First Principle Thinking for Product Innovators
Updated: Nov 14, 2024
In a small workshop, a man meticulously worked on an idea to make knowledge accessible for everyone. His era was way before the social media, and internet when 90% of world's information is shared online. During his time, books were equivalent to private jet travel - reserved only for elites. In year 1440, Johannes Gutenberg invented printing press. His invention profoundly changed the way information was broadcasted to the masses. In following centuries to come, his innovation accelerated scientific progress, religious reformations, and political revolutions.
Product professionals have opportunities to change the world by bringing valuable products to life, just as Gutenberg did, by relying on First Principle Thinking.
Imagine having had a toolkit with spanners to unlock innovation bolts of your product by enabling you break down complex problems and make bold decisions. This article a structure set of probing questions, grounded in the first principle thinking. It will help you and your team to create innovative, user-centered, exceptional product experiences.
Let's first understand how you can apply the first principle thinking to everyday problem, such as setting up a consistent workout routine.
Influence of First Principle Thinking
First principle thinking helps you to break down intricate problems into basic building blocks. This framework is a powerful tool for everyone involved in product creation and innovation - entrepreneurs product managers, product designers, and product engineers. For general information on First Principle, read this Wikipedia article.
First principle thinking helps you to:
Identify Core User Needs
By understanding what your users truly require, you can develop products that exceed their expectations. A survey by Bain & Company found that companies that focus on customer needs, rather than product features, increased their customer loyalty by up to 25%.
Foster Innovation
Deep dive into established behaviors and norms leads you to novel ways of thinking. Apps like TikTok were created out of a need to address a more engaging social experience, than just photo sharing.
Reduce Complexity
Simplifying your understanding of market demand by focusing on core needs helps your team to develop the product in more scalable way. For instance, Apple's commercial success lies in its ability to simplify the product experience and leading with innovation.
Now that you understand the importance of the First Principle Thinking in product innovation, let's understand probing questions based on First Principle Thinking.
First Principle based Product Innovation
"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence." - Albert Einstein
At the root level, First Principle based Product Innovation underscores the fact that innovation does not merely arise from replicating the existing solution, but from knowing the fundamental elements involved in the product creation process. You can extract this knowledge by probing deep inside the problem at hand. By stripping away the complexities, and reviewing the problem from basics, product teams can unlock potential for true innovation. Following are key characteristics of these probing questions.
They require you to simplify the problem, making it easier to understand and explain to 10 year old kid.
They question our assumptions and force us to consider better alternatives.
They are grounded in data and not opinions.
They often seek more information through a series of follow up questions.
Following section lists set of probing questions that help you instill First Principle based product innovation in your team. Consider these questions similar to your travel itinerary for your upcoming international travel that eases your planning and relieves you from stress. You can navigate directly to the relevant segment of probing questions based on challenges your role. However, I recommend you to explore all the segments to foster innovation, empathy and collaboration amongst all the product creators.
Product Management: Turning Ideas into Realities
Market Research and Competitive Analysis
Market Segmentation
Understand which group of users/customers exhibit significant opportunities. Articulate the unique needs of the individual group, which further helps targeting right audience with right product capabilities.
Probing questions:
What are the core characteristics (demographic, geographic, psychographic) of each segment?
What unique needs possessed by the individual segment?
How far we break the segment further into sub-segment so that they have unique characteristics? Do these sub-segment provide unique opportunities?
Which segment creates largest impact? How do we measure the impact?
Nike divides its market into different segments via type of sports, and further divides these segment based on pro athletes, casual enthusiasts. Nike tailors their products towards the unique needs of the individual segments and sub-segments.
Foundational Market Needs
Under the core needs, shape the user behavior and market demand.
Probing questions:
What are the specific pain points unaddressed within my target market?
How do these pain points align with the broader trends in the relevant industry?
Are these needs or pain points deeply rooted (perpetual) or they tend to change over the time.
