Every individual coming into the product management sphere is advised to improve and sharpen their product thinking through Product Teardown. Product Teardown is an initiative by The Product Folks to enable Product Managers and aspirants with a platform to showcase their product learnings. A product teardown, or simply teardown, is breaking down a product, part by part, feature by feature, and solution by solution, so that a product manager can better identify and understand the product.
Product Teardown is not something that should be rushed.
First, you must interact with the product you are about to teardown. Download it if it is a mobile application, and try to sign up or register for the service. Take note of how easy and quick the process was and the challenges involved with the process. These are the things that will inform your review and possible solution suggestion.
The higher the value-to-time rate is, the better the product is. The value-to-time rate is the amount of time it takes for a user to get the desired value in the product. For example, saving on the Piggyvest app might take about 3 minutes from downloading the app. This can be considered high as some apps require about 10 minutes just for the KYC (Know your customer) process.
Your user experience is what you are writing about in your product teardown. You can also go further by doing other user research and gathering all their experiences to make your teardown more comprehensive and holistic.
Here are some generic questions you can ask yourself (or others if researching) to better understand the product;
- What Problem is the product solving?
- Why was the product built?
- Who is the product built for?
- How does the company make money from the product?
- What are the product’s significant features, and what are the benefits of the feature to the users?
- Are there specific problems in the product currently and how can they be fixed?
- Why was the product designed the way it was?
- How does the product make you feel while interacting with it?
- What can be done right now to make the product better?
Furthermore, making your Product teardown presentation visually appealing is very important. The appeal is what will encourage people to engage with the content and review. The more positive reviews you get from senior Product Managers, the better you get at Product thinking.
Product teardown also includes your view about a product and your own suggestion. It does not have to be perfect or right simply because it is your opinion. You might not get some things right and that’s totally normal. This should not hinder you from adding your viewpoint when doing the teardown. It is in doing this that you get better at finding accurate information.
