The power of product thinking

Transcript

[00:00:00] Kimberly Boyd: Welcome to a special Pragmatism in Practice podcast takeover, The Power of Product Thinking. In this series, we'll speak to leaders who have adopted a product-thinking approach in their organizations with the aim of creating exceptional products that stand out and create value for customers, teams, and their businesses. We'll share the ideas and strategies they leverage so that you can do the same.

I'm Kimberly Boyd, and I'm here with two of ThoughtWorks product leaders, Rujia Wang, Global Head of Customer Experience, Product and Design, and Jonathan Savage, Head of Product and Design for Canada. Rujia, Jonathan, welcome. Thanks so much for joining me today for a little chat in the product world. Maybe just to get started, each of you can just tell the listeners a little bit about yourselves, introduce yourself and your role at ThoughtWorks.

 

[00:00:52] Jonathan Savage: Great. I'll start. My name is Jonathan Savage. I'm Head of Product and Design at ThoughtWorks Canada. I've been in that role since 2016. Happy to be here.

 

[00:01:04] Kimberly: Happy to have you. Thanks, Jonathan. Rujia.

 

[00:01:07] Rujia Wang: Thanks for having me on your podcast. My name is Rujia Wang, and I currently lead the Customer Experience, Product and Design Service line at ThoughtWorks. Our mission here is to delight customers while driving business impact by building better products and experiences. I've been working in this space for over 10 years, starting off as a business consultant and then moving into product management and product strategy before building the practice globally.

I've been very fortunate throughout that career to work with a lot of pioneering companies and thinkers across multiple industries and looking forward to sharing some of those learnings with everyone today.

 

[00:01:40] Kimberly: Great. Yes. We want to dig in and hear all about that. I think to get started, there's been the proliferation of product over the years. It seemed like, I don't even know how many years back now, it exploded, and everyone became a product manager overnight, it seemed like. There was product everywhere. We started to, then, hear about design thinking a lot.

 

That was the du jour topic. What we're here today to talk about largely is product thinking and the concept of product thinking. Let's dive in, and maybe you can both tell us a little bit about what exactly that is. How does ThoughtWorks define product thinking, and how is it different from just product, or how is it different from design thinking? Maybe those concepts folks are more familiar with.

 

[00:02:31] Rujia: Sure. I can make a start on that. Product thinking is a unified approach to product design and development that we've developed here at ThoughtWorks. The approach brings together some principles and methodologies from various disciplines, such as from agile software development, from lean, from design thinking, user-centered design, and more to build better products that benefit users and the organization.

By adopting product thinking, what we do is really help organizations mitigate the four product risks early. These are, firstly, desirability. Does it address the needs and jobs to be done of its target customers so that they choose to adopt it? For commercial products, it solves that problem so well that they want to pay for it, which also leads into viability. Is the solution commercially sustainable, and does it work in a business context?

The third one is feasibility. Is it feasible based on the resources available and the current and future capabilities of the specific technologies that we use? Then, finally, the fourth product risk is usability. Can users actually understand how to use it?

 

[00:03:33] Kimberly: All important things to make sure you're solving for and thinking about when creating a product. It makes a lot of sense. Is there really anything different about how ThoughtWorks defines and really applies product thinking?

 

[00:03:51] Jonathan: I would say that one thing that is unique about it is how we approach product thinking is we take a broader view of business goals and constraints. You mentioned earlier on design thinking, and design thinking is a classic voice-of-customer methodology. I think product thinking is more an embodiment of the best practices in user-centered design, agile software development, and business and product strategy.

For me, while it's important to understand user needs, voice of customer isn't enough. It's important to understand how markets change, what users value, really. In the blink of an eye, this can happen. Understanding the business and technology context is super critical in terms of how we define it. This dynamic view is also critical to the way we work. We view software-powered products, particularly as living systems.

Previously, compared to analog predecessors, software-powered products are subject to rapid change. They're adaptive. They're mutable.

You need an array of tactics and techniques to respond to that change. For me, many of those techniques reside in our product thinking playbook, a mapping tool that helps cross-functional teams plan and build better products, and also align our teams and clients on the why and how of every project.

