Recently, the San Francisco meetup group conducted two teardown exercises with the team Yammer. The exercises helped the participants practice and improve product sense, which is a key PM skill.
It is useful to share some of the top-level approaches used in these exercises, which is a way of looking at a product. Your goal is to get into the minds of the product team that built the app. What problem were they solving, and why did they solve it in the particular way the did?
The key takeway should be to improve your product sense, to stay current on product practices, to discover features you may want to build for your app (we are not above stealing).
Prior workshops have included the following comparative teardowns:
These are dimensions or aspects that are commonly used in approaching the product.
Key questions to raise:
These are the top contexts that matter.
Some have rendered the patterns of successful products into a framework. Nir Eyal did this with his book Hooked (and not just a book, but a blog and an educational business). Hooked framework applies to the process of building habit-forming products:
Download a pdf version of this Product Teardown Guide.
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