Presto Sketching

A book to help you think and communicate better with drawing

For designers and researchers

Nail your product strategy with the Product Pyramid

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Features! Story points! Sprints! UIs! It’s all too easy to let the detail of product management drown out the actual product strategy. The Product Pyramid can help.

Strategy is a tricky game. The more complicated the product(s), service(s) and business(es), and the more people involved, the trickier things get. Trying to get shared understanding about vision, direction, risk, priority, and so on is hard enough, let alone getting shared alignment, decision, and execution.

But so often I find that it’s all about connecting the various pieces of product management into a cohesive product strategy story. This usually involves visual framing, and getting everyone involved using a shared perspective and vocabulary that describes where we want to play and how we want to win.

Lots of product managers, designers and entrepreneurs struggle with strategy, because they jump into details too soon, or find it hard to separate what they know from what they believe/suspect/assume. Japanese master swordsman, author, philosopher and all round legend Miyamoto Musashi put it well: “Perception is strong and sight weak. In strategy it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things“.

What is the Product Pyramid sketch?

With that in mind, the Product Pyramid sketch is a way for product managers, designers and founders to visually relate the detail of any product (or service) to the rest of what’s important about that product: the experience it provides, the benefits it gives to customers, and the value it creates for customers and the business.

It’s a simple pattern that you can draw on a whiteboard in a strategy meeting, and it looks like this:

How does it work?

The Product Pyramid is a visual guide to remind you and others how all of the parts of your product are related.

  • P = PURPOSE of the product, usually to increase some value to your business and your customers; the change your product is trying to make in the world
  • B = BENEFITS to your customers; what they talk about to others that’s so good about your product
  • J = JOURNEY people go through when evaluating, buying, using, getting help and sharing your product
  • F = FEATURES of the product; what people use in the journey
  • P = PERSONAS that interact with the product; the different types of people that go through different parts of the journey. JTBD and needs (i.e. the jobs-to-be-done framework) fit in here.
  • C = COMPETITION that also attracts the same personas with the same needs

When should I use the Product Pyramid sketch?

Use this sketch (or visual framework) if these sorts of scenarios happen:

  • You can’t seem to focus product conversation at the right ‘level’ (i.e. people get bogged down in talking about user interfaces, bugs or features when you actually need to talk about benefits)
  • You don’t have a shared understanding of the product’s strategy across the team
  • You need to come up with good research questions
  • You can’t remember all your user stories

How do I use the Product Pyramid sketch?

Make sure you have a whiteboard. If any of the symptoms above start to happen in a meeting:

  • Draw a nice big triangle
  • Draw in some horizontal lines to separate the triangle into the different zones (Benefits, Journey, etc)
  • Make some notes in the zone (or beside the zone) that reflect the conversation you’re hearing. It could be questions, assumptions, or things you’re trying to understand better
  • Listen for connections in what’s being talking about, and visually reflect this with arrows from one zone to another

The Product Pyramid is a map

The Product Pyramid is a map. It’s there to help you know where you’re at in a product discussion, and where you want to be. It’s not meant to contain lots of detail, but it does serve to point the way to that detail (that would live elsewhere). For example, the Journey layer should ‘link’ to any customer journey maps you have created.

It’s also there to highlight any gaps, vagueness, or disagreement in your product strategy.

The Product Pyramid is a story

Because the Product Pyramid ‘connects the dots’ of your product’s purpose, benefits, journey and features, it also doubles as a great way to tell your product strategy as a cohesive logical story. Two examples:

Pitch to leaders (top-to-bottom) – “The most important change we want to make in this business is [Purpose]. To do that, we need to help [Persona(s)] with [Benefits]. As they use our product, they [Journey], and they way they experience [Benefit] is through [Features]. If we invest in [Feature], this will unlock greater [Benefit].”

Rationale for a feature improvement sprint to engineering (bottom-to-top) – “This particular [Feature] in our product might be small, but it’s the source of a disproportionate amount of support requests. At the moment, it gets in the way of [Journey], and stops too many customers from realising [Benefit]. That’s why we need to focus on improving it this quarter, so that [Purpose].”