 

[00:05:17] Kimberly: I really like the idea of thinking of that as a living system, right? Especially if, as I understand it, maybe both of you as experts in the field can let me know if this is the correct notion or not, but that you're really supposed to think about the ongoing evolution of your product. It ties very much and really resonates with me thinking of it as that living system, not just a thing you do once and it's static and then sits there after you've launched it into the world.

 

Anytime you can bring more of that naturalistic human element to it, I think it appeals. Thanks for setting us up and giving us the landscape of like, "What are the fundamentals? What do we mean when we're thinking about product thinking?" In both of your experience working with a variety of companies in the product space, do a lot of organizations adopting and embracing product thinking today? Is it still a relatively new concept?

 

[00:06:20] Rujia: What we're seeing is that companies are embracing product thinking to different extents. You talked about the living systems, thinking of products as living systems. I think that's really important, thinking about why it's really important to embrace product thinking today. What we're really seeing is that the competitive advantage that a company has is fading faster than before.

A new competitor could also be born tomorrow that disrupts that leadership position that a company might have. There once was a time where I possibly couldn't imagine what would displace YouTube as a top video platform before the advent of TikTok, which has now probably more daily active users than YouTube. In order to stay on top or even to stay still, companies need to constantly reimagine their products and services.

When you talked about living systems and thinking about it as constantly evolving, I think that's why it's really important today. I think our clients and the companies that we've worked with, they have been adopting product thinking to the extent that they're becoming better at becoming more customer-centered, more user-centered in developing the products. We do see some pitfalls in terms of developing a product and then letting it be.

It's launched as a great product, but then over time, that competitiveness and differentiation starts to erode. The other aspect of why product thinking is really important today I think is also because of the current macroeconomic conditions. We really need to improve the chances of investing in the right bets today. Depending on what figures you referred to, I think anywhere between 60% to 95% of developed features actually go unused. While there can be efficiencies--

 

[00:07:55] Kimberly: 95%? Oh my gosh. That's terrifying.

 

[00:07:59] Rujia: Exactly. While there can be efficiencies in how software is built today, the easiest way to eliminate waste is not to build it at all if it doesn't deliver any value.

 

[00:08:11] Kimberly: Yes, makes a lot of sense. Hopefully, I know that my eyes went real wide when you said it could be anywhere between 60% to 95%. Either end of that spectrum is probably much higher than any product organization wants to see, so definitely makes the case for maximizing your resources and using this approach to do it. You've talked about the why a bit. I guess I'm curious, how do we see product thinking showing up in organizations that are embracing this mindset? What does it look like? What does it feel like in the ways of working?

 

[00:08:48] Jonathan: Yes, for me, it's interesting. Certain clients of ours, key components of product thinking definitely do show up, but it's rarely the embodiment of all of the best practices, and that's where we often modernize and help a lot there. At its basis, customer centricity, this is the heart of best practice in product development. Classic voice of customer, it is deeply understood. Focusing on your users helps you achieve their vision of success, not your business's.

 

Often, org structures are designed around profit and loss and decision-making and risk aversion, but really being close to your customers is essential. By being closer, it also allows you to focus on real customer problems and outcomes, which again becomes a challenge as organizations get larger and matrixes how they make decisions and how they organize get more complex.

 

The other thing we look at is Kaizen or a continuous improvement, so taking an incremental approach versus a big bang change or big, huge moonshots, et cetera. We like to say,

maximize learning while minimizing the time to try it. Really, you need to enforce a culture of continuous improvement because, as I said earlier, software-powered products are highly mutable and adaptive, and changeable.

You need to take advantage of that dynamicism by having a practice that can really evolve with it. User needs, as Rujia alluded to, are continuously evolving. Another big piece that we see and we don't see in a lot of orgs is a shared sense of purpose across teams, working towards the same goal. People given tasks simply do tasks when they're not empowered, and that's not how you build something great.

 

The way teams collaborate is probably the single greatest driver for us for project success and overall work satisfaction, both of our client teams and our practitioners. It can dictate how efficiently and effectively work gets done, and really great collaboration builds trust and makes the work meaningfully better. Finally, a culture of innovation. Speaking of trust, greater trust allows for a culture of experimentation and calculated risk, which is really at the heart of innovation.

