Product Thinking- Myth vs Reality

Well it's been more than a decade that I have been part of the product ecosystem in India. One thing I have repeatedly heard over the years is something called 'product thinking'. Initially as an amateur I thought that thinking about products all the time could help me develop product thinking. So I would deliberately shift my focus from Katrina Kaif to Google Search Engine. I must admit it was hard but I managed to convince myself that I have finally acquired product thinking. The funny part was everyone around me thought the same. It was crazy because everywhere I went, the same sentiment would resonate. So as a programmer/product manager for an enterprise tech company , I'd visit my clients for presales demos and shove them a gamut of features and talk about how the major release could transform their business. It would usually end up with a deal materialising with some sweet sweet bonus. Even when I went to client locations for deployment, the objective was to make the software work in the client ecosystem. For a good many years I believed product thinking that product managers are supposed to have is about selling software and solving customer needs. In a nutshell I had no clue what product thinking was. I believe so is the case with Indian software industry.

There is a lot of chit chat around product management, UXD, product engineering, product marketing and maybe a little around sales. However most of these conversations never veer around product thinking. If there be a chance that some amount of impetus is given to product thinking, it usually results in cliched discussions around product management that we've heard a gazillion times. I mean I too would have never realised the truth, like Buddha, if I had not read this infamous essay by Theodre Levitt called 'Marketing Myopia'. Levitt talks about the problem space in detail. He makes some interesting comments about the illusion people have wrt the problem space. That article gave me an entirely different perspective. It got me thinking a bit about product thinking. Something was not right. Maybe it was some kind of an enigma that I was grappling with. I went to a few product forums again and heard discussions by product leaders. Some of them were eminent product leaders for close to 3 decades but their thoughts on product thinking were a far cry from reality. I needed to do something about it.

I then came across this famous course by Steve Blank called 'Startup Launchpad' on Udacity, where the only thing Steve Blank focused on was the customer development part. He asked students to move out of their buildings and talk to their customers. He believed in the hypothesis(which again isn't a hypothesis anymore but a reality) that unless one goes out and speaks with the customer, it will be quite difficult to clearly define the problem statement. Next I came across this wonderful book called 'What the CEO wants you to know' by Ram Charan(someone I admire a lot and is perhaps among a few from India who can counter Peter Drucker). This book showed me a different world. A world that showed product thinking in a different light. Things were hazy but somehow they were kinda making sense. But wait. If that were the case then wouldn't that topple the ideological belief system the product community had in India? The larger problem according to me was to understand product thinking in clarity. But before I went to that side of the cosmos, I decided to investigate the reasons why Indian software ecosystem perhaps had a different definition in mind when it came to product thinking? Why were they toying with a wrong idea? I spoke to a lot of people who were part of the industry over the last couple of decades and I saw a pattern. Let me cut straight through the story to give you a glimpse of what really transpired. India started its software industry sometime in the 70s. It wasn't that active but post Y2K , the services industry caught up with the wave of globalisation. This was the inflection point where a lot of entrepreneurs set up services companies and attracted projects from around the world. Besides that India over the last 6 decades has majorly been a services economy. Services contributed more than 60% of the revenue.

Services in general is about providing a host of services to the clients and getting paid for it. Indian software industries were amongst the first in Asia to catch the bandwagon. They provided all types of services to the clients be it voice support, non voice support, tech support, software development etc. In the initial years clients did not want to part with designing and the meaty pieces of the development process and gave away the remaining portion to Indian vedors competing on price. But I guess that is something we all know. The point to notice is however is the fact that this type of closed knit environment in software almost decimated innovation in India. But why are we talking about innovation? Shouldn't we be focusing on product thinking? I mean isn't this blog about that? Hold your horses!!!. Picture abhi baaki hain mere bhai :)

If you ever read Eric Ries's 'Lean Startup' , you'd see this model that Eric talks about.

In fact the entire lean startup movement was inspired by Toyota Motor Company's 'Kanban' system of catching errors before the final piece came out. But lets not digress. But that in software as specified by Eric, translates to getting your problem statement validated from the customers iteratively ,measure your growth and learn from it till you run another iteration of your MVP(minimum viable product). But then how is this related to product thinking? Didn't we start with product thinking? Well let me explain in detail for one to have a comprehensive understanding of product thinking.

