The Product Groundwork Method

The hard work to create a solid foundation for a product happens below the surface. It’s not sexy, it’s not showy, and it can get messy. It’s no wonder most companies want to jump straight into developing and launching products—there’s more instant gratification. But watch out for the pain of failure, which comes in the form of bad reviews, returned products, and poor sales. Some companies subscribe to rapid prototyping and launching a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) just to get to the endorphin high faster. Well, we think MVP is a myth; it’s an excuse to have something to market quickly. It’s the equivalent of throwing darts and hoping you hit a bullseye. There’s a better way that still strives for speed, but requires a bit of upfront work. Ever heard of the “measure twice, cut once” approach? That’s what the Groundwork does for you.

The Product Groundwork Method ™ is indispensable to creating conditions that help a product take hold, flourish, and thrive. We’re going to start by creating fertile ground with foundations that enable you to build your product with clarity and purpose. You can still launch a version 1, but if you’ve done the Groundwork, your entire dartboard becomes a bullseye.

PILLARS: 

The Groundwork Method ™ consists of three Pillars explained down below.  These three Pillars are always in play beneath the surface of product ideas and product features. Each Pillar is critical; they work with, and build on each other, and each ensures that together, they support and harmonize with each other. Usually, we start with understanding the problem or the customer, but there are cases where an unmet need is highlighted as a potential product idea. Wherever you start, the Groundwork Method™ ensures you define all three.

Now, this may seem like a process for slowing you down.  It’s not.  These Pillars can be hypothesized in a couple hours and evolved over time.  The point is that your team is putting a stake in the ground, has shared vision on that stake in the ground, and takes action against what they’ve gotten shared vision on.  As you do ongoing research, these Pillars are fortified and evolved as necessary and decisions are updated accordingly.  Consider these 3 artifacts as a rudder on your path to success.

PRACTICES:

If we asked you to name the most important practice a product management team should develop muscle strength in, what would you say? Why? Would it help the team move faster? Ensure a higher quality of products? Promote customer delight?  As product leaders, we all focus our coaching efforts on those skills that we believe are nonnegotiable and we share these practices with us to each organization we build or lead.

We’ve added three core Practices to your repertoire to help you establish and evolve the Groundwork Pillars you’ve established. Here’s why: What if there was a way to ensure your team was always customer focused, that you made decisions with the customer in mind, and to increase your confidence in every product and feature you launch? Well, there is.

Through our experience, we’ve found that the three practices below make all the difference when applied regularly and consistently to the three Pillars of the Groundwork. We see elements of these practices in leading companies that understand that highlighting and celebrating the practices is what sets the company apart. These practices will not only serve you well when establishing the Groundwork, but beyond that, they’re useful in every part of your job as a product leader.

In a world where product teams are increasingly relying on AI agents to generate research summaries, personas, problem statements, and hypotheses, it’s tempting to trust the outputs at face value. But speed without substance is dangerous. The Groundwork AI Accelerator—our set of powerful prompts —was built to counter that risk. It embeds customer-centric, data-driven best practices directly into the AI prompts so that outputs aren’t just fast—they’re credible and grounded in what matters.

This Groundwork AI Accelerator doesn’t replace the product manager’s judgment—it sharpens it. By embedding critical checks, real-world criteria, and thought-provoking questions into every prompt, we help product teams stay anchored in the right standards while still accelerating their workflow. The result?

PMs can move faster without skipping the rigor required to set a strong foundation for great product decisions.

The very first step for any organization is to get clear on one problem they’re solving. Don’t laugh—you’d be shocked at how many well-established teams and organizations can’t do this. The majority of products try to solve multiple problems and end up not solving any single problem exceptionally. How do you think products get all those bloated features? How often do you buy products based on a set of marketing promises and then get rid of them because you become so frustrated that the product didn’t solve your problem?

In this Pillar, we describe what it takes to create a clear, compelling problem statement that you want to solve. One that accurately depicts the customer’s problem in such a way that every single person on your team can understand, and it’s clear that you have the right skills, technology and resources to successfully address the problem. This is ground zero for products. Nothing thrives without getting this right.

The Product Groundwork Method ™ Program Deliverable:

We have a proven, repeatable process, design thinking techniques, and a template that helps your product managers to establish a Convergent Problem Statement quickly and practices that enable the evolution of the problem statement as new customer insights are gathered.

Customer Persona’s get such a bad rap. We’re talking about a stylized fictional character, that is designed to represent a customer or segment. We’ve even contemplated using a word other than “persona”, something more fun that readers won’t dismiss so quickly. The problem with the concept of “persona” is that it got hijacked by big firms that made a lot of money, creating fancy personas for product teams that never used them. So now “persona” is the laughingstock of the product world.

We’re here to tell you that personas, done right, are actually critical, and we’re going to show you the no-nonsense, absolutely free version that every product manager should embrace. Our version insists that the product manager closest to the customer creates the Persona. That way product and business decisions are confidently made based on your Persona. Our Persona is not pretty, it’s a workhorse. Our lofty goal is that the Actionable Persona makes you rethink your entire opinion of personas and you can’t wait to develop one that represents your customer. In any case, you can’t complete the Groundwork without it.

Groundwork Method ™ Program Deliverable:

We have proven ways to turn your customer research and existing personas into actionable artifacts that can be used for most, if not all, product decisions.  The simple, one-page template guides your product managers in the research they do, but also ensures they establish an Actionable Persona quickly.  We show how the Groundwork Method ™ Practices support the initial creation and evolution of your personas.