 

[00:11:14] Kimberly: A couple of things that you were sharing there that really stood out for me. One, I really loved the "maximize the learning but minimize the time to do the learning." I think if that's something we could bottle, everyone would get in line for that. Even going back to what we were talking about as product being that living, breathing mechanism, I think all the things that you were talking about as hallmarks of organizations getting this right, getting product thinking right really makes it almost feel like when you're doing product thinking, you're creating that living system around the product that you're building, that you're developing together.

Makes a lot of sense to me but it's really great to hear you break that down. I always love to hear an example. I think that that really does bring it to life. I know you both have spent time working with organizations specifically to help bring this way of working, this way of thinking to them. Is there a specific example that you could call out where you think the adoption of product thinking really brought about some positive and transformative change to an organization?

 

[00:12:27] Jonathan: For me, Ford Canopy is a case that always comes up. I don't know how many people know this, but I think the Ford F-150 is definitely the highest-selling truck in the world. The fan base around this truck is massive. The interesting thing is, for them, there's a lot of small business owners who own Ford F-150s, and they do a lot of fleet management with a ton of Ford F-150s.

Theft from these pickup trucks and Ford vans as well in the UK was rampant. The question they asked us was, "What role can Ford play to protect customers' valuables inside their vehicles?" A really interesting question for us because it obviously combined our 0-to-1 product development best practices. We work with them very closely mitigating the four main risks that Rujia alluded to at the beginning of this podcast around feasibility, desirability, viability, and usability.

 

We really answered that question forcefully with a product, a camera sensor system that ended up with that name getting spun out into an org called Canopy. It's basically a camera sensor system that used ML and computer vision for effective threat detection across Ford F-150 trucks and vans. As often happens with really successful projects at ThoughtWorks, not only did we build a better product, we built better clients.

Sam Harris, the Ford product owner, who was the sponsor of this early project, was promoted to VP and was actually spun the product off into a separate company, so a really impressive case for us to use our best practices and product thinking right from 0-to-1 across the board from inception to market to launch.

 

[00:14:22] Kimberly: What I heard you say is product thinking doesn't just build better products, it builds better product leaders. You get two for one with product thinking.

 

[00:14:30] Jonathan: Yes, enablement is always a proxy metric we look at when we work with our clients, and best practices and product thinking certainly makes our clients better product builders.

 

[00:14:44] Kimberly: Absolutely, it sounds like a great example of that, for sure. Rujia, any product thinking highlights from organizations you've worked with in the past that stand out for you?

 

[00:14:57] Rujia: Yes, sure. Jonathan talked about product thinking applied to a product that is used by end customers. I think a common problem that we see is product thinking is not generally applied to employee tools and systems. I'm sure everyone can think of that poor experience that they have with a company tool that we might have, like the CRM, the Customer Relationship Management tool, or a knowledge management tool or sales tool that the company might provide.

It's really important to remember that not all customers are outside of the company. When we're designing products, we design products for internal customers as well. It's just as important that they solve real challenges and help them to do their jobs better rather than hinder them in their jobs. I've got so many stories here because this is such a huge gap today. One of the very first products I built was for a luxury automotive company.

It's also in the automotive industry, but that's just a coincidence. In this company, buying a car we know is one of the most important and exciting purchases for customers and also the biggest contributor of their revenue. We saw that overall sales efficiency was really low. We visited multiple dealerships, observed the entire sales process, interviewed customers and sales consultants, and we saw that the whole process relied really heavily on multiple slow, clunky systems provided by the company.

 

The sales consultant often had to start the sale out in front of the showroom with the customer working with paper before leaving the customer alone for up to 30 minutes while they re-entered those details in the back office legacy system to generate a sale. What we know is that customers expect much more from a luxury brand and their sales consultants who could have spent much more time on that value-added service for their customer.

What we did was we built a mobile product that streamlines the whole sales process. It equips the sales consultants with all the tools to help the customer choose their dream car without leaving their site. They get access to all the vital information that they need, such as product specs, customization, and pricing, looking for perhaps their dream configuration of the car across different stores, and applying for financial services, all the important parts of getting a sale done, but without leaving the customer.

