This is an Introduction… You can skip it or not

Hello 👋🏽

What this isn’t ❌: A guide or mini-course on product analysis.

What this is ✅: A tool to guide your brain as a new or curious product manager on how to become that weirdo that breaks products down (analyses them) as a mental exercise to improve your analytical product management skills.

Makes no sense? Read on if you’re bored or curious.
Makes sense? Cool, let’s be weird together.

Brain Mapping & Laser Dissecting

Every skill does this. The more proficient you become in that skill the easier it is for your brain to map the ideologies and processes, the behind-the-scenes if you may, to the product you see.

Here’s a simple example: If you’re a filmmaker, you can’t watch a film without seeing its bare bones in your mind’s eye. Dissecting every piece, appreciating and cursing the team behind it in one breath.

Did the example help you understand this phenomenon? If yes GG

Now it goes without saying that knowledge and experience give the Product Manager the ability to brain-map and laser-dissect products she sees and I am of the opinion that anyone currently in training to become a product manager should start learning and applying this skill from the very first lesson.

Why? It re-wires your brain early enough and you approach learning product management differently.

How to Conduct Product Analysis on Existing Products as a Beginner

Approach this with the full realisation that at this point in time you probably only know the definition of product management. This is your first rodeo, you have been thrown into the sea to swim or drown. Your skill and knowledge gap will be in full light but that is exactly what you should want now. Identify every skill gap as we move through each step. Take pauses to read, research, apply to the best of your ability (you won’t become an expert overnight) and move to the next step.
When you are done give it to a peer or senior to review and repeat this exercise with multiple products so you can develop the muscle.

Breathe in… out…

Let’s begin

1. Jump right in, Choose any Product: Do not overthink this step, just go ahead and choose any product.
   If you get nervous and panic, and all the products you know suddenly vanish from your memory go to Google search to search then choose “Google search” as your first daunting case study product.

2. Unstructured Research: Set a timer for 40 minutes and do unrestricted and unstructured research about this product from reputable sources. There is no goal in mind, click on what interests you and go down the rabbit hole. Read everything. Take notes of what you find interesting.

3. Your First Structured Research: There is no reason to fret, yet. This is not scientific research but there will be a form of structure to it. You are going in with questions and you need answers. You want to know the product, want you guys to meet in a pub and exchange life stories. Here are some guiding questions:

   • What is this Product's name and why was it given that name?

   • Who sat down and said "crap I need to create a product like this!" and when?

   • What was the person's motivation to do it?

   • Did they consider other approaches to solving the problem? or not?

You can add more, these are just starters, but the scope of these research questions is to know the product, why the product owner thought it important to build, when and what vision they had. Write down your findings and sources

4. Take a trip Back in time: Roll up your sleeves we are getting into the deep of it. Get into your time machine and go back to when the product was founded. If you’re in luck the product team made it easier for you by having an engineering or product blog.

   But what are you looking for in these old dusty files?

   • What was the first MVP? What features were prioritised?
   • What market did they serve across different releases?
   • Who are their users and what do these users have in common?
   • How did the market receive the product? What was their performance over the years (or the years you are looking at)
   • What product decisions were made and why? were they right or wrong?
   • How did the users receive the product? Dig up user feedback from that timeline in the app store, social media and anywhere else.

   • Compare at least two iterations of the product. What changed and why?

     Again these are base questions to get you started, expand on these as you please but keep the goal in mind

5. Analyse: Step back and study all the data you have gathered. What do they mean? what do you understand from your findings? Yes, we are in the deepest part of the ocean now.

   Use free easy-to-use tools to aggregate some quantitative data you got and to the best of your ability try to identify patterns and what they could mean. Also, reference existing analysis that you could make sense of.

   

   Analyse the qualitative data as well and present all your evaluations and thoughts.
   Your goal is not to present an impeccable professionally done analysis. The goal was to perform your first wild analysis and make your brain perform its first bench presses

6. Presentation: Write a cohesive paper(article, document, post etc) on the answers you got from your rendevous in the wild and take a step further if you still have any breath left to put together a presentation and present your findings to your dear friend that has no other option but to listen to you.

Send these to Product Managers you know to review and give feedback and also have conversations and share your thoughts.

Congratulations, you survived.

Tools you can utilise

• Google Docs or Microsoft Word to write.

• Search engines (Google search, Bing, etc) for research.

• Google Sheets or MS Excel for data collation and simple analysis.

• YouTube, Articles, News Archives etc for research.

• MyBib for citation and reference formatting.

• Dictionary (online): You will encounter a lot of words you do not know the meaning of.

• Canva for simple visual illustrations you may want to incorporate

• Food and water, to stay alive.

In Conclusion

Developing your brain cells from the onset to think like a professional product manager during your learning journey will aid your journey of skills and career development.

You will learn extra skills that are applicable in other learning areas as you progress.
You do not want to just be a product manager, you want to be exceptional.

Practice and refine, the possibilities are endless.