If you don't know the story of Quibi, here's the abridged version. The company raised $1.75 Billion, crashed and burned in six months, then sold its entire content library to Roku for under $100 Million (i.e. less than 6% of the money it got from investors). Among other things, the company failed to leverage product thinking.
While Quibi might be one of the most mocked companies in the last decade, they aren't alone. Companies launch 30,000 products globally, and 95% of them fail, The difference between success and obscurity often isn't technical brilliance but how we think about product development. It's time to stop obsessing over features and start obsessing over humans. Welcome to Product Thinking 101.
Product thinking is as much an existential shift in how we conceptualize our work as it is a methodology. At its core, product thinking represents the radical notion that we should create things people actually want. (Revolutionary, I know.)
Unlike the feature factory approach, where success is measured by how many shiny widgets you've produced, product thinking asks a much more critical (and much scarier) question: "Does anyone actually care?"
Product thinking is fundamentally about developing a deep, almost uncomfortable obsession with human problems rather than technological solutions. It's the difference between saying "we need a better notification system" and "our users are missing important information that impacts their workflow." That is, focus on why you're building, not just what you're building.
Product thinking and user-centered design are like those cousins who look identical but insist they're nothing alike. User-centered design focuses on creating usable, useful, enjoyable experiences. Product thinking expands the lens to include business viability and strategic positioning. Another way to think about it is that product thinking adds consideration of business needs to to user-centered design's focus on user needs. They're complementary perspectives that, when combined, create something greater than their individual parts (like garage beers and 90s grunge, but for digital products).
Design thinking means taking a human-centered, iterative process to create innovative solutions that solve user problems. If design thinking is about solving problems creatively, product thinking is about making sure you're solving the right problems in the first place. Design thinking asks "How might we solve this?" while product thinking demands "Should we even bother?"
Consider this tale of two teams:
One team religiously follows design thinking processes. They brainstorm, prototype, and test beautiful solutions to problems nobody has. Meanwhile, their competition, practicing product thinking, spends time understanding market dynamics, customer pain points, and business constraints before dedicating resources to solutions.
Guess which team builds products people actually use?
The product thinking process isn't a neat, linear progression you can map on a Gantt chart (sorry, project managers). It's messier, more iterative, and infinitely more human. It looks something like:
In practice, this means spending significantly more time in the problem space before jumping to solutions—a concept that causes physical pain to many engineers and executives alike.
There are numerous key principles of product thinking. You'll know you're on the right track when feel like you're able to do all of these things well:
You can make progress in all of those efforts through user story mapping, building with intention, and thoughtful feature prioritization.
Customer journey mapping is essentially benevolent stalking. It's about following your users' every move to understand their motivations, frustrations, and moments of delight. It transforms abstract user stories into vivid narratives that make problems impossible to ignore.
The most effective journey maps capture not just what users do, but how they feel. As bizarre as this sounds, especially when you're thinking about enterprise apps, it's true because humans make decisions emotionally first and rationalize them later. (Yes, even logical software engineers do this.)
The design thinking process—empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test—becomes exponentially more powerful when infused with product thinking. Instead of being a creative exercise, it becomes a strategic framework for connecting human needs with business objectives.
This is where you'll hear product thinkers say things like "the problem isn't that users can't find the feature. They don't understand why they need it in the first place."
If product thinking had a love language, it would be saying "no" to feature requests. This isn't because product thinkers are inherently negative people, but because focus is a prerequisite for excellence.
Effective prioritization frameworks like RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) or the Impact/Effort matrix aren't just prioritization tools. They're communication devices that make the invisible thinking behind decisions visible to stakeholders. You can even use a custom Jira plugin to put the RICE framework right into your Atlassian tool.
Learning how to define and explain product thinking is nothing more than an academic pursuit until you know how to put it into practice.
Cross-functional collaboration is vital to product thinking. This means creating spaces where designers, engineers, marketers, and business stakeholders can develop shared understanding.
