Product roasts are the best way to enhance one's sensibility around building better products. It's called a "roast" because it often involves a no-holds-barred, brutally honest critique of the product's features, design, user experience, and overall value proposition.

In the spirit of 'everything is a remix', I've liberally forked, remixed and adapted a set of questions from industry leaders like Manas Saloi and Julie Zhou, to create my own tailored questionnaire for a product roast.

I run this through a new product or even a feature I would like to dig deeper into.

Strategy, Distribution and Market

      • If I was the PM for a product, how would I grow it?
      • What is the GTM of this product?
      • How big is this market?
      • Is the app a leader in this category?
      • Where does the product fit into the larger ecosystem of other companies/competitors? Where are they in this landscape?

Understanding the company and the larger context

      • What are the other products which the company creates? How does this product fit into the larger ecosystem?
      • What's the culture and DNA of the brand?
      • What is the tone and voice of their brand? Any hints being dropped from their company blogs?
      • Any news from seekingalpha, perplexity, techcrunch, crunchbase on the company status
      • what is the vision the executives from the company are pitching in global platforms/podcasts/round-tables etc?

Playstore

      • Is the name unique? is it memorable?
      • What is written in the About section? Is it too generic? Do they talk about the value prop in terms of JTBD?
      • How do the screenshots look like?
      • What are the metrics shown on the playstore page?
      • Do I see it running ads on its competitor pages?
      • What has been their approach for the description? Is it just a bunch of keyword stuffing? Written description using reviews of their users to show social proof?
      • How is the page different from its competitors?

Positioning

      • What do I think about its positioning? Has the positioning been consistent across other touchpoints?
      • Is there a crisp and consistent description of the product across their playstore page, app?
      • What is A, B and C, but not D for this product? What are the things they say they do, and the things they say they don't? And the things they say they do, but don't?

Onboarding

      • How frictionless is the onboarding process? Any identifiable barriers?
      • Is signup mandatory?
      • Can you skip the onboarding process?
      • What is asked in the onboarding process?
      • How quickly can you get to the meat of the product? Get gratification by completing the task I hired for? Measure both by the number of steps as well as the time taken
      • What is the developer optimising for in the signup flow?
      • What are the decisions in the onboarding that might affect the FTUE?
      • Are they talking about features or jobs?

First Time User Experience

      • How does the app feel? What emotions does it raise?
      • Is the FTUE overwhelming? Does it meet my expectations?
      • If I have to describe this app to others, how will I do that in less than 8 words? Will I use the same thing highlighted by the product team on the playstore page/app?
      • Is the experience a straight line?
      • What is absurd/supernormal about it?
      • If I was the PM designing this FTUE, what data would I collect to personalise the experience?
      • What are the hypothesis I have that I would test as a PM?

Jobs to be done

      • What are the main jobs a user might have been hired this product for?
      • What does the JTBD force diagram look like for this app?

Defensibility

      • What is the moat?
      • How is the app increasing the switching cost?
      • How is it decreasing switching cost if I am thinking of switching over from other apps?

Building trust and reliability

      • What are the trust indicators in the product?
      • How is the app reducing customer anxiety?
      • Is there any social proof?
      • How does the user know it is a legit business?

Product and Design

      • What are the interactions I like?
      • What do I hate?
      • Do I like the information architecture?
      • What are the things I can copy in my own products?
      • Is there some interactions, some visual elements which do not map to the convention? Any that follow industry standards that other apps don't?
      • Does the product design align with the frameworks I have learned over the years? Where does it deviate from the norm?
      • Now that i have used the product, what are the metrics I think the PM should be measuring?
      • What do I think the north star of the product is?
      • What are the experiments I would run?
      • Does the app experience tie back to what was promised in the playstore?
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The internet is best when strangers meet. Write to me at hey[at]shreyasprakash[dot]com