What is a product redesign?

A product redesign is where you completely overhaul your product and make sweeping changes to its UX, functionality, and product architecture. It goes beyond an everyday update of your product, instead reshaping the product into something that’s almost unrecognizable from the previous iteration. 

A product redesign is like giving your product a complete makeover. It’s not just a lick of paint, it’s a full-on renovation, changing things that the user will see (like the design and functionality) as well as things they won’t (like the code and strategy). 

The whole purpose of a product redesign is to update your product so that it matches user needs and keeps up with the changing expectations of your industry. 

A product redesign can touch on things like the user interface and functionality and also often comes with a reshaping of the overall product vision. It’s all about doing what it takes to keep up with changing technology, trends, and ever-changing user needs. 

Of course, a product redesign is a huge undertaking with many steps along the way. The process all starts with analyzing what’s working (and what’s not), and then from there, teams brainstorm, design prototypes, and test, test, and test again. 

A product redesign is iterative, collaborative, and sometimes messy, but it’s all part of getting the final product right.

A product redesign might involve:

• UI/UX overhauls: Think slicker layouts, streamlined workflows, and intuitive navigation.
• New features: Be it adding what you’re lacking, or introducing completely new concepts. 
• Performance upgrades: Faster, better, and smoother functionality to keep frustrations at bay.
• Branding refresh: Aligning the product’s look and feel with your company’s evolving story.

But remember – a product redesign is more than just the visuals. Strategy is involved here too. A well-executed redesign involves mapping out a clear roadmap, making sense of user feedback, and collaborating with stakeholders to ensure every change serves a purpose.

Product redesigns can be daunting. Juggling user demands, technical limitations, and time constraints isn’t for the faint of heart. But with a solid game plan, you’re not just updating a product; you’re reimagining its future. 

Ready to dive in? Let’s explore how to do it right.

Product redesign vs. product design refresh

Let’s clear things up before these two terms cause any confusion. You may see product redesign and product design refresh used interchangeably, but these are not the same thing, even if they often get lumped together.

A product design refresh is like updating your wardrobe – new colors, modern cuts, and maybe a fresh accessory or two. It focuses on visual tweaks, like rebranding, changing the position of a CTA button on a page layout, or updating your color palette. The product’s functionality is mostly untouched, and the underlying code sees little action.

On the other hand, a product redesign is a full transformation. It’s like updating your wardrobe while also getting a new hairdo, spray tan, maybe some work done, and a new personality to the point where you’re unrecognizable. It reimagines both how the product looks and works, often rewriting significant chunks of code to simplify workflows, add features, or revamp the user experience from the ground up.

Although different, these lines can blur. A simple refresh can spiral into a redesign if changes start impacting functionality. So, if your updates alter how the product feels and functions, you’ve crossed into redesign territory.

How do you know when it’s time for a product redesign?

Redesigning your product isn’t a decision you should take lightly. It’s a time-intensive process that should only be done when the time is right and the warning signs are there. 

Once your product is showing signs that it needs to be reborn and refreshed, only then should you move ahead with this process. A product redesign can breathe new life into your product and keep it competitive. So, how do you know it’s time? Here are the tell-tale signs.

You have an outdated look and feel

If your product’s design feels like it’s stuck in a time warp, it’s probably time for a product redesign. A dated interface can signal to users that the rest of your product might not be up to modern standards – even if that’s not the case. 

Freshening up your design keeps your current users engaged and helps make the right first impression on new ones. A good product redesign can help you cement your product positioning within your market.

You’re struggling with low performance metrics

Struggling to convert new users or keep existing ones around? Poor performance metrics like user retention and adoption rates may signal that a redesign should be in your future.

Dropping numbers could mean your product no longer meets user expectations or needs, making it time to reimagine the experience.

You get negative customer feedback

When users take the time to tell you your design isn’t cutting it, listen up. 

Getting useful customer feedback is really powerful for Product Managers. Negative feedback on usability and design is direct evidence that your product may need to be reworked. But this isn’t just criticism, it’s a blueprint for improvement. 

Redesigning your product based on user insights can rebuild trust and satisfaction, and lead you to a version of your product that more users enjoy and see value in.

You’re expanding into new markets

Tapping into new audiences often requires more than just a translation. Expanding into global markets may mean adapting your design to suit different languages, cultures, and user behaviors. 

This may mean you’ll need to go through a major product redesign.

You’re adding new features or product upgrades

Adding new features or tackling technical debt can quickly outgrow your current design, depending on the product architecture you’re using. A redesign helps accommodate these changes while keeping your product scalable and user-friendly.

What are the benefits of a product redesign?

A product redesign is more than just a facelift – it’s a real opportunity to enhance your product and drive growth. By undergoing a product redesign properly, you’re making your product better. Here are some of the key benefits:

Improved usability

A redesign can make your product more intuitive and user-friendly, helping customers accomplish their goals more efficiently. This improved usability translates to a better overall user experience.

Higher customer satisfaction

By addressing pain points and incorporating user feedback, a redesign shows your customers that their needs matter. This not only increases satisfaction but fosters loyalty and trust in your brand.

Increased market competitiveness

A modern, well-designed product stands out in a crowded market. By staying relevant and innovative, you can attract new users and keep existing ones engaged.

Boosted conversion and retention rates

An improved design can directly impact your bottom line by encouraging more users to convert and stick around. Smoother onboarding and better functionality keep users coming back for more.

Stronger brand image

Investing in redesigning your product signals to users that you value quality and continuous improvement. This enhances your brand’s reputation and encourages customers to become advocates for your product.

What are the main types of product redesign?

When it comes to product redesign, there are two main approaches you can take: 

Evolutionary redesign and revolutionary redesign.

Both serve a different purpose and suit different scenarios depending on your product’s needs and goals. Here’s a breakdown:

Revolutionary product redesign

A revolutionary redesign is a complete overhaul. Think of it as hitting the reset button on your product. This approach involves replacing the old design with an entirely new one, often making the product feel brand-new. It’s typically used when the current design is too outdated or misaligned with user expectations and needs a significant transformation to stay relevant.