Try these approaches:
Competitive analysis isn't about copying features. Ripping off features might help you achieve parity, but never superiority. Instead, competitive research is about understanding the ecosystem your product exists within. Tools like feature comparison matrices, positioning maps, and SWOT analyses help teams see beyond their product bubble.
The goal isn't to match competitors feature-for-feature (the fastest path to mediocrity), but to identify opportunities where your unique capabilities meet unaddressed customer needs. In other words, it's less about a checklist of which features you and your competitors have, and more about which problems your customers can solve with your products.
Products, like people, have lifecycles. They're born (ideation), grow (scaling), mature (optimization), and eventually decline (end-of-life). Product thinking acknowledges these phases and adapts strategies accordingly.
A mature product requires different thinking than a nascent one. Early-stage products need bold experimentation, while mature products need incremental refinement. Applying the wrong approach at the wrong lifecycle stage is like trying to teach calculus to a toddler or asking a healthy adult if they need help using the potty.
Software built with product thinking feels different. It solves coherent problems rather than showcasing features. It anticipates user needs rather than responding to them retroactively. Most importantly, it evolves based on real usage patterns rather than speculative roadmaps.
Consider the difference between these approaches:
One leads to cluttered interfaces, while the other leads to valuable solutions.
It would be nice to have a checklist of actions and methodologies: "Follow these steps and you'll achieve success with product thinking." Unfortunately, that's not how it works. Product thinking isn't a thing you do as much as it's a state of being.
The project-to-product shift requires abandoning the comforting illusion of "done." Projects end; products evolve. This means replacing output metrics ("we shipped five features this quarter") with outcome metrics ("customer satisfaction improved by 23%").
This shift can be psychologically challenging for teams accustomed to the dopamine hit of crossing finish lines. The antidote is celebrating learning milestones alongside delivery milestones.
Design thinking is more powerful as a part of product thinking than it is as a standalone process. The focus on connecting solutions to evolving human needs becomes a driving force for continuous discovery and growth.
The most productive teams oscillate between divergent thinking (exploring possibilities) and convergent thinking (making decisions) as smoothly as breathing in and out. Design thinking provides structured approaches for this oscillation.
What gets measured gets managed. The best product teams choose metrics that matter. They also commit to getting feedback (and acting on it) often.
Product thinking demands metrics that reflect value creation rather than feature completion. This means tracking:
The shift can be jarring. Some developers might revolt when their performance metrics change from "features shipped" to "customer problems solved." It makes sense. People normally don't want to change the way they're measured (at least not when they're hitting their current goals). Once they experience the intrinsic motivation that comes from meaningful impact, though, they won't want to go back.
Effective product thinking establishes feedback loops at multiple levels:
These loops allow teams to course-correct continuously rather than scrambling for the lifeboats during a catostrophy.
Cultivating product thinking is a journey of continuous improvement. There's no point at which you reach your destination and kick your feet up for your happily ever after. It requires intellectual humility (acknowledging what we don't know), emotional intelligence (understanding human needs), and strategic clarity (focusing on what matters).
The effort's worth it. Organizations that build their cultures around product thinking will outperform their completion with bigger teams and more features, especially in uncertain markets.
Embracing product thinking means striving for progress, not perfection. It's less like a race to the finish line and more like tending to a garden.
As you embark on your own product thinking journey, remember that the goal isn't perfection but progress—moving incrementally closer to creating products that genuinely improve the lives of the humans who use them. And maybe, just maybe, avoiding becoming part of that 95% failure statistic.
I won't be offended if this post hasn't answered sated 100% of your curiousity about product thinking. Here are a few additional resources you can use to go deeper:
We have a pretty great library at Sketch, but the best product thinkers aren't necessarily those with the most frameworks or the most impressive Goodreads accounts. Rather, it seems like the best product leaders are the ones with the most curiosity about the humans they serve.
What will you be curious about today?