Netflix in early 2000s, identified that users want flexibility in the type and time they watch content. Understanding this core need led to on-demand streaming, which further reshaped the industry.
Market Trends
Research underlying causes behind the emerging market trends. Be more adaptive, and proactive with defining product strategies that navigate through these trends.
Probing questions:
What are the primary drivers behind the market trends?
What are the hidden market trends?
Which are the mega-trends affecting majority of the industries including the one we serve?
Are these trends transient or long term? Are they localized or global trends?
How is our competition adapting to these trends?
Are there any opportunities to create its own product category to address these trends?
An environmental friendly shopping trend led Patagonia to create environmentally friendly clothing, right practices thereby creating a loyal and ever-growing customer base.
Competitive Landscape
Identify the opportunities and differentiation by knowing the competition with their strengths and weaknesses.
Probing questions:
How are our competitors addressing the core needs?
Are we getting blindsided by our competition? Should we avoid the 'addressing feature-gap' catchup?
What are the feature-gaps are critical to address?
What is our unique value proposition again our competition?
Are there any innovations in our product that we should protect under patents?
Notion entered into note-taking apps landscape dominated by existing giants like Evernote, OneNote, Google Docs. Yet Notion crafted a niche by positioning itself as all-in-one workspace - offering note-taking to knowledge base to task management.
Strategy and Roadmap
Product Vision
Product vision serves as a lighthouse to guide all the product decisions and inspiration for teams involved.
Probing questions:
What problems the product aim to solve and address user needs?
How product vision aligns with the organisation mission and vision?
What is our desired state of the product after five years?
How does our product offerings differentiate from the competition?
What are the industry trends and megatrends can we leverage for our vision?
How do we measure success in achieving our product vision?
Patagonia, an outdoor apparel company has embodied its commitment to the environmental sustainability in it's vision. Their products and actions reflect the vision - selecting sustainable material for their products to creating repairable products.
Prioritisation & Product Goals
Product goals will help you to move towards your vision in incremental, progressive manner, while delivering the value to the business and customer on it's way.
What are the short term and long term goals that support our vision?
How do we break the goals in achievable steps and initiatives?
What is our criteria to prioritize the the features and enhancements?
What metrics do we measure to ensure we are progressing towards our goals?
How do we prioritise the initiates and features based on impact, feasibility and alignment to our vision?
When and how we involve our teams to contribute to the goals?
How often we revisit our goals to keep them relevant?
Slack's early focus running feedback loops helped them set the short-term goals. This led to user satisfaction further triggering widespread product adoption.
Product Roadmaps
Roadmap planning and communication help you achieve the streamlining the development and alignment with the stakeholders.
Who are the stakeholders to influence product roadmaps?
How frequently should we communicate the product roadmap to various stakeholders?
What themes and initiatives should we outline in the roadmap?
How do we present the timelines and what should be the granularity of the timeline?
What level of details should we include in the roadmap to avoid unnecessary questions and distractions?
What should be primary dimension that we apply to the roadmap - user persona based (analyst, business admin etc.), or theme (product scale, increase user satisfaction etc) based or category based (e.g. technical, platform, functional).
During COVID-19 pandemic, AirBnB fast tracked safety, flexibility and traveler preferences by adapting to the market shifts in their roadmap by including flexible cancellation policy and cleaning protocols.
Go-to-Market Strategy
Positioning and Messaging
Define and understand the target market and align product's value proposition with customers outcomes effectively.
Probing questions:
What specific needs our product solves for the target audience?
Who are our idea customers, and their characteristics?
What are our key differentiators?
How are we going to test our assumptions that the product positioning and messaging resonates with our target customers?
What are the channels most effective to communicate with target audience?
What are the barriers of entry in each market segment?
Royal Enfield, an iconic Indian motorcycle has cultivated a loyal following by creating an appeal to motorcycle enthusiasts who appreciate ruggedness, heritage, classical looking bikes.
