🧠Knowledge Series #26: How to conduct a product health check
Diagnostic tools and processes to check the health of your product
🔒The Knowledge Series is a collection of easy to read guides designed to help you plug the gaps in your tech knowledge so that you feel more confident when chatting to colleagues. Clearly explained in plain English. One topic at a time.
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Hi product people 👋,
Michael E Porter is widely regarded as one of the leading voices in business strategy. And an important part of his strategic framework is the diagnosis stage. This is when, before making any strategic decisions, businesses take a step back to assess where they are today.
And that’s what this Knowledge Series is about: helping you figure out where you are today before you begin to decide where you might want to be in the future.
The topics covered are applicable for product team members (PMs, designers, engineers) and execs alike and we’ve designed this as a reference you can use if you join a new company or when you’re assessing your own product’s health.
Coming up:
An exclusive 30 minute strategy lesson from Amazon / Audible’s Director of Product
Strategic health: the 5 types of differentiation and market analysis
UX health: can users use your product?
Technical health: how healthy is your tech stack?
Commercial health
How to use data to understand your product’s health
At the end of this post we’ve also included a simple one-page snapshot that you can use to communicate your own product’s health if that’s something you need.
Why health checks work as diagnostic tools
I remember chatting to a friend a few years back who had just taken on a Chief Product and Technology Officer role at a venture backed startup. The company wasn’t in top shape and one reason they’d been brought on board was to turn the ship around. They remarked that one of their biggest challenges was figuring out where to start.Â
And it’s a common problem for product teams.Â
Given the vast, expansive nature and remit of a CPTO, it can mean anything from understanding the business model, the new domain you’re operating in, user engagement data, technical debt or the overall strategic direction of the business.
With that, we had a little discussion about what the best places for a CPTO to focus on might be in the early days after joining a company - and how a leader in product might be able to conduct a ‘Product Health Check’.
Product strategy isn’t simply about clear decision making; before you can even begin to make any decisions about the direction of your product, you need to spend some time in diagnostic mode where you try to build a big picture snapshot of the health of your product.Â
You can then present your health check in a digestible format with colleagues to help them understand the health of your product, too.
A DoP exclusive: 30 minute lesson from Amazon / Audible’s Director of Product
But before that, let’s set the context with some thoughts from a real world product leader.
Here’s an exclusive 30 minute lesson on Strategy from Amazon / Audible’s Director of Product Sean Jackson: