radar
iOPEX
logo
menu
close
arrow_back
Back
image

Product Thinking Approach & Its Business Importance | iOPEX

Nov 15 2023 , Navaniranjan N

What is product thinking?

Product thinking should answer the primary question of “what makes the product useful for the intended audience?” The traditional way of product development was more focused on features and then choosing the audience to sell those features, but now it all comes down to users/customers. With the amount of user behavioral data available through various channels, product managers can gather better insights to design & develop a product that addresses user problems, fulfills customer needs, and deliver a great user experience.

Business Importance of Product Thinking:
Product thinking makes us think in terms of product-first and help us build products that the user needs and not what we can offer. User Adoption, Customer Experience, and Product Design are the three focal points for a product thinking approach. 

Product Thinking Approach

Why product thinking is the future?

Design, UX, and Agility have been the key denominators for building a technically sound product but on the flip side product thinking is a habit, an insight, and a mindset that must be nurtured well within the team that is involved in the product building process. While product development was primarily focused on building a technologically sound product, the future will be on creating an integrated approach where product owners and managers will have to match the customer needs with the product.

The key lies in tying the relationship between people and products better than your competitors.

3 ways to evolve product thinking

Outcomes over Output

Output is quantitative and easier to commit, for example developing a user-friendly feature within 30 days and for this, the product owners can pull the right people, set the timeline, and deliver with a project plan. However, Outcomes are not easy to measure like if you are developing a product for an e-commerce client, the goal/outcome can be to attract a niche segment of customers from their competitors.

An outcome is a qualitative approach. Output can be achieved by the executors with a simple project plan, but outcomes can be delivered only if you live through the problem with an ownership mindset and create a roadmap that involves a lot of pre-planning.

Real-world experience vs document understanding

In the product world, product development is heavily backed up by documentation and acceptance criteria. The stakeholders’ requirements and user stories are documented with an acceptance criterion to build a product, by the product managers.

But the right solution is in the synergy of efforts to address the real-world problem and not in the continuous handoffs down the line. The development team should be involved in the initial phase of discussion with the stakeholders and users for better product and user adoption.

Understanding Speed and Timing

This point is strictly coherent with the product life-cycle process. While many organizations use product life cycle tactically to develop a product only a few enterprises involve the marketing function to use product life-cycle strategies to deliver a product that best sells in the market.

The product life cycle should consider the below four stages to not only develop a product that the user wants but also deliver on time before your competitors deliver it, hence speed and timing play a crucial role in the product life cycle management.

  • Market Development
  • Market Growth
  • Market Maturity
  • Market Decline

Integrating Design Thinking

By integrating design thinking product managers can observe the user interaction with the product and using that information user experience and adoption can be significantly improved. It mainly focuses on capturing the data and looks at how people engage with the product rather than looking at how the company thinks they engage with the product.

Design thinking outcomes:

  • Innovative solutions
  • Expands thinking
  • Predict problems
  • Prioritize needs
  • Tackles complex problems

Synopsis & Expertise:

It is evident and apparent that product thinking is not a technical skill but a leadership skill that the product managers, owners, and the development team should generate as a culture and stand out to build unique products that sell in the market, solving the most important underlying problem of meeting the user needs.

iOPEX has been doing this for more than a decade now and has helped organizations to adopt the latest technologies to meet and scale their user and customer needs with speed, agility, and timing. Our digital engineering solutions like Design, Development, and Applications modernization have adopted various tools & technologies with a product thinking mindset and have delivered 500+ applications and products.



Share your feedback

Emoji-1 Star-Rating-1.4
Emoji-2 Star-Rating-2.4
Emoji-3 Star-Rating-3.4
Emoji-4 Star-Rating-4.4
Emoji-5 Star-Rating-5.4

Anything that can be improved?

plus
Recent Post
image
What is Hyperautomation and How Does it Benefit Business?
Oct 30 2023 , Nagarajan Chakravarthy
read more
image
The Future of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Transforming Industries
Nov 08 2023 , Nagarajan Chakravarthy
read more
image
The Growing Adoption of LLMs in Production in the Enterprise
Oct 13 2023 , Nagarajan Chakravarthy
read more
Latest news
card

Unveiling iOPEX.AI: Empowering Enterprises with a Cutting-Edge AI Framework

Jul 21 2023

card

iOPEX Technologies Migrated to Google Workspace: Achieving Rapid Expansion with Real-time Communications

Jul 21 2023

space_bar

Relevant Offerings

space_bar
Home Page Carousel Application Modernization Banner

Application Modernization

With a huge increase in customer’s digital presence, achieve business acceleration by modernizing the core system applications for smarter, agile, and easy interactions

Web and Mobile App Design and Development Company

Design and Development

High-performing companies needs a swift engineering approach in releasing the products and be-spoke applications twice the time faster to stay relevant

Software Support and Maintenance Services

Support and Maintenance

Focus on stabilization and optimization of your applications through a lean application maintenance and support framework for effective business function during your...

Talk-to-the-experts-1 Talk-to-the-experts-2
Close-Button