Product Management

Seven Steps of Bringing Product Thinking to Non-Profits 🤝🏼

Focusing on understanding your beneficiaries and solving problems for them can not only help you get closer to them but also allow you to get loyalty from your employees and your funders. Learn how NOW!

Customer Service is important whether you have your own business or you work for someone else. Photo by Quintin Gellar: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-in-blue-top-giving-box-to-man-in-gray-top-696205/

Ruth had been working hard on this new financial inclusion product for over two months now. This was targeted at those who earn less than USD 2 per day. She did her research and talked to the industry leaders, politicians, and academicians to understand the problems the beneficiaries face in gaining access to formal credit. Moreover, she was also very well aware of the opportunity in providing access via mobile apps, and therefore she worked with a team of software developers to get this product to the market. Everything was ready and the launch was successful. Three months after the product launch, the uptake was way too less for her expectation. Furthermore, it appeared that the investment that was put in was not resulting in the intended benefits that the designers thought of. What happened here? Can you tell?

I am sure you must have come across such situations in your life where you and your team work hard on a product for a long time only to see that the final users do not use it: in fact, they don’t even understand what you created for them. One of the reasons for this is the lack of ability of the program designers and developers to empathize enough with the users of their work — the beneficiaries of the programs. This is a difficult territory to be in for social development organizations that do not have a huge corpus of money to try things out and fail at them. Nonprofits can learn a few things from their for-profit peers; one of them is Product Thinking.

What is Product Thinking?

Put simply, product thinking is the ability of a team to empathize and understand the world of their beneficiaries while they design programs for them. This requires the program designers to identify their beneficiary's problems, live in their world, and know about their decision-making process. This mindset aims to solve real problems for people by building meaningful solutions that resonate with them and add value to their lives. For those who love solving problems, it won’t be wrong to say that product thinking is the art of problem-solving. The questions that come up subsequently are why product thinking is beneficial and how you can bring product thinking to your teams.

Seven Steps of Bringing Product Thinking

1. Understand the world of your users
   Empathize with your beneficiaries and live their world. If the problem you choose to solve doesn’t actually exist or the solution you propose doesn’t actually solve the problem and bring value to your users, then it’s not worth working on that. Your programs and products will be useless to your beneficiaries. This has the potential to alienate your organization from your beneficiaries, in addition to a waste of money. Your users are the best folks who can tell you what they value and what they don’t.
2. Know what is it that they want to accomplish
   Talk to your beneficiaries and understand what the job at hand is that they are trying to do. There is a very popular example. People don’t want drills, they want holes that they can use to fulfill the purpose they have. Bringing an example closer home, people may not need water bottles, they need access to clean water. There are other ways to do that apart from bringing them clean bottled water. Your beneficiaries may not very well articulate what they want; however, they can articulate very well what is it that they are trying to accomplish.
3. Listen to why they want to accomplish what they want to
   It is easy to get into the weeds and work on a problem once you have talked to your users and know what they want. To get further into your users’ world, you need to also dig in and find out why they want to do what they want to do. Most of the time, why runs deep into the psyche of a human being. Moreover, this will bring you closer to your people and also help you frame the key benefits of your communication. A person doesn’t go to a barber’s shop for their love of barber, but for looking representable enough to belong to a place where they want to be. Belongingness is important for humans.
4. Assemble a cross-functional team
   If your organization is big enough to have a cross-functional team on board, it is prudent to proceed and have that. The benefit of a cross-functional team is that you can have multiple perspectives while designing something for your users. As a bare minimum, it is good to have a team of subject-matter experts, communication experts, designers, and engineers on your team. The subject-matter experts can help you with their expertise, the communication experts can help communicate effectively with users, government stakeholders, and engineers. The designers can design the products that will be used by the people, whereas the engineers can create the actual product you want to make. For example, engineers can help with the creation of a machine that can use waste to generate electricity effectively, or they can help create a membrane that can effectively help purify the water.
5. Formulate the strategy
   What is strategy? Strategy is a roadmap of how you are going to accomplish what you set out to do. Once you have understood the world of your beneficiaries, and know what they want, and why they want it, the next step for you is to form a strategy for giving them what they need in the best way possible. This strategy needs to have operational feasibility, financial feasibility, and technological feasibility. If you have done the previous steps meticulously, you won’t have difficulty getting your funders on board with the initiative you propose.
6. List out objectives and key results (OKR)
   To keep yourself and your team on track, work on creating the objectives and key results. This is beneficial not just for you, but also for the senior management and your funders who need to know about the progress that is being made on the work you have been paid to do. This guide is helpful to getting your team get set going on their way of writing out the OKR for your work. It is good to create impact than create outputs.
7. Document everything
   The human brain has been created to find patterns and solve problems by drawing connections. Its job is not to remember and store facts and processes. Therefore, it is important to capture everything you are working on and document it. Initially, you may find it an added task, but over the course of the program development, it will be important to reflect on the decisions that have been made throughout the development process, so that they can be used while similar projects are undertaken in the future.

In the end, I can say that product thinking boils down to three things: understand your users, form the strategy, and document the results. I am confident that equipped with this knowledge, you will be able to bring the change in the world you want to see. If you have any other ways of improvement of this process, let me know and let us co-create something.