Product Thinking

Your web presence isn’t an object of art, like a model ship in a bottle. But we often treat our websites that way, for instance applauding one-off sites because they seem impressive when actually they fracture the user’s overall experience of your brand. Your website is more like a ship with a crew that needs to negotiate changing seas in order to get somewhere.In particular, you need to think business first (where are you going and under what conditions) and consider the broad and long term impacts of any potential change you make to your site.

Business first

This component of product thinking is so obvious, and yet relatively infrequently considered. This is partially because we all get buried with requests and start dealing with the squeaky wheels (see this one page flowchart to help deal with this issue), but nonetheless it is crucial to always touch upon the business need of the change (and certainly to rise above just chasing industry trends). Regardless, everyone needs to move toward thinking about the business need of any possible changes.

Broad thinking

Broad thinking is considering all the factors needed to successfully deliver and maintain site capabilities or characteristics (and how to deliver the strong functionality across all stakeholder touch points).

There are certainly some overlaps with long-term thinking here, so let’s concentrate on these aspects of breadth:

Breadth of stakeholders required to implement the functionality
Breadth of teams that need to coordinate to deliver the capability
Breadth of stakeholder touch points when stakeholders interact with the capability or characteristic

Long term

Long-term thinking is creatively thinking how capabilities or site characteristics will be maintained over time (as well as new instances and decommissioning over time).

Let’s break this down into its components:

Creatively thinking. Product management isn’t just taking orders from stakeholders. Product management frames problems and opportunities, perhaps completely shifting the conversation on an issue.
Capability or site characteristics. Product management is shepherding in two aspects of a site: capabilities (whatever a particular organization is considering for its site, from mapping, APIs, social sharing, within-organization content sharing, etc.) and site characteristics (for instance, consistency across the entire web presence).
Maintained. It’s not much use to deploy something that immediately erodes. This can apply to content, a standard, or a new capability.
New instances and decommissioning. If you are confronted with a request to make a change to a particular piece of content, site section, template, or website, then how will the next request of the same type be addressed? If it will be considered as a completely new request, then you aren’t thinking for the long term.
Over time. The primary point of long-term thinking is that the impact of any change over the long term should always be considered.

As a flip side, if there is one thing that erodes website quality the fastest it is short term thinking. Unfortunately, given the immediacy and speed of implementing changes on the web (a good thing), this means that many organizations think they should be making whatever change crosses their path.