The entire essence of product thinking talks about the demand side instead of the supply side. Every product is an extension of oneself if Steve Jobs were to be believed. George Orwell famously quoted,"politics begins at the level of language. To control the people is, first, to control the language". If we see Apple's philospohy one would see every product as an extension of the human expression process. An iPhone is not merely a hi-tech gizmo but a gadget that can help a human being express himself effectively . Facebook is another grand example. It solves the human need of connecting with the corresponding 6 degrees of connection. It enables the establishment of a social graph where the entire planet is connected by virtue of John Guare's 'Six degrees of separation'. In a nutshell, a product tends to solve a human need. The fulfilment of a human need leads to happiness.

Now that we have touched the irrestible topic of 'needs' , let's define what needs are. Needs are elements of necessity that help us survive and thrive. They are responsible for the well being of an individual. Abraham Maslow studied human needs in detail where he came up with a pyramid of needs that categorises human needs and shows the movement of humans from one category to another. Take a look

The bottom most and the most important category of physiological needs was covered extensively by the Hindi movies made in 1970s'.

India right after independence was struggling through bouts of existential crisis, thanks to 30 years of socialism. But then I'll discuss all that in a different blog seemingly spicy. Evidently, every section of Maslow's pyramid represents human needs. Needs that shape humans the way they are. Needs that create an entire world view of an individual. Needs that shape the career path of an individual. Needs that create legacies. Needs that have created imagined realities like religion and corporation. In a nutshell a human being reolves around needs all his life. Everything a person does it to solve a human need. But if needs are so important for the existential well being of humans then why was it not a part of product thinking in India till date?In fact even now, most startups are devoid of product thinking. The reason is plain and simple. In service organisations the focus is to follow a rigid plan to build software and deliver it in due time. The emphasis is on delivery and project management details. There is absolutely no necessity for stakeholders to understand the customers that well. The revenue comes from as many bodies as one can deploy to a project. Therefore the focus area is entirely different.

Soon after the 90s India shifted to products. Loads of product companies jumpstarted in India but they were mostly offshore developement centers for American or European companies which were tightly controlled by the foreign bosses. It was predminantly because of this reason that product management was confined to mainly writing PRDs. One could not really expand the scope of work beyond a certain degree. All these reasons impregnated the diaspora with ideas of a different wavelength pertaining to product thinking. People were engrossed by the supply side equation. The core focus was on building the next best product. The core focus was to employ the next best tech. The ideology was to become the number one product in the market and grab a large market share. It did work for some time but soon most companies in the B2B and the B2C space trailed behind their foreign counterparts. From then till now nothing much has changed. We are still not clear on the definition of product thinking. We assume product thinking is all about building cutting edge products or using the next best technology. That convoluted idea has shaped an entire generation of failed products and product managers.

Two years back I worked for a company that taught product management to senior professionals stuck in their jobs. After numerous interaction with the students I realised that most of the students are sold out on Service based thinking which prompts one to build the best product to capture the market. I don't really blame them because most hailed from service based companies and even the ones that came from product companies were victims of runt work in the name of product management. None of these people had ever made a point to understand the customer space in detail. Their jobs were limited to a few things and most of them were not allowed to go beond their normal duties. Although companies talk a lot about employee engagement, employee growth and learning but it seldom boils down to anything significantly beneficial to the said audience. Years and years of spending time inside the cubicles turns one into Dilbert and he inadvertently becomes a victim of bureaucracy. The following cartoon illistrates that effectively.

The reason why we have not been able to inculcate product thinking is because the economic forces operating inside our workplaces quashed any opportunity we had of knowing our customers. Product thinking is all about understanding the customers. Its about going deep within multiple layers to unravel consumer psychology. It is about understanding ethnographic, psychographic and anthropological details about the customer segment. It is about keeping track of the socio economic and geopolitical data points to understand more about the impact of black swan events that might have an impact on sales. There was a 1970 movie starring Amitabh Bachchan that showed the concept of product thinking in so much clarity that one could actually learn from it. Its about this guy who sells jaggery in the market. His jaggery is supposed to be the best in the market because he knows exactly what his customers want. People flock to his shop and within a few hours he manages to sell the quota for the day and leaves. Suddenly one fine day he completely loses track of customer needs and ends up creating stuff that doesn't make the customers happy and the tables turn for him right then. He loses his entire market share overnight. Take a look

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgnUfG-uPX4

That is exactly what happened to a lot of product companies that lost track of customer needs in due time. But is that sufficient? Assuming you know the customer needs adequately and build products that can solve those needs, is there anything missing from the picture. It sure is.

