Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.
Log in Create free account100s of community videos are available to free members. Conference talks are generally available to Gold members.
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
-
•
Whole product thinking integrates business, problem, and reality spaces for holistic product delivery.
-
•
Shared language and alignment documents help teams overcome communication silos and contradictory perspectives.
-
•
Decision culture and business stage significantly impact how product strategy and investments should be approached.
-
•
Customer outcomes and business impacts must be simultaneously considered for successful products.
-
•
Continuous understanding blends strategic exploration and tactical evaluation to maintain customer connections.
-
•
Product operations—including research ops, design ops, data ops, and customer success ops—are critical as binding infrastructure.
-
•
Delivery is as important as design and development, emphasizing incremental releases and deployment planning.
-
•
Design principles like accessibility and sustainability are folded into business values and solution design, not separate add-ons.
-
•
Avoid prescribing rigid roles; instead use the framework as a diagnostic tool to identify gaps and align cross-functional teams.
-
•
An experience vision acts as a north star, inspiring teams toward long-term customer-centric outcomes beyond fixed product features.
Notable Quotes
"Frameworks are the best because they help structure conversations and align teams."
"Everyone has a different context—teams, culture, and history—that shapes how they work and think."
"Is there good kung fu in everything? Every perspective has something to teach us."
"Outcomes is a word people use so much it's lost its meaning, so we need clarity around it."
"Business space includes vision, mission, market understanding, business model, and decision culture—not just product."
"Reality space focuses on customers’ mental models, appetite for change, and the broader solution ecosystem."
"Continuous understanding means both strategic and tactical research with strong customer connections."
"Delivery gets missed at the right time often; sequencing, deployment, and adoption planning are critical."
"Product operations serve as the binding agent to enable teams and processes to work seamlessly together."
"Experience vision is the north star describing what the customer’s world will be like after success."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Low vision users often invert colors and use magnification levels as high as 400 percent to reduce eye strain."
Sam ProulxSUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population
December 9, 2021
"Most of our designers are contractors; they have limited voice because they’re bound by contracts."
Michael LandEstablishing Design Operations in Government
February 18, 2021
"We stuck with NPS because it was a pure metric with a long history we could trend, instead of muddying things with loyalty or revenue."
Shipra KayanHow we Built a VoC (Voice of the Customer) Practice at Upwork from the Ground Up
September 30, 2021
"People care about titles way too much. I had a guy whose business card said star-bellied sneak—love that."
Ian SwinsonDesigning and Driving UX Careers
June 8, 2016
"Communication is an integral part of the chief of staff role, whether with leadership, the org, or partners."
Isaac HeyveldExpand DesignOps Leadership as a Chief of Staff
September 8, 2022
"Would you feel confident leaving your project success to the flip of a coin based on the fact that almost half of all change fails?"
Amy EvansHow to Create Change
September 25, 2024
"Super speed means enabling rapid onboarding by centralizing and streamlining a previously disparate process."
Kate Koch Prateek KalliFlex Your Super Powers: When a Design Ops Team Scales to Power CX
September 30, 2021
"The higher up you are in an organization, the more distorted your reality is likely to be."
Dave GrayLiminal Thinking: Sense-making for systems in large organizations
May 14, 2015
"Durable insights can emerge organically based on usage and referencing patterns in the system."
Matt DuignanAtomizing Research: Trend or Trap
March 30, 2020