 

It saved them millions of dollars in licensing fees for the existing tools that weren't doing the job very well. The business got better data from increased adoption. Most importantly, the customers had a more memorable and engaging experience.

 

[00:17:27] Kimberly: I'll say, too, right, the automotive industry typically probably not thought in the forefront of leaders of digital products. I think this proves that when you're working this way, adopting this mindset, maybe even more traditional industries can see a lot of great digital product success working this way. Love both of those examples. We talked quite a bit about what product thinking is. I'd love to maybe take the flip side and say, what are some of the common misconceptions when it comes to product thinking, or what is not product thinking?

 

[00:18:06] Jonathan: Sure. One thing is it's not design thinking. A lot of the methods, the tactics, and techniques that are in design thinking are obviously part of our product thinking playbook. A lot of them are best practices, but the way that I see it is that product thinking is not a fixed system or a unicursal solution of problems. What I mean by unicursal is a maze is unicursal. There's only one way to get through to the end.

We like to think about product thinking as multi-cursal, like a labyrinth. In other words, there's many directions to move in. There's many experiments to take. There's many bets to shape. There's prototypes to build. You can move in a ton of different directions. The other thing that it's not is it's not something that could just be bolted onto the existing way a company works.

 

Really, often we find with our clients that as businesses grow, some of their ways of working actually atrophy, this is very common, meaning they're focused on the business. They're focused on revenue. They're focused on hiring. As a company gets bigger, there's more people who know less, right? There's a ton of time spent on alignment and communication. Really, what happens is the companies start to get adrift from customers.

They start to get adrift from the value proposition that they need to build for their customers. They sometimes lose the muscle memory of what made them great in the first place in extreme examples. Many simply stop talking to their customers. For me, product thinking is a great way to reset that capability and get them focused on growing versus simply not shrinking. I think that that's where product thinking really shows its measure and values is the ability to look at business technology and markets in the future and not just talk to customers.

 

[00:20:00] Kimberly: When you were talking about atrophy and muscle memory, that's exactly where my mind went to. It sounds like it's very much a capability you need to continue to exercise and build and retain that muscle. It's not something that you pull on and off the shelf when you need it. You need to, again, back to that living organism, keep it alive at all times.

Thanks for sharing a little bit of maybe the view of what it isn't. We've talked about what some of the great outcomes can be when folks are really embracing this and adopting it and doing it well. I always love to understand what a pitfall might be, or a challenge, just to make product leaders who might be thinking of diving into this aware of what bumps there might be in the road. Are there any common mistakes that you've seen organizations make when they're trying to switch to this way of working and switch to this mindset?

 

[00:21:09] Jonathan: Yes. For me, a mistake would be attacking, trying to wrap their arms around the whole problem like trying to attempt to not start small, like with a team or a project or even a feature. That definitely is one where it becomes whole hog-like, "We're going to adopt product thinking. Here's a rollout, and here's a communication plan." It's not very impactful at the project scale.

Ideally, starting small is the way to go, but really it's more of a resistance. It's more organizations struggle because they're not really structured in a way to make it a success or adopt it. That's why small teams works as well, right, because you'll work with, say, a product owner that wants to transform, and you'll start small, and you'll make a lot more progress on that because it's a lot easier to implement some of the ideas.

Many companies are not designed to make decisions that reflect voice of customer, right? They're designed to make decisions about the business and budget and revenue and profit and loss. Often, they're designed as well for risk aversion, right? The idea that not how do we grow, how do we stop shrinking, right? There's so much. Rujia was mentioning earlier in the podcast, there's so much going on with economic and technological transformation that you really need to stay on top of everything because the world is changing so quickly. Technology is changing so quickly. Markets are evolving and changing so quickly. You really need to have a highly adaptive and progressive approach.

 

[00:22:52] Kimberly: To that point, too, is there something that organizations need to think about doing or designing their organization differently in order to enable them to address voice of customer and some of those things that are critical when you're working in this way?

 

[00:23:11] Jonathan: Yes. One is, be really amenable to building flat teams and empowering them. If you're downstream from the value proposition, your influence over the direction should wane, right? The team should be empowered to make decisions. I mentioned earlier that people given tasks do tasks, and you're not going to build anything great with that.

