Product Design Strategy

Notes from Exponent Product Interview Example

Product Breakdown Steps

1. Establish a Product goal 2. Identify a User segment 3. Outline a Pain point 4. Envision a Solution/vision 5. Enumerate Pros and cons

Establish Product Goal

Are there any specific overarching goals in mind when seeking to improve the platform?

User acquisition

Engagement

Monetization

What are the plausible goals we can set?

Any specific customer segment that we're interested in targeting?

Ways to improve the product

User acquisition - How do we onboard more new users? Is there a cohort we're not currently targeting, how do we make it easier for new users to join User engagement - How do we: encourage more usage from existing users encourage them to spend more time in the platform give them a better user experience Monetization - How do we make money off of an existing product

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Choose one to focus on and explain the reasoning for your choice (i.e. engagement: because there is already an established market, we ought to make it better. OR acquisition: product needs to grow marketshare by onboarding different types of users and product solution needed for their usecase)

User Segment

Take some time to think of some potential customer segments

Demographics:

  • Age
  • Lifestyle
  • Income level
  • Career
  • Digital nativeness
  • Users of disparate applications
  • Mobile vs. desktop

Define the segment and why they are worth targeting and what may be challenging about targeting

Focus on a customer segment that has low hanging fruit / high juice squeeze potential

Think about some major pain points that these users may be currently facing

Product Vision/Solution

Product vision for improvement - VERY big picture and broad areas this improvement will touch.

  • Design principles that should underlie the product

Broader vision of the existing product as a whole, fit the improvement within those confines

What is the value prop of the improvement as compared to the overall application

Define User Flows

  • Onboarding
  • Using new functionality

Positioning of the new functionality

  • how will it look, function and feel, how will users first encounter

Define KPIs and North Star metrics that would be used to measure feature's efficacy

Vision/Solution Tradeoffs

What are the tradeoffs, how will you address major pitfalls?

  1. value risk (whether customers will buy it or users will choose to use it)
  2. usability risk (whether users can figure out how to use it)
  3. feasibility risk (whether our engineers can build what we need with the time, skills and technology we have)
  4. business viability risk (whether this solution also works for the various aspects of our business)

Conclusion

What was the initial goal, define how the product leads users to events users that contribute to that goal