Try it yourself

So, the next time any of your product team meetings include even a bit of product strategy – e.g. sprint planning, feature brainstorming, business review meeting – your team can now have a way to keep all the various parts of the product related, and optimise discussion for business benefit and customer benefit.

Use the Product Box sketch to improve any product or service

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Picture yourself strolling down the aisle of your local supermarket, looking at the various products on the shelves. What catches your eye? What is it about the boxes, packaging and labels that gets that product into your trolley?

Not many of us get to design those boxes and packaging, but imagine if you got to do exactly that for your business, product or service?

Or imagine if you got to design a box for you?

That’s exactly what this Product Box sketch trick is all about. It’s a way to help you think about whatever it is that you’re selling, from a fresh point of view. You use the visual ‘language’ of boxed product design (like a box of cereal) as a way to express your product’s value to customers. And it goes a bit like this:

Decide on what it is that you want to sell. As an example, I’m going to use ‘Project Manager’ (I was having a conversation with a friend the other day about how she’s trying to help her team understand how a project manager can help them).

1. Start the box

Sketch a nice big rectangle. This is going to be the front of your boxed product.

2. Sketch the front of the box

Now it’s time to start getting creative! Write the name of the ‘product’ at the top of the box in nice big letters (in my case it\’s ‘Project Manager’), and sketch whatever your product is. Make sure you leave some area blank for the next step. Note how I\’m keeping my sketching really simple:

3. Add the benefits

Next, think about the benefits of your product. What’s your product going to do for your customers? Why should they care? Write those benefits on the front of the box, too (up to 3 benefits is fine). Try not to agonise over the benefits (or your sketching) too much. Progress is better than perfection at this point!

4. Add the ‘ingredients’

Now, let’s get 3D: draw a bit of a parallelogram on one side of your ‘box’. This is the side of the box where your ‘ingredients’ go. This can be the main features of your product; the sort of things that customers want to check that your product includes, when they’re comparing your product with others. Go ahead and write whatever those ‘ingredients’ are.

5. ‘Open here’

Finish off the box by drawing the top (like you can see below). Add in something about how customers start using your product. Do they just open the box and away they go? Or do you want to add the price?

6. Refine your design

As you sketch this ‘product box’, you may well have more ideas about how to make it better. You might also get into the metaphor of the product box a bit more too, and you might want to riff off product-y things like ‘batteries not included’, or ‘assembly instructions’, and so on. Go ahead and do another sketch, and work in your refinements. Here’s mine:

And there you have it! It’s amazing how often we forget to think about our business, our product, our service — whatever it is — from a customer’s point of view, and the product box is a great metaphor for getting us thinking differently. Here are some ways you can use this Product Box sketch as an activity:

  • Help you and your team get a shared understanding about what your product/service is now
  • Help you and your team think in a fresh way about what it could become
  • Galvanize your team, and get them thinking about their internal value to your organization in a new way
  • Help you think about yourself. What value do you want to be in the world? Why should people ‘buy’ you?
  • Sharpen up your resume: what are the benefits to your new employer if they were to give you the job?

So, give the Product Box sketch a go, first by yourself and then with your team. As always, let me know if you try it out, and how it went.

Amaze your team mates with radar charts

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If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, by now you know that I’m keen on helping you use simple sketching in your work, to explore problems, explain concepts, and generate ideas. I cover a range of topics, including drawing icons, whiteboarding, making meetings more effective, exploring problems and plans with metaphor, and visualising data.

This post looks at a particular data visualisation pattern that is really useful but often gets forgotten.

Step forward if you would, radar chart, a.k.a. spider chart, star chart or polar chart. The radar chart is great for plotting multivariate data, or in other words: those times where there is more than one value or factor that you need to measure and compare. Plus, they just look really cool.

And they look a bit like this (left) or this (right):

Snazzy, hey? Each value you’re measuring has an axis that radiates out from a point (typically of value zero), with equivalent increments along each axis. Radar charts give you a much more compelling way of looking at data, rather than just in a table. Let’s take a look at where you can use radar charts, shall we?

