm that we don't build any redundant features. Competitor app reviews also help us understand the pain-points and most wanted features of the users.

The Validation - Metrics

Before putting all resources into building a product, we need to be sure that building this feature/ product line will help us solve the problem. This is achieved by analysing the metrics at each level of the user flow. We should choose a feature that comes in the 'high impact- low difficulty' quadrant. This analysis is helpful for deciding the priority of the features. Often, prototyping is also one of the costly ways of getting to know the Product-Market fit.

Product Specs & Building

As we are sure of the product feature that we want to build, now we finalise the design, tech, user event analytics. Task dependency management is a major part in this section. Moreover, the efficiency of the Product Development process depends on how proactively we have been involved with the product teams.

While building the product apart from delivering the features a sound analytics needs to be built so that constant tracking of user behaviour and monitoring of app performance is possible. This helps to build up on our existing product and continue with our iterations.

P.S. I am a budding Product Manager who has recently taken an internal transition in my company. The above article is my understanding of the activities that we have to undertake while evaluating and deciding the course of action for any product.

Image Credits: Pexel