The Product-Minded Engineer

Chapter 1. The Foundations of Product Thinking

Here we go yo, here we go yo

So what, so what, so what’s the scenario?

A Tribe Called Quest

If there is a core primitive of product thinking, it’s the scenario. It’s simply a user story structured to be useful for product design.

Here’s a scenario about passwords:

Darla is a retired baby boomer who began using computers at the age of forty-five. She is setting up an account at her local tea shop, so that she can order online. When it asks for an email and password, she chooses her daughter’s birthday followed by her son’s first name so that she can remember it. She has about thirty online accounts, so she uses the same password for most of them because otherwise, it would be impossible to remember, and she’s been advised not to write down her passwords.

You can guess what happens next—​her tea shop has a data breach, and her password—​the same one she uses at her bank—​gets leaked. Perhaps someone on the dark web buys her login and takes her money.

This nightmare scenario highlights a problem with passwords, but not one in the product, per se. You’d never get to it by simply considering the signup interface itself, the encryption protocol, the secure storage, and so forth. But by writing a complete story that incorporates predictable human frailties, the security problem becomes obvious.

In this section, we’ll break down and analyze the components of an effective scenario and teach you how to craft a good one. Loosely speaking, ...