Launch Planning
This involves creating a detailed plan for launching the product in the respective market. This includes the timelines, resource planning and key activities.
Probing questions:
What the outcomes do we expect and against what metrics should we measure them (e.g. user engagement ,revenue, user acquisition etc)
What potential risks could arise during the launch, and how can we tackle them?
What customer feedback mechanism should implement?
How do we ensure that all the related entities are informed about the launch ahead of time so that they can plan their activities?
Have we enabled field teams with the supporting material required for the launch and customer adoption?
VanMoof, a Dutch bicycle manufacturer, launched its Electrified S2 electric bikes in 2018. This launch showcased innovative tech and reveled effective launch planning. Their product launch leveraged various strategies like gauging perfect launch timing, crowdfunding, social media marketing, influencer marketing.
Product Design: Crafting Delightful Experiences
Understanding User
User Research
User research requires you to explore different aspects of user experience - direct interviews to usability testing. The insights from the user research help you build products with engaging, enjoyable product experience.
Probing questions:
What are the tasks, outcomes our target users are trying to accomplish? A task management app would present the summary of accomplished tasks on the home screen to motivate the user.
What are aspects of the goals users trying to address through the interactions with our product/service - functionality, creativity, efficiency or social interactions? Everyday cooking app may show recipes in short video formats vs gourmet recipes in long video formats.
What physical and emotional environments the users spend their time with our product - e.g. high-stress, casual, personal, noisy, format environments. An audio book platform like Audible provides in-car experience with larger buttons with limited functionality with ease of use yet avoid distractions.
What are the top frustrations they faced with similar products they used? Driver experience for bike assist app could add voice commands because biker cannot use the mobile screen due to hand gloves.
Are there any emotional triggers that influence the user engagement? Gamifying performance goals improves the productivity of contact center agents.
Insight Timer built a platform to bring meditators, teachers together to inculcate the mindfulness practices across the community. They researched the need for meditation teachers to monetize their experience, increase their reach to the global scale and contribute to the mission to offer meditation sessions free of cost. They introduced monetizable programs to go deeper and intentional into specific topics such as self-care, dealing with anxiety & stress, increasing focus & concentration.
User Behavior Patterns
By observing how user interacts with your product, you can identify user preferences, optimize user interaction flows, and enhance overall product experience.
Probing questions:
Are there any repeated interactions which indicate a strong user preference? For example, if the user always choose specific filter values on an e-commerce website, it indicates a strong user preference for the selected product categories, or geographical parameters.
Are there any specific path users take to achieve their desired outcome? If the users always visit the product page before checkout step, you could optimise the path by introducing a product review summary on checkout page itself.
What are the contextual factors - time of the day, location, device type - affect the user behavior? If the insurance executives always review unsettled insurance claims from the last week as a first thing on Monday, you could introduce a review panel on home page.
During which flow the user flows access support artifacts (for example information messages or documentation articles) more often? If you observe that users click on the information icons more often during account opening process, you could add account opening tutorials on home page.
What interactions contribute to the positive user experience as observed through analytics or user feedback? This feedback will help you to reuse the interaction elements and patterns in the future designs.
Osprey an outdoor gear company leverage user research and feedback to improve their products. They gained insights into durability, comfort and overall performance of the products, by interacting with the outdoor enthusiasts.
Prototyping and Designs
Prototype help you turn the concept into tangible and testable experience even spending a single penny into the actual development of the product. Effective prototypes help you identify the useability issues early on, optimize your investment by taking the most effective path, align your externa and internal stakeholders with the common messaging. Probing questions within this category attempt to investigate intuitiveness, usability, inclusivity aspects of the product.
Wireframing
Wireframes serve as a high level sketch of your product experience, presenting the basic structure, and layout. Probing questions in this sub-category will help you reflect upon the user needs, product objectives and usability aspects.
Probing questions:
What is the objective of the wireframe and what purpose does it serve?