The transition can be immediate, where the old version is replaced outright, or gradual, where users can try the new design while still having access to the old one before the full switch. While revolutionary redesigns can be risky due to their scale, they’re impactful when done right, breathing fresh life into your product and making a bold statement in the market.

Evolutionary product redesign

An evolutionary redesign, on the other hand, is a more gradual approach. Here, changes are introduced incrementally – one feature or section at a time – without disrupting the entire product. This method is less jarring for users, as they adapt to updates naturally over time.

Evolutionary redesigns are perfect for products needing frequent updates to address user feedback or evolving demands. They allow teams to test changes in real-world scenarios, reducing risks and enabling continuous improvement without overhauling the entire product at once.

Both approaches have their merits, and the right one depends on the scope of change and the challenges your product faces.

How to do a successful product redesign

Redesigning a product is hard. And it’s also risky. A lot of time, effort, and money goes into a product redesign, so it’s not something that you’d want to get wrong. 

To oversee a successful product redesign, you need a structured approach that balances strategy, user insights, and execution. Here’s a step-by-step process to guide Product Managers through a successful product redesign:

1. Define your goals and objectives

Every redesign must begin with a clear purpose. Identify what you aim to achieve: be that addressing user pain points, boosting engagement, improving performance, or staying ahead of competitors. 

These objectives should align with your overall business strategy. Use frameworks like SMART Goals to ensure your goals are actionable and focused. This clarity will guide decisions throughout the redesign process.

2. Analyze the current product

Before jumping into solutions, you first need to know your problems. 

Take a detailed look at the product as it exists today. Assess its features, usability, and performance. Identify areas where it’s falling short or no longer aligns with user needs. 

You’re going to have to do a hell of a lot of product research in this step, to get a full understanding of where your current product is letting you down. This step creates a baseline for measuring the impact of your redesign and ensures you’re addressing the right problems.

3. Conduct user research

Gather insights from your users to understand their experiences, needs, and pain points. Use surveys, interviews, and analytics tools to collect both qualitative and quantitative data. 

This research will help you pinpoint areas for improvement and prioritize changes that resonate most with your audience. Remember, user input is the foundation of an effective redesign.

4. Pair research with usage analytics

Users don’t always articulate their challenges very well, so complement their feedback with data from product usage analytics. Tools like heatmaps, session replays, funnel analysis, and cohort analysis can reveal hidden friction points and highlight opportunities for improvement. 

Together, user research and analytics provide a comprehensive picture of how your product is used and where it needs to evolve.

5. Ideate and prototype

Translate your insights into actionable solutions. Begin with brainstorming sessions to generate ideas that address the identified issues. Create prototypes and an MVP for initial feedback and high-fidelity versions as concepts take shape. Prototyping allows you to test your ideas quickly without committing to full development, minimizing risks and saving time.

Invite users to provide feedback through user testing or beta programs. Use their input to refine your designs, ensuring they meet both user expectations and business goals.

6. Communicate the redesign to stakeholders and users

Transparency is key when introducing significant changes to your product. Communicate with internal stakeholders to ensure alignment and with users to prepare them for the redesign.

Use email campaigns, release notes, in-app messages, and social media to highlight how the changes will improve their experience. Build excitement while addressing potential concerns to ease the transition.

Once the redesign is finalized, roll it out thoughtfully. Depending on the scale, consider a phased release or beta testing to mitigate risks. A well-executed launch sets the tone for user adoption and satisfaction.

7. Monitor performance post-launch

The product redesign doesn’t end at launch. You still have work to do. Track key metrics like engagement, retention, and conversion rates to measure their impact. Keep an eye on various Product Management KPIs and metrics to identify areas that may still need tweaking. Collect user feedback to understand their reactions and address any lingering concerns.

Need a hand on what metrics to keep an eye on? We’ve got an ebook covering all the best ones.

8. Iterate and improve

No redesign is ever truly finished. Use the data and feedback collected post-launch to identify opportunities for continuous improvement. There are always ways to make things better. 

Of course, you don’t want to do another product redesign right after the first. Instead, prioritize incremental updates to fine-tune the user experience and stay responsive to evolving needs. By adopting an iterative mindset, you make sure your product remains relevant and valuable over time.

What are the risks of a product redesign?

Embarking on a product redesign isn’t a decision to be taken lightly. While a successful redesign can reinvigorate your product and delight users, the risks of rushing the process or skipping critical steps can be substantial – and often costly. Here’s what can go wrong:

Alienating existing users

Your loyal user base is your product’s backbone. A poorly executed redesign risks driving them away, especially if it disrupts their workflows or removes features they depend on. Users don’t want to feel like guinea pigs for untested changes, so failing to validate your ideas through user testing or ignoring feedback can lead to frustration, customer churn, and negative reviews.

Missed business goals

A redesign without clear objectives is like wandering in a fog. If you don’t define measurable goals upfront – whether it’s improving retention, driving revenue, or solving specific pain points – you risk wasting resources on changes that look good but don’t deliver value to you or your customers. Worse, you might solve the wrong problems altogether.

Make sure your product redesign helps you achieve your business goals and is aligned with the same North Star metric.

Overlooking user needs

Designing in a vacuum – or worse, making redesign decisions based on assumptions – can result in a product that looks polished but doesn’t actually address user pain points. Neglecting thorough research and testing can introduce new issues while failing to resolve the old ones.

Negative market perception

A botched redesign risks damaging your reputation. If users and competitors perceive your product as inconsistent or unreliable, it can erode trust and market share, which takes years to rebuild.

A fresh start

Embarking on a product redesign is both a challenge and an opportunity. It’s a chance to address user needs, modernize your offering, and differentiate yourself in a competitive market. Whether you’re tackling outdated designs, low-performance metrics, or planning for growth, a thoughtful redesign can redefine your product’s future. 

From the initial goal-setting to analyzing data, gathering user insights, and iterating through prototypes, every step builds towards a product that aligns with user expectations and business objectives.