I think in that case, trying to figure out ways to flatten the org and give more autonomy and mastery and purpose to the teams that are actually doing the work is a big way to change because not only are they incentivized and empowered, they have the ability to influence, which is a key component of-- anyone's productivity at work is their ability to be autonomous and influence.

 

[00:24:04] Kimberly: Rujia, I saw you definitely vigorously nodding your head when we were talking about, are there things that need to, or could, should change in the design to really embrace product thinking? Is there anything that you'd like to add to what Jonathan just shared?

 

[00:24:18] Rujia: Yes, I think how we're set up as an organization can really help to amplify the impact of adopting product thinking. For example, if the team is cross-disciplinary, including people who understand the business, people who understand the customer, people who understand technology all in the same team, rather than making those decisions in sequential form, then we'll be able to get the most of applying these product thinking approaches.

At the same time, yes, I do believe while the organization and the team structure and operating model do go a long way for amplifying the impact of product thinking, at the same time, I do think that product thinking can be applied at all times, regardless of what the org structure is and the team structure. It can be applied to everything that the organization delivers. I'll explain that a little bit more because I think when we talk about product thinking, we should actually clarify the definition of product first.

The definition of a product has evolved, so when people think about a product, they might think of a digital product that's like a mobile app. Actually, we also believe in treating every touchpoint that a customer has with the business. It could be a website. It could be a customer service representative. It could be an employee tool that they use in the process of delivering that experience, or even a technical product like for those of you who have much more technical, an API or a data service as a product.

These aren't normally designed and developed in customer-centric ways. Getting close to who is the actual user in the customer, focus on solving the right problems in an iterative and evolutionary way, building to actually learn rather than just thinking on paper, and working in those cross-disciplinary teams of people who understand all of those different angles of business technology and the user and the customer go a long way to delivering business value regardless of some of those organizational structures that are in place.

 

[00:26:23] Kimberly: Structure doesn't need to be an inhibitor of product thinking. There's maybe some things you can do to help better facilitate it, but you don't need a wholesale change of your team. Product thinking, obviously, has product in its name. We've talked about it. We've said the word a lot today, but there's a lot of other people involved in product that aren't on the product team, so I guess I'd like to understand, is product thinking something that's just truly for the product organization, or how do you see that represented in other teams or other roles that also still playing an important part of product development?

 

[00:27:06] Jonathan: I would say it is most certainly not just for product teams. Case in point, a client that we worked with, their business function is media and television, and they largely viewed their mobile products as marketing, sort of an amplification of tune-in or product market fit that they'd achieved in the broadcast era. That's really interesting from an influence perspective for us to work with companies like this because Rujia had mentioned that the definition of a product has changed a lot, whether it's an API or a backend service.

Really, working with this org and getting them to understand that mobile is actually the first point of contact for your company now. It's actually almost more important than what you viewed as simply an amplification of what you did on broadcast and that user needs are different in mobile than they are in broadcast. For me, product thinking is agnostic to product teams, meaning teaching it and getting organizations and teams to understand it goes a long way towards empowering the entire org to think about products.

 

[00:28:26] Kimberly: Product thinking for everyone, it doesn't have to just remain sequestered away. [laughs] The topic that I think has been forefront everywhere I think this entire year pretty much is GenAI. I feel like I'd be remiss if I didn't at least say it and mention it in the conversation, but obviously, we know that GenAI as a technology has a lot of implications for a number of things but product in particular. I'm curious to get both your thoughts of, "What role do you see GenAI playing when it comes to product thinking?"

 

[00:29:03] Jonathan: Yes, Rujia and I speak a lot about this. We view generative AI's impact both in product development and also in the way that we work, so in the tools we use in product development, and we look at it from two angles. I'll start with the tooling. I feel that generative AI will play a huge role in transforming how we build products. One of the challenges that we find in discovery activities or the traditional left side of the diamond is constraints both in time and labor and overhead around divergent activities like ideation, research, and prototyping.