Great for analysing products

Are you a product manager, researcher or designer? You’ll know that you can’t judge your product’s performance on just one metric; there might be a range of heuristics that you use, to do with usability, customer satisfaction, up-time, task completion speed, and so on. And sometimes these are a bit semi-quantitative, and a bit hard to hook a definite number on. Radar charts give you the flexibility to use other values like ‘high’, ‘medium’ and ‘low’, or ‘happy’, ‘meh’, and ‘anxious.

Here’s an example from a fictional social media website, where you can see how user satisfaction is rating for four major functions of the website:

Great for analysing you

Are you working on your own professional development? Plotting your skills on a radar chart is a quick and engaging way to see where you’re at now, and where you want to grow. Here’s another fictional example, using a mix of user experience designer skills:

Great for analysing staff and teams

Sports players and coaches have used radar charts to analyse players and teams for ages (and if bringing data and sports together is pure nerdy heaven for you, check out these charts for hockey and soccer/football!) This visual way of assessing team members’ skills is really handy for candidate interviewing in recruitment, and for helping team members to balance where they want to grow, and where the team needs skills.

What’s really nifty is that you can overlay several team members on the same radar chart, to build up a story of aggregate sets of skills in a team:

In the example above, we can instantly see the different levels of ability in teamwork, design and sketching, as well as where these two team members are complementary. Plus, this also helps us see that we don’t have much by way of development ability in the team.

So there you have it; aren’t radar charts amazing? Start using them by analysing yourself and your skills, then see how you can apply them in other areas of your work.

Get your problems all MOPT up with this problem-solving method

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In the last post, we looked at an easy way to sketch out various aspects of a problem, according to three parts:

  • Rational – What do I understand about this? (objective, facts and data)
  • Emotional – How do I feel about this? (subjective, feelings and stories); and
  • Political – Who else is affected by this? (associative, connections and systems)

These three lenses give us a more structured way to approach and better understand a problem space.

Step 1: look for clues

So where does the MOPT come in? I’ll get to that. Firstly, you get the sheet you sketched before, where you jotted down notes and pictures about the rational, emotional and political parts of your problem. Then you go back over it, looking for clues that could give rise to ideas to solve that problem.

For this example, I’m going to change my initial problem to: I’m always late filling in my timesheet. Here you’ll see I’ve circled a few clues:

You might notice from my sheet that the two things I’ve circled in the rational space are like sub-problems, or problems within the larger problem. That’s good to highlight. You might also find connections that you hadn’t seen before. Notice the arrow in mine, where I’ve connected the fact that I don’t know how to classify all the things I do in the timesheet, with Sarah the Project Manager, who certainly does. This will lend itself nicely to an idea for a solution.

If you’re lucky, you might also find the odd valuable insight. One of the things I wrote in the political part of my sheet is that it’s hard for the business to track where time is spent. Afterward it occurred to me: if the business knows what projects we have on, and who is occupied on each project, then it should already have a pretty good idea of where people’s time has been spent, rather than starting each week blank.

Understanding MOPT

At the heart of this method is the now-famous innovation question: “How might we [solve this problem]?“. ‘How might we’ as an approach was invented by Procter and Gamble, and popularised by companies like IDEO and Google. I’m a big fan, because it’s a great way to have a positive mindset about any problem, and it moves ideas in more useful directions.

The things is, the ‘we’ in ‘How might we…’ is sometimes left out of that ideas-generation mindset. In other words: ‘we’ are the ones coming up with ideas, but ‘we’ may not be in the final solution. And that’s where MOPT comes in. MOPT stands for:

M = Me

You – either you individually, or the collective ‘you’ as the team taking on this challenge – might indeed be the one to solve the problem. Often those closest to the problem itself are the best qualified to solve it. For example, Kathy Bowles was a nurse (now at University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing) who was concerned that patients were five times more likely to be readmitted to hospital than those who received proper post-acute care when needed. This drove her to spearhead RightCare Solutions, where she and her team designed an end-to-end software solution simplifying the post-acute care referral process.

O = Others

Sometimes it’s clear that you (or those you work with) are not the ones to solve a challenge, but you can alert, support, and encourage others who certainly can, with some initial thinking about your perspective on the challenge.

