The Product Triad is my three-tiered model of how I deconstruct the ‘skill of product’. It's the model I'm using to organize Own the Outcome.
Product thinking: Innovating and evaluating products using your intuition and taste.
Product management: The art and science of making tradeoffs between stakeholder goals, customer desires, and engineering capacity.
Product practice: Bringing product thinking to bear when designing, coding, writing, and communicating.
Product thinking
Product sense (also sometimes called Product intuition) often feels inscrutable. “I’ll know a good product when I see it.” To the outsider, it looks like magic, as if some people see the world differently and are more in tune with design. But how does that work?
Intuition is the subconscious process of making predictions, developing expectations, spotting relevant cues, deciding what’s important, and applying or inventing solutions. For more on developing these skills, see the sample chapter How to improve your product intuition
I draw a distinction between intuition and product taste. Intuition drives your output, but taste informs it. Taste also shapes what you take in. Taste combines empathy for the user, domain knowledge of the situation, and your creative ability. Your creative ability is how skilled you are at inventing, identifying, and remixing existing solutions to solve problems. I’m borrowing this definition from Shreya Doshi’s How to improve your product sense.
Are some people born with better taste, more skill, and greater vision for what’s possible? Possibly, but it can be trained. You can intentionally improve your product intuition and cultivate your taste.
Product management
Product management—the only one of the three you can get as a job title—is about deciding what gets built and why.
Product managers have to be aware of customer desires and collect and absorb feedback. They read between the lines and understand what’s going on in customers’ heads. The only way to know what’s important is to have good taste. The only way to understand your users is to have empathy for them.
Then, they must understand stakeholder goals. Most commonly, the stakeholder is the business, organization, or client signing your paychecks. If you’re building a product for yourself, then the stakeholder is you. They will have multiple goals around monetization & growth, which vary based on their industry, monetization model, how they’re financed, and where they are in the product lifecycle.
To get anything done requires engineering capacity. Engineering capacity is made up of the resources you have available, how fast you can build, and what constraints you have from tech debt, governments, and the laws of physics. It’s why we can’t give customers and stakeholders everything they ever wanted. If you could, this wouldn’t be any fun.
Product practice
Intuition and taste are great, but only if they change the output of your work. Product managers can write a tome of roadmaps, user stories, and business cases, but none of it matters if those artifacts aren’t well-informed and actionable.
Building a better product isn’t something you can sit down and do, any more than eating healthier is a task you can check off your to-do list and be done. It’s a new way of seeing the world. A different way of practicing your craft. You bring it to bear in the hundreds of tiny decisions you make every day. How you pay attention to detail and what you do about it.
It permeates every part of the product experience. How it’s built. How it works. The words used to describe it.
There’s no such thing as a solo creative process. All design is collaborative, even if it’s between a creator and a single user. We have to bring this to how we work with others. Within an organization, the only way to be effective is to bring this to your output and build trust and influence. You need to communicate effectively, persuade, and push back on your teammates.
Everything is a product. The software you build, the documents you create, the dinner parties you throw. Hopefully, this framework can help you do that a little bit better.
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