What level of fidelity should incorporate based on the audience and stage of concept evolution?
Does the wireframe presents the basic structure of the product elements without distractions of visual details?
Do the chose devices and form factors align with the user preferences?
Is error and edge case handling in the wireframe adequate?
Do the controls in the wireframe serve the functionality as expected? Do they signify the user about the expected interaction?
Slack, in the initial stages of building the product, relied heavily upon wireframing. This helped them to validate the concept and user flows. This led to some of important features of the product such as direct messaging, channels, and user mentions.
Interaction Design
Probing questions asked in the context of interaction design help designers to anticipate the friction points, reduce the complexity and provide engaging experience through interaction design.
Probing questions:
Are the transitions and feedback effects (hover, loading indicators) clear, intuitive and assist the user to achieve the desired outcomes?
Are the design elements clear enough across diverse set of the user base (across age, location, role etc.)
Are the design patters consistent across the application and the platform?
Duolingo, a language learning application, an apt example of leveraging interaction design principles to create a highly engaging and motivational experience for diverse set of users across all ages and geographies. You will observe these consistent interaction design practices across all their features such as leader dashboard, daily streaks, friends quest, interactive lessons.
Accessibility and Inclusivity
What is our plan of adopting to the accessibility standards such as WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines)?
Are we offering key-board common or screen reader friendly experience?
Are there any complex interactions or components that may lead to accessibility issues?
Do the color combinations in our design meet accessibility standards for visually impaired users?
How do we ensure that audio and video content in our application is accessible to users with visual or hearing impairments?
Is the language used through our product culturally neutral free from regional or technical jargon-heavy terms.
Airbnb consistently adheres to inclusivity elements that enables users across the world to easily access their website or application. This approach not only helps them to adhere to the accessibility standards from compliance standpoint, but also with increasing their user base across the globe.
Design Validation & Iterations
User Feedback
User feedback makes you understand how users interact with your product and helps you validate your assumptions you made in design phase.
Probing questions:
Do users feel the design is intuitive?
What are the recurring themes appear across majority of the user feedback?
Which design elements receive positive feedback?
Are we utilizing range of methods to collect the user feedback - surveys, interviews, usability testing?
A/B Testing and Experimentation
A/B testing and experimentation allows the product innovators to test specific hypotheses in isolation, compare the outcomes and choose the best options.
Probing questions:
Are there any constrains under which we can perform A/B tests. What are alternatives if A/B testing is not feasible?
What are the specific hypotheses are we testing with A/B tests. Are these hypotheses related to the user outcomes?
Do our test user set represent the larger user base? If there is a section of users we cannot employ for testing, what are the alternatives?
Are we testing various sunny and rainy day paths through the testing?
How is the outcome of the testing, fed back to the design process? How are we capturing the learnings from the testing?
Are the product metrics being tracked through A/B testing relevant and actionable?
Booking dot com - a leading travel agency- extensively employs A/B testing in the design process which is evident from the minor design changes reflected regularly across their global base.
Product Engineering: Building Products at Scale
In product engineering segment, I have only considered product specific aspects. . I have deliberately avoided discussion regarding various development processes which is different topic of discussion.
System Architecture & Design
Scalability Planning
Scalability planning helps the team to ensure as the product scale grows, it serves without compromising on speed, efficiency or functionality.
Probing questions:
What is the projected growth of the user traffic and how the system is going to handle it?
Which components or services are prone to being bottlenecks during peak loads?
What is our approach of scaling - horizontal, vertical, hybrid?
What are the cost implications related to the scale? Is business aligned with these implications?
What are the disaster recovery and failover plans in case of scale issues?
Canva is a great example of handling the scale their architecture from 0 to 50 million uploads per day through microservices architecture. They improved the performance, and avoided the replication throughput ceiling by implementing sharding solution.