Choosing the right approach – be it evolutionary or revolutionary redesign – depends on your specific goals and the scale of transformation required. Both methods come with unique advantages, and balancing user needs with strategic foresight ensures you’re creating a product that resonates with your audience. While the process may be demanding, the payoff is worth it.Redesigning goes deeper than pure aesthetics; it’s about making your product work better for your users and your team. Tools like ProdPad simplify that process by tying your validation and research directly to your product roadmap. Centralize your efforts and turn insights into action.

Try ProdPad for free and create a roadmap that leads to success.

What is product research?

Product research is all about building an understanding. Understanding a problem. Understanding the people you want to solve the problem for. And understanding what potential solutions suit the problem best. As a Product Manager, research should be a big part of your role, helping you build confidence in your approach and drive data-driven Product Management. 

Remember college and those big thousand-word essays you had to write? I bet the person with the highest grades in your class spent more time gathering resources and information than they did actually writing the thing. 

This speaks to how important research is. You’re not going to create anything good, anything of value, without learning about the subject area. This is the same when it comes to your product. Product research improves your understanding of crucial things like your customers, competitors, market, and even your own product performance. 

With product research, you can act with more certainty that your approach through your product development process is validated. 

There are a million and one ways to do product research, and multiple times during the Product Management lifecycle where you’re going to want to whip out the test tubes to do some testing and product research. We’ll touch on that in more detail later on.

To be a good Product Manager who operates based on data and insight instead of hunches and guestimations, you need to embed product research into every aspect of your workflow. It needs to be part of your daily routine as a Product Manager. 

Research isn’t just something you do once and then forget about it. As a PM, every day needs to be a school day. So get learning. 

Product research vs product discovery

Product research and product discovery can often get confused with one another. With both, you’re finding something out, you’re learning something new, but they focus on different things. 

Product research is all about finding the truth. Information about your product, customers, market – whatever it may be – that can guide future decision-making. 

Product discovery is more focused on the activities that help you decide what to create next. Product discovery is about validating ideas and testing hypotheses to work out what customer problems are worth solving and the solutions that are worth building. It focuses on reducing uncertainty and ensuring the product delivers real value.

Product discovery is mainly done during the discovery stage of the Product Management Lifecycle, right at the beginning when you’re still figuring out what the best approach is. It’s all about validating your ideas to figure out what’s going to delight your users the most. 

The key thing here is that product discovery is bound to this stage of the lifecycle. 

Product research is far broader and encompasses all the other learning you’ll do during the development process – and trust us, you’ll be doing a lot of testing and learning. Product research is all about answering questions. 

Why are users churning? Finding that out is product research. 

What feature should we build next? Working out that answer is product discovery. 

There’s a lot more to know about product discovery if you want to master it. Learn more about it to better understand how it differs from product research:

Why is product research important? 

Why is breathing important? Product research is the backbone of Product Management. If we’re not out there finding out things about our customers and our own product performance, what’s the point? 

If you don’t know the things users in your target market like, how on earth are you going to build a good product for them? If you don’t know what features are working and not working, how on earth do you expect to improve things? 

Product research is the cornerstone of building a good product – a product that drives growth. It gets your head out of the sand and lets you see things much more clearly. 

Let’s shine a light on some of the benefits of product research: 

1. You’ll understand user needs and pain points
   Your product exists to solve problems – but if you don’t know what those problems are, even the best ideas could miss the mark. Product research uncovers the challenges your customers face, helping you design solutions that truly matter.
2. You can align user needs with business goals
   Great products strike a balance between customer satisfaction and business objectives. Research bridges the gap, ensuring that your roadmap supports user needs while being tied to the greater product strategy.
3. You can drive better innovation
   When you understand what customers want, you can think creatively about how to meet their needs. This clarity inspires innovative ideas and ensures that every feature or iteration hits the mark, and everything you do is customer-centric.
4. You’ll gain a competitive edge
   Product research lets you learn more about your competitors. Knowing their strengths and weaknesses helps you spot a market gap that you can fill to get your product to stand out.
5. You’ll streamline things
   With research-backed insights, prioritizing features and initiatives becomes a team effort grounded in customer value. This added knowledge makes it easier to refine your backlog and keep everyone focused on what matters most. 
6. You can challenge assumptions
   You may have a hunch or a preconceived idea that may not actually be true. Product research sorts the facts from fiction letting you make choices based on reality. 
7. You’ll boost performance
   Turning your attention to researching performance metrics can help you identify opportunities where you can improve and capitalize. Spending time to learn about your own product and how it’s being used can open the door to innovations that transform your product.

Simply put, product research gives you knowledge, and knowledge is power. Knowing your customers, competitors, market trends, and product feasibility gives you an omniscient point of view to make impactful decisions. 

What are the different types of product research?

There are soooo many different ways to do product research. That’s because there’s a lot of different things you can choose to find out that’s going to empower you as a product person. Every nugget of information gained about your product is a goldmine, and whatever way you find that out can be considered product research. 

Let’s crack this nut a bit more, and explore the different types of product research available to you:

Customer research

Customer research is all about getting into the minds of the people who use – or more crucially could use – your product. This process uncovers their needs, frustrations, and desires, providing the foundation for designing features, experiences, and marketing strategies that resonate. 

By understanding who your customers are and what they want, you can create a product that genuinely solves their problems and keeps them coming back.

Some of the best customer research methods include: 

• Customer interviews and surveys:
  Dive deeper into personal experiences, uncovering motivations, and pain points. You can use simple surveys embedded in your product, or invite certain customers for one-on-one interviews. Or, leverage your Customer Advisory Board and schedule a CAB meeting to interview a cross-section of your customers at once.
• User personas:
  Create detailed user persona profiles that represent your user base to better understand each user segment so that you can create products that resonate with them.
• Usability testing:
  Evaluate how easily users can navigate and accomplish tasks within your product by observing their interactions, identifying pain points, and gathering feedback to improve the overall user experience.

Market research 

Market research focuses on understanding the broader environment in which your product exists. This includes analyzing competitors, identifying trends, and spotting gaps or opportunities in the market. It helps ensure that your product fits into the landscape and remains competitive over time.