Clayten Christensen came up with the Jobs Theory in his bestseller 'Competing Against Luck'. Clay feels that apart from understanding the needs of a customer it is also pertinent to understand how effectively the product is doing the job for the customer. There cannot be a one fit all innovative product for everyone. Innovation needs to be different for different people. What is innovative to me might not be innovative to my friend. Our needs are seemingly different from each other and hence the agents that satisfy those needs would also be different. That calls for retrospection, focus groups, customer interviews, brainstorming, NPS and every other mechanism to tap the degree of utility of a product in the context of customer satisfaction. Even if we ignore the 'Jobs theory' for a second, its natural that customer needs are subject to change. That means more than competition most product companies should be mindful of 'irrelevance'. 'Irrelevance' has killed many big companies who could not cope up with the changing dynamics of innovation that gratified the customers and shut them down.

Then there are is a section of people who are heavily sold out on data. One of the primordial puzzles humans have grappled since the beginning of time is to unravel the mysteries around them in the quantum universe using data. As soon as Mukesh Ambani called data the new oil, almost everyone was heavily sold on it. People got a new fad to latch themselves to. I am not a contrarian and I have worked with the first business intelligence company in the world and have dabbld in data for 5 years. I can tell you from my experience is that data is a partial lens to unraveling the enigma of the human mind. Human mind is a complex playground. Human beings are sentient creatures. Every decision they make has a base in emotions. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky mentioned it clearly in their books 'Judgement under uncertaintly:Heuristic and biases', that won Kahneman a Nobel prize in behavioural economics. They also wrote a paper jointly on the 'Prospect theory' that challenged the 'Expected utility theory' developed by John Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. In a nutshell Kahneman and Tversky discovered that human beings make irrational decisions all the time and its only a few dozen times they actually rationalise things before taking a call. This observation changed the face of behavioural psychology forever. Soon after Dan Ariely and Robert Cialdini came up with their own versions where they described how the human mind works and the cognitive biases it suffers from. In fact Martin Lindstrom did an experiment with a lot of smokers and in his findings found out that a lot of anti smoking campaigns actually trigger smoking behaviour in smokers. Although smokers feel extreme guilt on seeing the anti smoking messages on cigaretter packets, the craving spots in their brains are activated thereby prompting them to smoke.Neuroscience today plays a pivotal role in understanding the human mind because sometimes our brains behave differently than us. Take a look at this scene from 'The West world' where a robot designed not to harm humans becomes sentient and avenges herself by killing her creator who was responsible for her torture over many years

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ro0H8c4mgq0

That is the reason why a politician in today's world knows his constituency better than a product manager knows his customers. It has a lot to do with empathy and how closely can one relate oneself to the problems faced by their customers. In the 1970s the FBI started their 'Behavioural sciences unit' to do a comprehensive study of psychopathic serial killers to unravel their minds. After a series of setbacks they finally hit paydirt. They used the data gathered from several interactions with some of the most notorious killers , to catch other serial killers on the loose. The Netflix series 'Mindhunters showed the same quite clearly. Its a must watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edaQ9XwLiXc

So conclusively I'd say that product thinking predominantly revolves around the customer space. One cannot know a customer by sitting in plush offices and making wild conjectures about human behaviour. One has to go out and meet people in flesh and blood to understand about them. Companies need to run study groups to understand consumer behaviour. As Peter Thiel once said that scale is a function of distribution after product market fit. Distribution is again a function of consumer psyche and it cannot be understood by data alone. These are relentlessly dark times when we need more behavioral psychologists than data scientists. As much as I'd like to agree with Cassie Kozyrkov when she taks about the importance of data in decision making, the distinction is , the human decision making process is a multidimensional animal and data is a unidimensional tool that can't really help much. One needs to dig deep to understand consciousness and the underlying role of emotions and how they shape decision making. Intelliegence is merely a tool employed to carry out activities. Simulating intelligence might reveal correlation but devoid of causality it could be termed as a lacklustre exercise. The million dollar question is-how many companies are willing to dig that deep to understand human behaviour? Guess not many. Till the time that happens, 'Product Thinking' would still be an enigma to a larger part of the tech community.