Traditional product development relies on a traditional linear process, right? You research design, you do some concept generation, you do testing, and then development and delivery. With GenAI-powered tooling, it will incentivize a much more experimental and iterative approach to design. To me, that'll lead to a lot of greater innovation, a lot more experimentation, which is what we want. Traditionally, sometimes projects are restricted by the number of prototypes we can produce, but we want to produce multiple prototypes.

We want users to not only test them; we want them to test them against each other, right, benchmark them against each other. I think that's going to have a huge impact. Then from automation, GenAI, and automation, you hear the word "automation" over and over again when you're generative AI. For me, GenAI will certainly alter the boring components of discovery, like say, in research, recruitment, scheduling, reminders, all those activities that our practitioners do, incentives, anything around research operations.

Allowing practitioners to focus on really higher quality synthesis and observation and more time with clients, better storytelling, I see it having a huge impact there. It will ultimately allow us as a practice to shrink time to value and bring products much more quickly to market.

 

[00:31:14] Rujia: I would just want to add on to that. I completely agree. I think generative AI can facilitate the whole end-product development process, all the way from defining the problem to defining the solution, prototyping, validation, and iterating on that, and then into the build, so using generative AI in the process of software development to build out the solution and then launch it to market.

Like Jonathan said, I think one of the areas where we are getting a lot of immediate upside from generative AI is in the solution design process. What's really different between the tools that we had before and generative AI is that GenAI can be creative and, in turn, enhance the creativity of us as product and design practitioners. In that divergence phase, we always say there are no stupid ideas, that quantity is important, and wild, seemingly impossible exploratory ideas could actually stock other more feasible but still transformative ideas.

We've just seen a lot of upside in leveraging generative AI in that ideation process. Then combined with what Jonathan was saying about being able to prototype a lot more of those ideas, we're reducing the marginal cost of that prototyping to near zero. We can keep that exploration phase open for much longer and really avoid converging much too soon on a solution that we're going to go and build out.

 

[00:32:37] Kimberly: It's helping us to keep our options open. I'm also curious, too, have you seen or at least started to see more organizations that you're working with actively using GenAI in the product development process, or is it still early stages?

 

[00:32:54] Jonathan: I've seen examples of it certainly with clients, but really what I've really seen is the existential threat, right? Questions around, "If my competition is using generative AI more effectively, will it make my business irrelevant? Will it shrink my business?" Yes, I've seen some experiments with tooling, depending on the vertical. I've seen more sort of an angst around what is really going to be disruptive.

Generative AI looks like a general-purpose technology. It looks like something that will have massive implications, both in productivity, automation, but also in innovation. Really, what we're seeing with clients is a tremendous amount of interest in working with us and understanding how to think strategically, how to work and deliver using best practices and generative AI tooling, et cetera, on delivery, whether it's with Copilot and other innovations there. That's really what we're seeing a lot is that our clients are paying a ton of attention to this, and so they should.

 

[00:34:06] Kimberly: I'm always curious, right? Everyone's talking about it, but how many people are actually doing it? It seems like it's at that point where it's starting to build momentum. We've talked about GenAI, but what about the role of GenAI in actually developing products that use generative AI as part of the product?

 

[00:34:26] Rujia: Jonathan talked about that existential risk that our clients have and many companies that we're talking to about, what is the threat of competitors who adopt generative AI? What is the impact on their business? That's a topic that we've been talking about a lot and is about how to use generative AI in the product itself to give it a new competitive edge or possibly even transform their business model. However, this is where product thinking really comes in.

There's the risk of jumping in with a tech-first approach without really thinking about what the problem it is that we're trying to solve and that is best solved with generative AI. We have a shiny new hammer, what can we hit it with? While implementing some of these quick use cases in their simplest form might be really easy, it might be really cheap and require minimal effort, what we find is that the generative AI-powered feature or product often lacks long-term value and fails to solve the user's real problem or is easily copied by a competitor, so it doesn't have a lasting advantage.

I think I can give it a quick example, which is frequently seen one is the chatbot. Everyone talks about how we can use GenAI in creating a chatbot and in conversational interfaces. We would really go back to the roots of "What is the problem that the chatbot is solving, and is it the right way to solve that problem?" In the financial services industry, a high-net-worth individual looking for financial advice wants the high touch of a human relationship manager.