Various types of market research include: 

• SWOT Analysis: Identify your product’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in the market, and see how it compares with your competitors. A SWOT analysis lets you better understand your competitors in the context of your product.
• Product Benchmarking: Analyze competitors’ offerings to understand your differentiation points. External product benchmarking lets you see how you’re against the standards in your industry.
• Trend Analysis: Monitor shifts in customer preferences, emerging technologies, or market conditions.

Product analysis 

Product analytics provide real-time data on how users interact with your product, helping you understand what’s working and where improvements are needed. It bridges the gap between assumptions and reality by showing patterns in user behavior and usage.

Product Analysis can include things like:

• Cohort Analysis: Study groups of users over time to evaluate retention and behavior trends.
• Funnel Analysis: Identify stages in the user journey where drop-offs occur, and optimize them.
• Heatmaps: Visualize user interaction with your product to highlight high- and low-engagement areas, helping to understand the most popular features of your product.
• Session Recordings: Replay user sessions to see firsthand how your product is navigated and experienced, allowing you to improve its usability.

Metrics and KPI tracking 

You don’t immediately think of metrics and KPI tracking as product research, but actually studying your performance against KPIs can be pretty useful knowledge to learn. Tracking metrics and KPIs ensures you’re measuring the success of your product against predefined goals. This data-driven approach provides insights into growth, engagement, and retention, helping you identify what’s working and what needs adjustment.

Some of the best metrics to track that can provide illuminating insights include:

• North Star Metrics: Define a single guiding metric to align your team’s efforts and measure performance against it.
• Product Launch Metrics: Evaluate the success of a product launch by tracking these metrics.
• Product Adoption Metrics: Measure how effectively users are integrating your product into their workflows.

Make sure you’re using the most effective KPIs by picking from the ultimate list you can download below: 

Product pricing research

Researching around your pricing strategy is an important way to see if you’re pitching your product right. This helps with product positioning, aligning the perceived value of your product with what customers are willing to pay. It will help you ensure that your pricing strategy supports profitability while remaining competitive.

Some great ways to research your product pricing are through:

• Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Analysis: A framework to determine the optimal price point for your target audience.
• Conjoint Analysis: A Product Management framework that identifies which product features customers value most to guide tiered pricing.

Learn more about these price-related product research methods – and more  

When should you do product research?

Product research is a continuous responsibility. It’s like owning a dog, you can’t decide not to feed it one day. You’ve got to be committed to product research from day one. 

There are many times during the product development process and product lifecycle when product research is ESSENTIAL. 

Here are some moments when product research needs to be at the forefront of your mind: 

1. At the start: During idea validation

Before diving into the build phase, you need to validate your initial ideas to check that they’ll work. You don’t want to find out too late that the ideas actually suck.

Conduct research early on to help you refine your product concept and align it with user needs so that your product has a solid foundation from the very beginning.

2. When defining your product roadmap

Once you’ve figured out the core concept of your product, you next need to do product research when prioritizing feature ideas.

You need to understand what your users value most, which problems need solving, and how your product can evolve to meet those needs over time. This helps you focus on actions that will drive the best results and stops you from wasting time on things that won’t move the needle.

3. During product development

Throughout the development process, research should be used to test hypotheses and refine your approach.

Usability testing, A/B testing, and feedback loops help confirm that each iteration of your product or feature is meeting user expectations. This ongoing research prevents costly mistakes and allows for early adjustments. You want to encourage a culture of continuous improvement. 

4. When preparing for a launch

As you get closer to launch, product research helps you fine-tune your offering. Product research at this stage might include building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to see how your product idea fairs in the real world. Feedback from this will help you make tweaks to improve what you’re offering and double-check that you’re backing the right solution.

5. After launch

Don’t think that product research stops once your product is in users’ hands. After launch, you’ll learn the most by monitoring how users are engaging with your product.

Post-launch research helps you find areas for improvement, track user satisfaction, and uncover any bugs or features that need attention. It also informs future iterations and helps keep your product aligned with evolving user needs.

Who does product research? 

Do you think that one person does all the product research, sat there handling all the data and insight for the entire Product Team? Nah, product research is something that everyone is involved in and should have a hand in. It’s a collaborative effort. 

Yeah, okay, some folk may take the lead, but it’s a task that spans multiple roles within the organization. It relies on input from various stakeholders. So who are the main players? 

Product Managers

I bet you saw this coming. As the custodian of product strategy and product vision, it’s no surprise that the PM will be deep in product research. 

They define what needs to be researched, prioritize research initiatives based on business goals, and ensure that the findings are integrated into the product roadmap. Product Managers act as the bridge between the user insights gathered from research and the development of the product.

Data Analysts

Data Analysts bring the power of numbers to the product research process. As a role within the Product Operations function, they analyze large datasets and tidy them all up so that Product Managers have clear data that they can act on and make decisions on. By identifying patterns, trends, and anomalies, they offer interesting insights into how users engage with the product.

Product Operations is a function normally reserved for larger businesses with multiple PMs, so this role tends to be seen in enterprise companies. If you’re a bit smaller, nine times out of ten,  PM will be doing data analysis themselves. 

Still, their work is essential for answering questions like: Which features are most used? Where do users drop off? What metrics signal success or failure? Data Analysts play a big role in making research data-driven and optimizing the Product Management process.  

How do I do product research well? 

Let’s explore the key principles of good product research. We don’t just want to tell you how to do it, we want to tell you how to do it well so you’ve got useful, actionable data and insight that can drive amazing results. 

Here are some product research best practices to help you nail this vital part of Product Management: 

1. Start with clear goals

Before diving into research, define your purpose. What are you trying to learn? Are you exploring new opportunities, validating an idea, or refining an existing product? This helps make sure that you’re using the right product research methods for what you’re trying to do.

As already explored, there are a lot of things you can learn with product research. Having clear objectives keeps you from getting lost in data and ensures your findings directly influence your product’s development.

2. Deeply understand your customers

Product research is customer-first, always. Be obsessive about your users when doing product research. Dive into their pain points and find out what keeps them up at night and what makes them excited about similar products.

The best way to find this stuff out is to ask them directly. Some PMs can try and be too clever and use other methods to learn about their customers. Engaging directly with users is the best way and will reveal what they value most, ensuring your product solves real problems. There’s no substitute for a customer interview or survey, so make use of these options in your product research.

3. Combine qualitative and quantitative research

It’s easy to fall into the trap of relying too much on numbers and data and quantitative stuff. Many PMs swear by this – but reality isn’t just spreadsheets and graphs, you need a touch of real life. 

That’s why it’s important to supplement quantitative research with qualitative research. This can give context to the numbers, and help build a clearer picture of what’s going on.

Confused between the two options? 

• Qualitative methods = interviews, focus groups, etc. Understanding user motivations, emotions, and behaviors.
• Quantitative methods = Metrics, A/B tests, analytics: Gathering statistically significant data to validate your hypotheses.

Sometimes what customers SAY and what they actually DO are different things. You shouldn’t rely on qualitative research alone for that reason. And, on the flip side, you cannot get a full understanding of motivations, emotional reactions, and frustrations from looking at the quantitative stuff alone. 

You need both together. Looking at both quantitative and qualitative product research provides a 360 view of your target audience and ensures you’re making decisions based on robust evidence.

4. Research relentlessly

Turn insights into action by testing your product ideas early and often. Start with small, low-stakes experiments, and just keep building, and testing throughout the lifecycle. Each bit of research you do is a step closer to the perfect product, so make sure you maintain the appetite for product testing at all times. 

You don’t do one bit of research and then base your entire product idea on that. You need to keep learning and keep checking to make sure you’re onto a winner. 

Research is Knowledge. Knowledge is Power.

At the heart of every great product is great product research. It’s what transforms ideas from hazy concepts into something tangible, meaningful, and valuable. Product research doesn’t just give you an answer – it gives you confidence that you are taking the right steps. Confidence that you’re prioritizing the right features, meeting your customers’ needs, and creating a roadmap grounded in reality, not guesswork.

At ProdPad, we understand the power of product research, which is why we’ve built tools to make it part of your everyday workflow. With features like customer feedback tracking, user persona creation, and our iconic Now-Next-Later roadmapping, ProdPad empowers you to ask the right questions, uncover actionable insights, and continuously improve. Product research isn’t one-and-done, and it isn’t something you do separately: it’s a long-term commitment tied to your Product Management process that helps you create a better product.

Try ProdPad and see how research-driven Product Management leads to stronger, more successful products.

What is a Product Mindset? 

The product mindset is a way of thinking about Product Management that focuses on solving problems holistically while delivering meaningful impact to both users and the business. It’s about prioritizing the problem to solve and viewing solutions as stepping stones toward continuous improvement, rather than treating products and features as one-and-done tasks.

Your product lives forever: it’s not something with a defined endpoint. Adopting a product mindset means embracing the idea that your product is never finished, there’s always potential to make it better. 

Instead of seeing a product launch as the finish line, you’re seeing it as a mile marker in a longer, ultra marathon-like race. As Product Management practices and product-led growth strategies have gained prominence over the last 10–15 years, so too has this approach, reshaping how teams think about development and growth.

Now, a product mindset isn’t a set of tactics. It’s a perspective, not a playbook. There’s no list of rules you need to follow to have a product mindset. It’s a philosophy that encourages you to approach your work with the understanding that a product is never truly “done.” 

Achieving greatness means leaning into experimentation, conducting market research, creating a customer feedback loop, and iterating through a build-measure-learn cycle. It’s about staying adaptable, aware, and committed to long-term improvement.

Product Mindset vs Project Mindset

If you’re planning to adopt a product mindset, you’re likely going to be moving there from a pre-existing project mindset. A project mindset is rooted in rigidity, focusing on completing predefined scopes within set timescales and budgets. Success is measured by output: how many features are shipped and how quickly tasks are checked off. Volume is the driving force. When it’s done, it’s done, time to move on to the next project. 

The product mindset forces a shift in perspective where you embrace the idea that a product, or even feature, is never truly finished. It needs to evolve and improve continuously. This perspective is about delivering ongoing value and making decisions that align with long-term goals for both the customer and the business.

Where the project mindset prioritizes execution, the product mindset thrives on strategy. It’s not just about doing things right but also about doing the right things. With a product mindset, you consider the bigger picture: How will this feature grow the product? What value does it bring to users? How can we improve and adapt over time? 

Going from project to product mindset shifts the focus from output to outcomes, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.

What are the three principles of product mindset? 

At the core of the product mindset are three guiding principles that define what success looks like when implementing this frame of mind inside your business. Together, these driving principles ensure that your product doesn’t just exist – it thrives and provides value. 

As long as you keep these three pillars in mind, you’ll be able to create solutions that delight users, drive business success, and adapt seamlessly to the ever-changing landscape of customer expectations and market demands. Let’s break down each principle and what it means in practice.

Minimizing time to value

At the heart of the product mindset is the drive to deliver value as quickly as possible. Time to value is the period between when a user first interacts with your product and when they experience its intended benefits. This moment is called the wow moment. A shorter time to value means your product is solving problems faster, delighting users sooner, and building trust along the way.

This principle pushes teams to prioritize the most impactful changes and eliminate anything that slows down delivery. It’s not about rushing work; it’s about being laser-focused on what matters most to the user. By shipping smaller, high-value increments, you can gather feedback early, iterate effectively, and keep delivering solutions that resonate.

Solving for need

A product mindset is rooted in addressing real user needs, not just ticking off feature requests or following trends. It’s about understanding the core problem your users face and crafting solutions that create meaningful impact. 

Teams with this mindset are relentless in asking ‘why’ until they reach the heart of the issue. Kind of like a bored five-year-old, asking ‘why’ to every one of your answers! 

This principle ensures that your product remains relevant and valuable over time. Instead of blindly adding things to your product, operating like a feature factory, you’re aligning every decision with your users’ goals and your business objectives. By focusing on solving the right problems, you ensure that your product isn’t just a collection of features but a deliberate solution.

