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Summary
Join us for this session with Sean McKay, Founder, Product Strategy & Design Consultant at Whole Product Thinking. Why is it so hard to align everyone so we can deliver products that our customers love? It’s a question that will steal your soul (and your job) if you let it. I believe it’s more important now than ever that we transcend the nagging industry debates, power struggles, and process wars that are blocking us all from doing our best work for our customers. In this session, I’ll share a new “Whole Product Thinking” framework I’ve been developing. It’s intended to help structure conversations and align teams around the fundamental concepts needed to deliver human-centered products that are meaningful to users and effective for business. My approach centers on the 'what' and 'why,' deliberately separating the 'how' to allow organizations the freedom to choose approaches and methods that align with their unique contexts, development philosophies, and company culture.
Key Insights
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Whole Product Thinking combines the original whole product model with design thinking to create holistic product strategies.
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Alignment and shared language across teams and departments are crucial to overcoming fragmented approaches in product development.
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The framework divides considerations into three spaces: business, reality, and solution, each with unique focuses but interconnected.
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Business space includes company vision, business models, decision culture, metrics, and financial resources, which influence product strategy.
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Reality space focuses on users’ mental models, motivations, appetite for change, ecosystem, competition, and market dynamics.
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Solution space covers product domain strategy, design, development, delivery, experience and system architecture, and go-to-market strategies.
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Continuous understanding means maintaining an ongoing, strategic and tactical connection with customers, internal knowledge, and analytics.
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Product operations act as a binding agent integrating research ops, design ops, data ops, DevOps, and customer success ops.
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Outcomes and business impact must be clearly defined to bridge customer goals and business objectives, avoiding diluted meaning.
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Delivery planning, including sequencing, deployment, pricing, and packaging, is often overlooked but critical to product success.
Notable Quotes
"Frameworks are the best because they help structure conversations and align teams."
"Everyone has a different context—the teams, culture, and backgrounds—which means one size does not fit all."
"There’s good kung fu in everything—we can learn from every approach even if we disagree."
"Outcomes get used for everything and lose meaning; this framework tries to bring clarity to those terms."
"The business is ultimately making strategic investments into reality—to solve problems for people and maximize impact."
"You don’t have to research everything; collective knowledge within the company also matters when making decisions."
"Empathy is overused; I prefer customer connections to understand their thinking styles and motivations."
"Roadmap and delivery are different; sequencing priority can be constrained by architecture and technology dependencies."
"Organizational change is hard but building shared understanding and relationships is the way to influence it."
"Experience vision is the North Star describing what our customer’s world should look like when we succeed."
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