Perhaps a chatbot there isn't the best solution, but a relationship manager may want a conversational interface to actually digest and interrogate the wealth of investment research that their bank is providing to them to help them to provide better advice to their high-net-worth customer. It's based on proprietary research from a bank, and it couldn't be easily replaced by a general-purpose chatbot developed by a competitor.

We would always go back to saying "What's the problem that we want to solve first with GenAI?" before thinking about how we use generative AI in the solution and really testing that with customers to avoid any bias and make sure that it is really suitable for the need.

 

[00:36:42] Kimberly: Well, I know we've covered a lot of ground today, but one more question for the both of you is, where do you see product thinking going next? How is it evolving? What's the future of it, or what trends do you anticipate in the space?

 

[00:36:58] Jonathan: I really see the tooling will evolve. I think that it will encourage more innovation, more moonshots, more risk-taking in a calculated way, but more experimentation, which is always good for growth. I mentioned earlier, companies grow, they get risk-averse, they focus on risk mitigation, and really they should be doing the opposite when it comes to thinking about innovation in the future and where their company and their product is evolving.

I always say there's a quote by a US psychologist named Martin Seligman. He labels our species Homo Prospectus. It's a great idea that humans are not Homo sapiens, they're Homo prospectus because they're constantly considering their prospects. Whether it's rumination prediction, thinking about the future, having a product thinking approach that, is considering prospects, is looking at the future.

To me, there's going to be a greater focus on that because what technology does is it accelerates people's prospects, right? That's literally what it does. It invents a future for you to change your life or change your behavior or adopt new habits or practices. I think there's going to be a lot of changes with product thinking around the tooling and how we think about the future.

Then, also, generative AI is really good at probabilistic thinking, something that humans are terrible at, right? The idea that it'll become a more important way for businesses to grow their capabilities, I think research capabilities and logistics will continue to be automated allowing us to cast a wider net in terms of answers to questions we have about consumer behavior. I think that's a really exciting change.

 

[00:38:54] Kimberly: I want to place a bet that Martin probably was doing some sort of study on Tinder when he came up with the Homo prospectus and people keeping their options open.

 

[00:39:06] Jonathan: Tinder feels like a manifestation of his hypothesis, for sure.

 

[00:39:11] Kimberly: Exactly. Rujia, final thoughts from you? Where do you see product thinking going? What's the future hold?

 

[00:39:18] Rujia: I think we'll see product thinking evolving to deal with even more complexity that we have in the products and experiences. Jonathan quoted someone. I think that I'll share a quote that I really like as well from a Finnish-American architect called Saarinen. Always design a thing by considering it in its next largest context. Design a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in the environment that it's in, and the environment in a city plan.

It's really the same when designing a product. What role does the feature play in the product itself? What role does the product play in the experience that we deliver to the customer? What is that brand promise that we want to deliver to our customers through every single experience that they have with us? As the number of touchpoints increases, as that complexity of that journey for a customer is, there are more and more touchpoints and interactions with us in and out of our control, I think we'll need to evolve the product thinking approach to be able to deal more and more with that complexity.

Overall, the principles and the mindset of product thinking won't change, but the methodologies that we use will continue to grow and evolve. That's why we've developed the product thinking playbook as a set of tactics and techniques that really house all of the approach and continues to evolve over time to deal with this increasing complexity and also the different futures that Jonathan was talking about as well.

 

[00:40:46] Kimberly: Well, thank you so much for joining and having this discussion today. I know I learned a lot. For those listening, I know if this sparks some questions and a desire to learn more about product thinking, I'm sure Jonathan, Rujia, and their teams would be happy to dive into that with you. I think lots of food for thought, lots of ways to think about how to build better products, build better product organizations, and also, as we learned, build better product leaders. Once again, thank you both for joining us today.

 

[00:41:19] Jonathan: Thank you.

 

[00:41:19] Rujia: Thanks, Kimberly, for having us.

 

[00:41:21] Kimberly: Thanks so much for joining us for this episode of Pragmatism in Practice. If you'd like to listen to similar podcasts, please visit us at thoughtworks.com/podcasts, or if you enjoy the show, help spread the word by rating us on your preferred podcast platform.

 

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