Most PM teams move directly to solutions once the problem and personas are identified.  Most of the time that leads to trying to solve too much or not solving the one thing that will drive the most delight for a chosen market.  Making the path to growth much slower than necessary.

The last Pillar in the Product Groundwork Method™ is Individualized Needs.  It’s the third step required before you can merrily start thinking about product solutions, roadmaps, or features. Everything you learned about the problem and the customer translate to customer needs. Needs aren’t requirements and they’re not user stories. They are your insights based on observation and interaction with your customers. We call them Individualized Needs because they are connected very specifically to your Actionable Persona. When you stratify needs, you can make priority calls. Whatever you build, create, or manufacture is rooted in understanding what will best satisfy a specific customer need.

In our experience, customers forgive incomplete and even (we’re embarrassed to admit) buggy products as long as the product meets their primary need. The most loyal customers in every company we’ve worked with became promoters of the products. Without receiving a penny in compensation, they share their love for our products because our product solved their most important individual needs. Isn’t this what each of us wants for our products? That they solve a real need (and the free, enthusiastic promotion is quite nice, too).

We believe that understanding each persona in isolation and prioritizing their needs, also in isolation, ensures the best possible tradeoffs.  Best, meaning highest confidence, most logical, and customer-backed, which usually results in durable decisions.

Product Groundwork Method ™ Program Deliverable:

We focus on what it takes to gather the insights you need to develop a prioritized set of needs (not features) for each persona.  We introduce and coach your team to the definition of “need” (as opposed to feature or capability,) on the research methods and best practices that most efficiently uncover needs, the strategies for prioritization, and ways in which to ensure your stakeholders understand the tradeoffs being made.   All of this resulting in logical, clear, and justifiable decisions that drive commitment.

Product managers almost always work with ambiguity. They are constantly learning from customers, the market, and competitors. They’re dealing with customer complaints, satisfaction surveys, and business metrics. They’re bombarded by ideas from senior management, from their development teams, and from technical support. They are inspired (and driven) by products they admire, and what the competition is doing. There is never a shortage of opportunities and ideas. Where they choose to focus is critical.

Hypothesis-driven product managers understand that when they take time to carefully plan what they pay attention to and bravely uncover what they understand the least, that they can make decisions faster and more effectively.

The Developing Hypothesis Practice provides a discipline that helps  the most meaningful ideas and problems naturally rise to the surface. After all, why would you spend time trying to learn anything you already understand? You want your teams to tackle the hardest problems first, and to have a clear line in the sand about what they believe and why so that they can move fast.

When you develop hypotheses, you have a consistent way to describe what you expect to be true, why you expect it to be true, and then outline how you will learn and provide evidence to support your belief.

Product Groundwork Method ™ Program Deliverable:

We cover a simple template that represents the goal of any research project.  We provide examples of what a good hypothesis looks like and what a not-to-good hypothesis looks like.  We also take your team through the critical elements of a hypothesis that yields the best possible research outcomes.

This practice is how you find the fastest, most convenient way to prove (or disprove) a hypothesis. Research can be a daunting task. In large organizations, entire teams focus just on customer research or just on market research. Research teams are skilled in analytics, have post-graduate degrees in human factors, and they run focus groups and massive quantitative surveys. Scrappy research isn’t about any of this.

Scrappy research is the act of learning fast. It’s guerilla tactics—getting to a customer or a proxy quickly and learning from them firsthand. When you couple this practice with the practice of Developing a Hypothesis, you get small, logical, hypothesis-driven experiments, which produce results that give you direction. There’s no better way to make a product decision than by testing first and testing small, with customers.

An organization that embraces scrappy research as a practice understands the power of hearing from customers and infusing customer insights into everything they do, not just the big stuff.

Product Groundwork Method ™ Program Deliverable:

We have proven, scalable tools and tactics that enable your team to develop an ongoing practice for gathering high-integrity customer insights with very small sample sizes.  We have templates, script outlines, and pro tips that ensure that the most is made of small-scale, ongoing customer interactions.

As product managers, we have one of the toughest jobs.  Our teams, and we have to get decisions made and get resources and commitments from teams and individuals across the organization to get anything done.  And most, if not all the time, none of these stakeholders report to us.  Many of them are at higher levels of the organization and have multiple priorities themselves.  So how do we get commitment and set product building efforts up for success?

This third Practice of the Groundwork Method™ promotes getting buy-in to the decisions you make and the solutions you put forward.

Product managers who consistently practice getting commitment are seen as influential, they get things done, their teams love working with them, and they seem to have few to no barriers between themselves and partner groups within the organization. Executives outside of product management point to them as examples of great employees. If this sounds too good to be true, then you’ll love this practice. You don’t need to be born with charisma to get commitment using this practice.

The practice of getting commitment involves selecting the right customer data to share, identifying key stakeholders, developing a story, testing your story with a trial balloon, and sharing the results. Yes, there are a lot of steps to getting commitment, that’s why we offer this as a practice. Once you master this practice, the results are magical. We promise!

Product Groundwork Method ™ Program Deliverable:

We provide tools and techniques for building and presenting your logic.  We cover a proven outline for decision driving narratives that elicit empathy for the customer, but a clear grasp of the logic behind your team’s decision.  We share insider tips on storytelling that fortifies your team’s efforts in presenting customer insights.  Our recipe in getting commitment ensures decisions are made, kept, and teams commit.