Being good at change

Change is the only constant in product development, and excelling at it is essential for long-term success. Markets evolve, user needs shift, and technology advances. The product mindset embraces these changes, seeing them not as disruptions but as opportunities to improve and grow.

To excel at change, teams must adopt a culture of adaptability and continuous learning. This means being open to feedback, iterating on the fly, and rethinking strategies as needed. By staying nimble and responsive, you ensure that your product stays ahead of the curve and continues to deliver value no matter what challenges arise.

Why is the Product Mindset important? 

Adopting a Product Mindset is really important, but here’s the catch: it’s not a solo endeavor. If you are the only one adopting this frame of mind, you’re going to clash with the rest of the team who are entrenched in a different approach. 

For the product mindset to really shine, It’s important that it becomes woven into the fabric of your entire company culture. The benefits of doing this are huge. 

You break free from the illusion of progress

See, you’re probably operating in a Project mindset for one main reason: the project mindset feels safer because it’s easier to measure output. You can report on product velocity, count the features shipped, and build a picture of productivity that looks great on paper. But here’s the problem, this approach often results in a pile of disjointed, low-value work that doesn’t align with strategic goals. It’s progress without purpose.

A product mindset flips the script by prioritizing outcomes over output. It ensures that your team’s time and resources are spent creating meaningful, optimized solutions that align with both customer needs and business objectives. It’s not about doing more – it’s about doing what matters.

You unlock efficiency

The product mindset doesn’t just improve what you build; it transforms how you build it. Traditional project planning wastes time on elaborate timelines and exhaustive scoping exercises only for those plans to fall apart when reality hits. 

Be honest, how often do you meet development deadlines? You’re wasting so much time planning cycles just to present this ambitious timeline that you’re going to miss anyway. With a product mindset, you cut through the noise.

Instead of rigid plans, you work iteratively, breaking tasks into manageable chunks and adapting as you go. You can test ideas, gather feedback, and pivot without being bogged down by the weight of “the plan.” This makes your team more agile, flexible, and efficient, unlocking a flow of continuous improvement and innovation.

You build a collaborative culture

Perhaps the biggest impact of adopting a product mindset is the cultural shift it creates. It encourages cross-functional collaboration, where every team from Engineering to Marketing to Customer Support rallies around shared goals. It fosters curiosity, experimentation, and a focus on long-term success.

In the end, the product mindset isn’t just about delivering better products; it’s about creating a stronger, more aligned team. By embedding this way of thinking into your organization, you’ll unlock a more innovative, adaptive, and effective way of working. And that’s the kind of progress that truly matters.

How do you create a product mindset? 

Shifting to a product mindset isn’t easy. For many, especially stakeholders higher up in your organization, the comfort of seeing a product meticulously planned out, no matter how unrealistic that plan may be, can feel reassuring. 

But the reality is, that time and energy spent on building that rigid framework often results in wasted effort when the plan inevitably falls apart.

Creating a product mindset is a big shift. You and your entire team need to embrace the change. To help you make this transition, here are the key actions you need to take to build a product mindset within your team and company.

What is a Product Operations Manager? 

A Product Operations Manager supports the wider Product Management function by handling the practical, operational work of the product process, taking it off the plate of the PM so they can focus on crucial product-orientated tasks. A Product Operations Manager takes ownership of ‘bitty’ administrative tasks while introducing ways to improve collaboration and streamline processes. This makes the entire Product Team more efficient and facilitates smarter decision-making. 

A Product Operations Manager is becoming an increasingly sought-after role for scaling Product Teams. As Product Teams grow, Product Managers often find themselves bogged down by operational hurdles such as choosing tools, organizing workflows, and gathering data. These responsibilities, while critical, pull PMs away from their primary focus: building and improving products. 

Enter the Product Operations Manager: a dedicated problem-solver who steps in to manage these complexities.

By taking on this operational load, Product Operations Managers empower Product Teams to work smarter, make better decisions, and achieve more throughout the entire Product Management lifecycle.

Although a Product Operations Manager holds no influence over product development, their work helps improve product discovery, data analysis, and facilitates data-driven Product Management. The role helps Product Teams build better products. 

Product Manager vs Product Operations Manager 

Think of Product Managers and Product Operations Managers as two gears in a finely tuned machine. They both need to ‘click’ to get things moving properly.

While Product Managers set the direction – crafting the product vision, defining priorities, and steering execution – Product Operations Managers ensure the engine runs smoothly. These roles work in a partnership alongside each other, where one role clears the path for the other to thrive.

If Product Managers are racecar drivers, Product Operations Managers are those clearing the track of any debris or oil spills so that they can have a smooth race. Product Managers lead customer discovery, craft strategies, and set the product roadmap. Meanwhile, Product Operations Managers ensure those strategies can be executed effectively by overseeing and selecting the right tools, managing cross-functional coordination, maintaining customer feedback loops, and providing actionable, clean data.

Without a Product Operations Manager, PMs risk being pulled into time-intensive operational tasks, leaving less room for strategic work. With a Product Operations Manager in place, Product Managers can concentrate on high-impact activities like market analysis, prioritization, and delivering meaningful customer outcomes.

What does a Product Operations Manager do? 

The main goal of a Product Operations Manager is to streamline and optimize the operational processes in the Product Management function. Now, the way they do this can vary depending on what each organization needs.

At the end of the day, a Product Operations Manager is designed to make the life of a Product Manager easier and allow them to do better work. They eliminate the distractions. Here are some of the common responsibilities a Product Operations Manager will handle on a day-to-day basis:

Streamline processes

One of the main responsibilities of a Product Operations Manager is identifying and optimizing processes within the Product Team structure. This could involve standardizing workflows for sprint planning, backlog grooming, or roadmap updates. If there’s a bottleneck or a blocker, a Product Operations Manager should be on hand to work out a solution that helps teams deliver value.

