Train Your Brain to Build Better Products
Train Your Brain to Build Better Products
How to use product critiques to help you build better products
👋 Hey, I’m Ben! I write weekly about how to grow products and companies. I go deep on growth strategies, how to build products users love, and what actionable lessons can be learned from what best-in-class companies are doing and industry experts are saying.
Happy Tuesday, folks!
Welcome to the fifth edition of Ben There Building That. Man, time flies. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate you all taking the time to read my writing each week. It means a lot!
This week I’ll be covering one of my favorite ways to develop product sense; by conducting product critiques. Product critiques are a great way to strengthen the mental muscles around building products users love; by being intentionally aware of product experiences around you you’ll become more attune to what makes a product experience good, bad, or special.
Julie Zhuo wrote a great article on this topic back in 2014 and it’s still one of my all-time favorite product-management reads. Her article inspired this post, and I will be referencing it several times throughout. I highly recommend taking the extra ten minutes to read her article in addition to this newsletter post.
At its most formal, a product critique is a written evaluation of a product that asks and answers questions about which experiences were good, which experiences were bad, and which experiences were special. At its most informal, a product critique can be a continuous observation and reflection on product experiences and what makes them good or bad. The process of conducting a written evaluation can help you develop a more mindful approach to product evaluation, and I recommend doing it regularly, as I still find value in it.
When conducting a product critique, it's important to keep in mind the factors that drive user engagement. Julie says it best:
Developing good product intuition—by which I mean developing a good sixth sense about what features or experiences will resonate with people and become successful—is about two core tenets: 1) understanding people’s desires, and 2) understanding how people react to things.
These core pillars lie at the heart of a product critique exercise. It's all about going through a product experience and asking yourself: Why are you using the product? What do you want to accomplish? How do you react to different aspects of the experience?
To provide structure on how to go through a product critique exercise, you can break up the experience into three lifecycle stages and ask a separate set of questions for each:
Before you interact with the product
Your first impressions and explorations
Ongoing product usage
Before you interact with the product
There is more to consider at this stage than you may initially realize. Julie lays out three questions to consider:
How did this app come to your attention?
What’s your one-line summary of what this app does at this stage?
What’s the buzz so far?
First impressions are important and the context we have going into a first impression can greatly impact the impression itself. Understanding that context is an important first step. Some additional questions you can ask at this stage:
Who do you think the product's target audience is?
What problem do you think the product is intended to solve?
Your first impressions and explorations
As we all know (and as I noted above), first impressions are important. Julie outlines six questions that can be used to take a critical eye to early experiences:
What’s the experience of getting started or signing up?
How does this app explain itself in the first minute?
How easy to use was the app?
how did you feel while exploring the app?
Did the app deliver on your expectations?
How long did you spend in the app?
Even though it is the early stage of the customer journey, the onboarding and initial experiences can significantly impact user retention, positively or negatively. Nailing this part of the product experience is key to building a product with high retention that users love. Some additional questions you can ask yourself at this stage:
Did you feel lost on what to do or how to do something at any point?
How long does it take for you to start getting value from the app?
Ongoing app usage
The true test of building a winning product (and in doing so, a winning business) is building something that users want to consistently engage with over time. With that in mind, Julie outlines another five questions to consider in the weeks after first using the product:
How often have you used the app? When do you tend to use it? What compels you to open it?
How does this app compare to other similar apps?
What do other people think of this app?
Based on all that you know, how successful do you think the app will be a year from now?
(and eventually, after enough time has passed), were you right in your prediction of how this app was going to do?
At this stage, you’ll have a good understanding of what experiences within the product are good and bad. You’ll also likely have a wishlist of things that you wish were slightly different. Some additional questions to think through as you evaluate the product and the business behind it:
Now that you’ve used the app for a while, who do you think is the ideal user? How does that compare to who you thought their target audience was at the start?
If you could wave a magic wand and change (add, remove, alter, etc.) one thing about the product, what would it be? Why?
How does the product monetize? How could they expand their monetization strategy?
How does this product’s user base grow and how could they drive more growth?
Product critiques really come down to being aware of the product experiences you interact with every day. Think about those experiences, what they do well, what they could do better, and how you can use those learnings to influence the products you’re building.
That’s all I’ve got for you for now. See you Friday with another edition of builders weekly!Â
- Ben
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