Reliability and Resiliency Engineering
Reliability and resiliency engineering ensures the system continues to operate at the acceptable level, after facing unexpected issues. It involves approaches such as load balancing, redundancy and automated recovery over period of time.
Probing questions:
What are know primary risks that could disrupt the service?
How do we design automatic recovery from the failures?
What are our redundancy strategies - active-active, active-passive failover?
How do preemptively address the failure before it start affecting the users?
How do we handle the surges in demand and provide ability to maintain critical requests or services during the surge?
Netflix is a well known example of resilience engineering. They implemented Chaos Monkey as part of chaos engineering practice to build a resilient system. Chaos monkey randomly disables part of the system mimicking real-world failures.
Security by Design
Security by design focuses on embedding security practices into the engineering processes rather than addressing reactively.
Probing questions:
How security requirements are covered under overall requirement and design process?
What user data do we collect and how it stored and transported?
How much level of authentication and authorization do we need?
Which security testing methods (pen-testing, design reviews) are employing during our development process?
What monitoring system are in place to detect malicious activities?
How do we ensure the third party integrations have acceptable level of security.
Spotify prioritizes security by design approach especially to protect user data and catalog of licensed music. They deploy proactive monitoring system to detect unusual user activities and unauthorized access.
Product Support
Logging and Troubleshooting Tools
Logging and troubleshooting tools equip the product support teams to diagnose the issues themselves without waking up the engineering team in the middle of the night.
Probing questions:
Do product logs provide actionable insights to the support team or customers?
Are the logs presented in a way that they can be filtered and analyzed by the support team?
Is support team equip with tools to act and fix the issue based on the insights provided by the logs?
Is the information logged too less, or too much? Is it captured under right log levels?
Majority of successful enterprise B2B products effective logging troubleshooting tools. A noteworthy example is cloud communication platform Twilio which provides self-troubleshooting tools for their support teams. Their logging enables both internal and external teams for effective diagnosis and resolution.
Automated Alerts and Monitoring Automated alerts and monitoring is essential for identification of issues related to system performance, reliability and resolve these issues proactively.
Probing questions:
Are issues prioritised and assigned to respective teams based criticality?
What criteria or performance metrics trigger the alert and how frequently?
Does system provide trend analysis for recurring issues?
How the alerts integrated with other communication platforms such as slack, SMS, emails?
Can alerts be suppressed during the planned maintenance?
Netflix provides monitoring and alerting system which monitors critical metrics such as streaming quality, latency, server health etc. Netflix uses the monitoring inhouse tool Atlas that allows custom thresholds and historical trends.
Conclusion
To summarise, this article explores holistic approach to innovation during the product development. Product management, design and engineering disciplines contributes to building user centric, scalable, resilience product that also contributes to the commercial success of the orgnisation.
Stay ahead in product innovation—subscribe to receive more insights on product management, design, and engineering, or connect with me on LinkedIn for real-time updates.
References:
Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. (1996). The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe
Bain & Company. (n.d.). Focus on Customer Needs and Loyalty.
Einstein, A. (1954). Ideas and Opinions. Crown Publishers
Etches, Amanda, and Eric Phetteplace. “Know Thy Users: User Research Techniques to Build Empathy and Improve Decision-Making.” Reference & User Services Quarterly 53, no. 1 (2013): 13–17.
"Miro's Digital Whiteboard for Remote Collaboration Blog. Miro Collaboration.
The Innovation Handbook by Adam Jolly
A/B Testing: Test Your Own Hypotheses & Prepare to be Wrong - Stuart Frisby
From Zero to 50 Million Uploads per Day: Scaling Media at Canva
Netflix's approach to chaos engineering and system reliability - netflixtechblog
Stepping Up the Cloud Security Game - Spotify Engineering Blog
Effective Troubleshooting with Logs - Twilio Blog
Business Unusual - Patagonia
Looking back and thinking ahead: Slack’s growth in Asia
Inside the world’s most successful bike launch - VANMOOF blog
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