P = Processes

When we try to come up with solutions to challenges, sometimes we think the solution lies in something completely new, ‘blue sky’, or radical, while the solution(s) may well lie in improving the humble day-to-day processes everyone takes for granted. Toyota has always made a name for itself with its focus on process optimisation. Its Toyota Way puts great emphasis on Lean principles of minimising waste (muda) and kaizen (continuous improvement).

T = Tools, technology and systems

This is often the first ‘idea territory’ that people reach for when generating ideas. Tools! Apps! A new website! Any solution you come up with will typically sit within a system of other solutions. It’s worth zooming out a bit, and noticing other adjacent parts of whatever system the challenge is a part of. Whatever you think of McDonalds, Ray Kroc – the man responsible for turning it into the global fast-food juggernaut it is today – can be credited with tons of great system improvement ideas. By focusing on systems improvement, he was able to streamline and scale not only how the kitchens and menu processing ran, but all other parts of the business including quality control, partner relations, and real estate tactics.

Step 2: draw up a MOPT table

Now that we have our heads around the idea of different territories of solutions, we can move on to step 2. We transfer our initial challenge over to a new piece of paper (or whiteboard, or area on an online innovation space like Miro), and draw up a table, with a row for each clue.

There are four other columns, for Me, Others, Processes and Tools:

Now, either by yourself or as a team, you can tackle each cell of the table separately, and come up with a range of ‘How might…’ questions, depending on the clue, e.g. “How might I improve this so that I can recall everything I do?” or “How might I solve this so that I don’t even need to recall everything I do?”

I really like this because straight away I’m going to get more ideas than I otherwise would have, because I’m setting up all these different cells to fill. And like all good brainstorming, not all the ideas need to be practical yet; it’s always good to go for quantity first, and see if some ideas lead to other ideas.

There’s not a lot of space in those little squares, so treat each cell as a placeholder for your thinking, a springboard to another piece of paper, or another part of the whiteboard. Here’s where I got to with mine:

Note how a couple of cells in my example above just didn’t apply, and that’s fine. Mixing written notes and pictures is also fine. What this does is it arranges our thinking spatially, rather than just as a list… or with no form at all. Once you fill your MOPT table, you can go back over it and pick out the ideas that are most resonant and relevant.

How was it for you?

Go on, give it a go, you might be surprised by the insight this reveals to you. If you do give it a try, let me know how it goes, and if you think it could be improved upon.

Here are 4 lines to help you understand any problem

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As Albert Einstein might have said*, “Given one hour to save the world, I would spend 55 minutes defining the problem and 5 minutes finding the solution.” It’s so important to understand the problem before jumping in to tackle it, isn’t it?

When it comes to understanding (and solving) problems, we tend to think of ourselves as rational creatures, who form opinions and make decisions based on facts and logic. But as you probably know, our emotions play a much larger role in opinion-forming and decision-making. We have all sorts of unconscious biases and emotional triggers**. What’s more, a lot of problems don’t really exist in isolation, but are connected to other problems and solutions. We might come up with a solution to a problem, that then upsets something else. A great example of this holistic thinking in action is how pet stores in San Francisco (and other cities) can now only sell rescue animals, to combat the spread of inhumane ‘puppy mill’ breeding.

So there’s actually three parts to any problem:

  • Rational – objective, facts and data
  • Emotional – subjective, feelings and stories
  • Political – associative, connections and systems

So, how do we use only 4 lines to understand a problem? I’m glad you asked. Trying to understand all parts of a problem in your head is just too hard. Let’s look at how you can do a simple sketch to help. To start with, write a succinct sentence about your problem in the middle of a page, and draw a cloud around it, like this:

Next, draw three lines radiating out, pretty much equally spaced, and write these questions:

Now, fill each of those three spaces with whatever you think is relevant, to answer each question. You can write bullet points, or draw pictures, or maybe even a mind map of connected thoughts. Go nuts.

This is a simple visual way to explore a problem space. To really do this properly, I’d take Albert’s advice and spend at least 55 minutes on it, and I guarantee that you will have a much deeper, nuanced understanding of whatever your problem is. And feel free to adapt the prompt questions to your context.

Depending on the problem, your page should start revealing some insights to you. Maybe you don’t have much in the ‘rational’ space, but a lot in the ‘political’ space? Or maybe there’s SO MUCH on the page, that you need to scope the problem down a little bit?