Managing tools and systems

The most effective Product Teams have a sophisticated stack of tools empowering their work and supporting their processes. That Product Management tool stack usually looks something like this:

Evaluating, testing, and implementing the best Product Management software is a serious, and important job. A Product Operations Manager takes ownership of this process, assessing these tools, running procurement, rolling out onboarding and training across the team, and owning the ongoing adoption and relationship with the vendor. All of this is done with an understanding of the Product Team’s needs and the objective of achieving maximum efficiency. 

Collecting and analyzing metrics

To drive data-informed decisions, a Product Operations Manager is tasked with collecting and analyzing metrics that reveal team performance, process efficiency, and customer feedback trends. They then transform this raw data into actionable insights, enabling Product Managers to refine strategies and improve outcomes. 

Facilitating cross-functional communication

Collaboration across teams is critical in product development, especially in a product-led company. Product Operations Managers act as the glue, ensuring seamless communication between Product, Engineering, Design, and other key stakeholders. They establish clear communication channels, schedule alignment meetings, and make sure that updates are shared consistently. This prevents anyone from working within a silo. 

Driving continuous improvement

Product Operations Managers are always on the lookout for opportunities to enhance team performance. Whether it’s identifying inefficiencies in workflows or introducing best practices, they proactively suggest and implement changes to ensure the team operates at its best.

Managing Feedback Loops

Customer and stakeholder feedback is vital for product success. A Product Operations Manager ensures that this feedback is collected, organized, and routed to the right people within the Product Team. Without this, feedback can be messy and hard to decipher. By managing these loops, they help teams prioritize improvements, easily work out the next steps, and maintain alignment with customer needs.

Onboarding new team members

A smooth onboarding process means new hires can hit the ground running. Product Operations Managers take responsibility for creating and executing onboarding plans that familiarize new team members with tools, processes, and expectations, accelerating their integration into the team.

What is product validation?

Product validation is the process of checking if a product or product idea meets its intended purpose, achieves specific requirements, and addresses the needs of its target audience. It’s a check to make sure that the product is suitable before you go and blow a whole load of money developing and launching it to the market. 

In simple terms, it’s your safety net – your way of confirming you’re on the right track before committing significant resources to build, launch, or scale the product. 

At its root, product validation makes sure you’re not guessing about what your customer needs, but are instead building your solution based on evidence. It’s about asking: Is this product solving a real problem? Is it suitable for the market? Will it deliver the value it promises?

Product validation is a key stage in the Product Management lifecycle. It sits between your product discovery phase (when you identify the problem) and the build phase (where you execute the solution). It’s the phase when you’re testing out your possible solutions to make sure you land on the right one. 

Think of product validation as a scientist testing a hypothesis. Imagine you’re designing a rocket to go to space but don’t know which fuel will safely get it there without causing an explosion. Would you risk building a full-scale rocket just to find out? Of course not! You’d conduct smaller, controlled experiments to identify the best solution. The same principle applies to product validation: small-scale tests to verify ideas before taking them to the next level.

While there’s a spotlight on product validation after the discovery phase, it doesn’t end there. The truth is that you’re going to be validating your product multiple times during your development process. It’s not a one-and-done deal. You should be validating at: 

• The idea stage: To confirm the problem exists and the solution is viable.
• The pre-launch stage: To fine-tune features or messaging.
• The post-launch stage: To validate updates or new features.

Why is product validation important? 

If you want to be a data-driven Product Manager, you need to be validating your ideas. You can’t always rely on a hunch, so product validation gives you a chance to check and see if your idea is actually any good and if it’s resonating. 

You don’t want to be doing expensive and time-consuming things without research and evidence that proves it’s worth your time and money. It’s like throwing a dart in the dark from 10 yards away. Yeah, you might hit a bullseye if you’re lucky, but you’re more likely to miss the board completely. Product validation turns the lights on and allows you to stand a bit closer to the target before making your throw.  

For Product Management, validation is critical to success. Here’s a look at all the key benefits that make product validation a key part of your overall process:

Reducing risks

Product validation makes things less risky. Studies show that over 35% of startups fail because there’s no market need for their product. That’s a staggering number and something that could have been avoided with reasonable validation. It’s better to not make a product at all than a product that doesn’t work. 

By validating early, you ensure your idea solves a real problem that people actually care about. Think of it as your insurance policy against wasting time, money, and resources on something that doesn’t hit the mark.

Validation also reduces technical and execution risks. By testing ideas on a smaller scale, you catch issues before they become costly development disasters.

Building user-centered products

Remember: everything you do to your product is for your users. Product validation helps ensure that you’re constantly thinking of them when making new features. By stepping into their shoes and assessing your product from their perspective, you get a clearer view of whether things are working. 

By gathering insights through interviews, prototypes, and customer feedback loops, you’ll uncover their real needs and pain points – things you might not catch in a brainstorming session. Insights from validation can reveal surprising opportunities and stop you from becoming a feature factory.

Saves time and money

You probably know this already, but developing products is expensive, and marketing isn’t cheap either. By doing product validation, you’re making sure that you’re spending resources on ideas that have an increased chance of success. 

By validating bad ideas, you’re prevented from pouring time, budget, and energy into something that might fall flat on its face. 

Improving stakeholder buy-In

Some stakeholders can be a bit frustrating to deal with. One day they may ask you to drop everything and prioritize a feature idea of theirs just because it came to them in a dream, then the next they’re demanding more evidence before moving ahead with something you proposed. 

Whenever you want to convince others that your ideas are worth focusing on, you’re going to want to present hard data to back you up. A validated concept can turn skeptics into supporters, aligning everyone around a shared vision. 

It can also help you strengthen your relationships. If stakeholders consistently see validated ideas based on evidence from your customers, it gives you a hell of a lot more credit in the bank.

Product validation can also be your friend when it comes to saying no to those stakeholders who have great confidence in their new idea. If you put their bright idea through product validation and the data shows it not to be a worthwhile project, then you can go back to them with that evidence. Suddenly your ‘no’ is far less likely to be taken personally and you can maintain a good relationship with that stakeholder. 

Fostering innovation 

You always want to be learning as a Product Manager, and innovating and improving your product and understanding of your customers. Validation is great for this, as it not only confirms assumptions but also challenges them. 

