What is a product teardown? Why?
In the hardware world, product teardown is the act of disassembling the product into pieces until the last part to understand the functionality, what is what inside the product. The activity goes hand to hand with 'Benchmarking' a well known product which helps reverse engineering.
There is no difference in Tech product teardown, it is the process of taking apart a product to understand it and to understand how the company making the product succeeds.
Usually we try to do a teardown of any of our competitor's products, but that is not only the case. We should do the same on our product to understand its performance / success when comparing with the predecessor.
On the nutshell, depending on your project goals, teardowns can be used:
- Benchmarking competitive products
- Studying unique mechanisms
- Solving major business challenges
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I've participated in the monthly teardown event conducted by The Product Folks, a volunteer-driven community of PMs and enthusiasts who are passionate about making an impact and help everyone grow together.
I hope you should be aware of this PM community, if you don't I recommend you to join them!
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Problem statement: Improve engagement and retention of end users
Here is my teardown: Click here to view PDF
What did I do?
- Identified users' pain points from different user review websites (without even thinking about user personas 😑)
- User personas are not strong / accurate enough
- Suggested some substandard ideas which improve engagement
I'll not vote for myself, if I were a jury member. 😉
What I didn't do as part of this product teardown?
( In comparison with the final deck done by Sarvesh Lanke and Shivam Kedia, the finalists of the event) Click here to view the awesome deck
- Methodology: Identifying the way to increase customer engagement and retention.
- Conducting reviews on play store, Facebook group, YouTube videos.
- Talk with the users who actually using it
- Identifying strong user personas (Income level, Goals, Priorities)
- Spot pain points
- Prioritization of features
Okay, let's learn what I've missed to do:
1. What is the methodology?
A methodology is a set of ideas or guidelines about how to proceed in gathering and validating ideas and how to achieve the end result we wanted.
We should identify the methodology based on the goal. Productive Thinking Model to solve problems creatively and efficiently.
2. How to conduct user reviews?
Jot down feedbacks from social media posts, play store reviews, surf on some websites (e.g.: Product hunt, App advice) >> We'll end up large amount of data from the research >> Organize the identified results into groups. We could use the tool called Affinity Diagram to do so >> We'll get a gist of what are user's thinking about the product.
3. How to build strong user personas?
User personas help to uncover the ways in which the users buy / use the product, it helps to improve the experience of real life use cases. They are the fictional characters represents different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way.
User personas should have who is the user? What are their goals? What's stopping from them to achieve the goal?
This is how our user persona should look like. Its getting complex now, let's take a separate post for user personas itself. It deserves it!
4. How to spot on pain points?
The ultimate aim of any product / service is to address user pain points. Those are also defined as inefficiencies in customer experience. Before addressing we should be able to identify those pains regularly, not just once.
- Ask right questions. It could be customer interview, survey, feedback etc. If the options were provided in those surveys, make sure the options contain data
- Surf online. Do some online research about the customer reviews. Go back & re-read Learning No.1
- Identify common pain points (which are frequently raised by the users) and it could be answered through FAQ page and/or building Knowledge Base
- Usually those pain points are grouped into following baskets: Financial Pain Points, Productivity Pain Points, Process Pain Points & Support Pain Points. These baskets help us to think what we are primarily going to solve. For instance, if the users are facing long waiting time to solve their tickets, then we need to put it in Support pain points and solve accordingly.
5. How to prioritize the features?
Prioritization skill is a must need skill the Product Manager to possess (as per different web articles). There are so many tools and techniques out there (Will discuss the important ones in a separate detailed post) like RICE model, Weighted scoring model etc.
Let's discuss the simplest, quick prioritization technique - ICE
ICE expands as Impact, Confidence and Ease. All we need to do is rank our idea / feature based on its I, C and E on a relative scale ranging from 1-10 (1 being low, 10 being high)
Then, the ICE score = Impact * Confidence * Ease
where Impact - the influence or impression the feature would create to our main objective. If our objective is to improve sales across the world, then any feature that does the same will get high rank.
Confidence - feeling sure / trust / capable of the feature that could impact the main goal (e.g.: scale across countries, users shall be engaged better)
Ease - the effort that could take to build the feature
There you go, the top most feature is our priority! Read an article to understand better!
However, there are some drawbacks too: Everyone has their own perception and hence the score may vary drastically, Only technical people can determine 'Ease' score.
These are the five things we've learned from Meesho teardown activity.
Yeah, I know this is so basic right? Hold on, we'll build some depth and breath as we go along.
Until next time, Cheers!
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4 Comments
Nice Article 👏👏
ReplyDeleteThanks! 🙌
DeleteKeep going!!!
ReplyDeleteSure, Thanks! 🙌
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