Try it out; I hope you find this technique useful, for you and your team.

See, don’t you feel smarter already?

* There are so many of these sorts of quotes around, citing Albert Einstein, that I’m sure he couldn’t have come up with all of them. I mean, how would he have found time to work, in amongst all that brilliant commentary? Oh, yeah that’s right, he was a genius. 😉

** My go-to books on this topic are:

(These links have a referral code)

Make your transformation happen with the Superhero Booth visual framework

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It’s well known that visualisation helps us achieve the success we want to go after. This has been documented especially in sports performance, but visualisation – imagining your intended goals and how it feels to achieve them – is a skill available to anyone. I was at a meetup the other night, and I had a great conversation about how drawing is a really effective way to visualise goals (d’uh!).

And it reminded me of this great visual framework that you can use to clarify exactly what would turn ‘Regular You’ into a ‘Super You’. And it goes a little bit like this.

Step 1: Draw ‘Regular You’

Like other visual frameworks I write about, this is all about using a 2-dimensional space to organise and connect your thoughts, to explore a challenge or solve a problem. Grab a sheet of paper and a pen, or a whiteboard and a whiteboard marker, and draw the following simple pattern:

Draw a picture of you on the left, as you are now. You can draw a simple figure like I have here, or something that looks more like you… that’s completely up to you.

Step 2: Draw ‘Super You’

Now, ask yourself: if you were a superhero, what would your super-powers be? Have fun with it, and let your imagination go wild. Here are a few that tend to come up with groups I’ve done this with. Super strength? Maybe. Flying? Being invisible? Being able to clone yourself? Now you’re talking.

On the right, draw a ‘Super’ version of you (another way to think about it is ‘Future You’):

The Super You can be showing the super-powers you’re thinking of, but if that’s too complicated, just a simple figure that looks a bit super-ish is perfectly fine. Feel free to copy my one (above). It helps to put your initials on the chest, too. Example: I remember one guy in a workshop just wanted to be super PUNCTUAL, because he was late all the time, and it frustrated him. So when he drew the Super Him, he just drew himself with a massive clock hanging around his neck!

Write your super-power(s) above the ‘Super You’ figure, and now think about why you want those powers. Why would you want to clone yourself (for example)? This can be really insightful for you, because it shows what you truly value. We can never be invisible*, but maybe if we dig into why we want to be invisible, there might be something that we could do to achieve some benefit of being invisible. But let’s get to the next step first…

These super-powers are a bit of a metaphor for how we really want to be, and you may well see how they could become goals for you to pursue.

Step 3: Draw the Superhero Booth

Now, draw a big box in between the two figures, and draw an arrow to show how ‘Regular You’ stepping into that Superhero Booth, and another arrow out the other side, showing how you come out as Super You:

Can you see how this ‘Superhero Booth’ works as a visual metaphor? It makes you think: “what goes on in this booth that turns me from Regular Me into Super Me?”

Step 4: Stop I Start | Continue

Here’s where it gets interesting. Draw 2 horizontal lines in your Superhero Booth (see mine below), and write STOP, START and CONTINUE, like this:

Now, jot down what you think you need to (you guessed it) stop, start and continue, to become that Super You. Remember how I said to think about why you would want each of those super-powers? Think about the benefits of those powers that appeal to you, and what you could stop, start, and continue in your life and work, to achieve those benefits.

Be bold and set yourself challenges, and let this Superhero Booth be your map, to remind you of what you need to do. Improving yourself is hard, and there are sure to be some challenges in your way… but never fear; there’s a visual framework to help you with that, too. 😉

Try it as a team

Discussing (and sketching) what your super-powers are as a team is really insightful, too. What needs to happen inside that Superhero Booth, to take your team to the next level?

Here are some other ideas about how to use this visual framework:

  • Are you a designer or product manager? Try envisioning the Super Version of your customers (i.e. what would make them better), and let the Superhero Booth be a catalyst for connecting their needs with your offering.
  • Are you a project manager or scrum master? Try it with your team to help everyone improve each others’ performance
  • Are you in change management? Try it with different parts of your organisation, to see where they’re at, where they want to be, and what is going to resonate with them to get them there.