When going through the product validation process – which we’ll get into in a bit – you may unearth some insight that you’ve never considered that knocks your socks off. By focusing on validation, you often end up with more creative and impactful outcomes, helping you stay ahead of your competitors. 

What is the Product Validation Process?

A solid product validation process isn’t just throwing a customer survey into the wind and calling it a day. It’s methodical, data-driven, and user-focused, and there are a lot more steps and things to consider to get it right. 

Follow this process to make sure that you’re validating your product properly and gaining insights to help ensure that your solutions work and that you’re creating something that is valuable, and frankly, wanted by your audience. 

What is a Growth Product Manager?

A Growth Product Manager (GPM) has a distinct goal: don’t just build products, but fuel their growth. Sometimes called a Product Growth Manager, this role centers around tackling specific business objectives like boosting acquisition, user activation, retention, referral, or revenue in order to grow the company.

Unlike a traditional Product Manager who juggles a bit of everything, the Growth PM has a laser focus on removing barriers to customer value. In other words, they’re obsessed with unblocking users on their journey to product success – and making sure that success drives measurable impact for the business.

Growth PMs and core PMs share a common goal: solving customer problems. But while a core PM might be overseeing everything in the Product Management lifecycle from development to launch, the Growth PM zeroes in on product-led growth initiatives with the highest potential to impact key metrics. For them, it’s not just about launching new features; it’s about ensuring every change accelerates growth, often by experimenting, iterating, and relentlessly tracking results within a build-measure-learn approach.

Growth Product Management is a data-driven discipline. Where traditional Product Management of old might have once emphasized shipping products, Growth PMs are all about optimizing them. By studying user data, user journeys, customer feedback loops, and performance metrics, Growth PMs make evidence-based adjustments that remove friction points and boost engagement, often without needing a massive redesign. They’re the people who look at what’s working, amplify it, and cut what isn’t.

In short, where traditional Product Managers might bring the product to market, Growth Product Managers make sure it keeps climbing once it’s there. They turn great products into unstoppable growth engines, focusing less on building and more on unleashing.

What are the responsibilities of a Growth Product Manager? 

A Growth Product Manager (GPM) wears many hats, but every one of them is geared toward driving measurable growth. Unlike standard Product Managers, who oversee the broader vision and product strategy, Growth PMs zero in on specific, high-impact business metrics like acquisition, retention, and revenue growth. Their role is all about unearthing ways to amplify a product’s reach and enhance its value without reinventing the wheel.

Here’s a breakdown of the core responsibilities of a Growth Product Manager:

1. Analyze user behavior: Growth PMs dive deep into data to uncover patterns in user behavior, surfacing insights that could point to growth opportunities. They’re always searching for the data that can lead to actionable strategies.
   
2. Identify opportunities for growth: By keeping a close eye on user data, GPMs pinpoint ways to expand the user base or boost existing user retention and engagement. This might mean finding new markets, enhancing product features, or spotting untapped opportunities for revenue growth.
   
3. Run experiments: A/B testing and experimentation are key tools in the Growth PM’s toolkit. They’ll test hypotheses on selected user segments, analyzing feedback to refine approaches in things like user journeys or come up with a pivot strategy if needed. This continuous loop of testing and learning helps a Growth Product Manager to optimize the product’s growth trajectory.
   
4. Make recommendations for improvements: Growth PMs use the data from experiments and analysis to make concrete, data-driven recommendations for product improvements. Whether it’s adding features, streamlining UX, or adjusting pricing models, these recommendations are always aimed at pushing growth forward.
5. Collaborate with cross-functional teams: Growth PMs work with teams across Marketing, Sales, Design, and Engineering to make sure the product roadmap aligns with growth goals. This cross-functional collaboration ensures that product-led growth strategies are practical, scalable, and integrated across all areas of the business.

Lets not beat around the bush here. You’re probably thinking that these tasks are something any Product Manager could (and often does) perform. So what’s going on here? Why does the Growth Product Manager job role exist if we already have core Product Managers doing this stuff, and potentially more?

Well, the difference lies in the focus: while core PMs manage every aspect of a product’s lifecycle, Growth PMs concentrate solely on scaling that product, prioritizing strategies that yield direct business outcomes. It’s a role that exists to ensure growth doesn’t just happen by accident – it’s engineered.

A Product Manager might spread themselves a bit too thin across all these responsibilities. Introducing a Growth Product Manager to the mix makes sure these crucial growth-related tasks aren’t missed. 

Why does the Growth Product Manager role exist?

The Growth Product Manager role is relatively new in the field of Product Management, but its fast rise speaks volumes about where SaaS and tech companies are focusing right now. In the wake of the turbulence of recent years – layoffs, budget cuts, and significant losses across tech – there’s been a shift.

Many companies that once prioritized “big-picture” product development are now sharpening their focus on growth and revenue generation. It’s a shift that’s driving companies to create specialized roles to achieve targeted growth rather than assuming growth will simply follow great products.

The economic pressures of recent years have effectively planted the idea that Product Managers need to prioritize business growth and not just build a product pipeline. From that need sprang the Growth Product Manager role.

Growth PMs are all about using data and experimentation to identify and amplify what works while removing friction for users. They don’t just build; they tweak, test, and amplify until the product is a steady engine for growth.

And it’s catching on fast. According to research from Lenny Rachitsky, Since Q1 of 2022, growth-focused roles, including Growth Product Managers, have surged by 117%, outpacing the more traditional PM roles, which rose by 103% in comparison. This growth trend is backed by companies’ increasing need to scale up quickly, get to market faster, and drive metrics that show measurable, bottom-line impact.

A Growth PM’s job, therefore, isn’t just a niche focus – it’s a critical response to a tech landscape where steady growth has become non-negotiable. Growth PMs are now the hot ticket for companies aiming to bounce back from tough times and find scalable ways to expand their user base and revenue.

The Growth Product Manager role exists to ensure companies don’t just have great products—they have growing ones.

Source : Lenny’s Newsletter, Jul 23, 2024