What are Product Teardowns❓

Rohit Verma
3 min readJul 5, 2021

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A product teardown is an act of disassembling a product. It doesn’t necessarily imply criticizing the product rather it involves investigating & reverse engineering the thought process & experience offered by the product. It serves as a great inspiration to enhance our own product.

It is crucial for a PM to introspect and understand the reasons regarding why the product was designed as it was — what were the objectives & what kind of drawbacks it currently has.

Tom Connel

Product Teardowns shouldn’t be limited to your competitive apps but instead, should also include apps from other domains as well.

Top 5 goals of Product Teardowns

  1. Develop an understanding of how the app onboards, activate & engages users.
  2. Which customer pain point it is addressing? Any “aha” moment?
  3. What is the organization objective it is trying to solve?
  4. Key takeaways & learning that can be applied to your product directly.
  5. Identifying gaps in their journey.

Top 4 benefits of Product Teardowns

  • Competitive Landscape Understanding
    Product Teardowns are a perfect concept to understand the competitors. It helps to understand their offerings or their approach towards the same problem statement which you are facing. You can also scan their Google Playstore reviews to understand the pain points of their customers & also gain knowledge about their most appreciated feature.
  • UX knowledge
    Understanding the different interactions, flow, notification, communication & exception handling of the product gives deep insights into the product. Also, learning about the new and trending designs followed by the most popular apps helps to draw parallels for your product as well & makes it easy for the customer to recognize & identify quickly.
  • Innovation
    While performing Product Teardowns you can come across solutions or architecture which are pathbreaking & makes the onboarding or engagement smooth for the new or repeat users. Try to learn and deploy such innovative ideas to your own product which can help you design out of the box solution for the customers.
  • Thought leadership
    Once you go deep & ask why this particular feature is present in the product & what problem it is addressing, you are creating your own repository of solutions & reasoning for the same. This expands your knowledge base drastically & helps you to hone your Product Management skills.

Thanks for reading! If you’ve got ideas to contribute to this conversation please comment. If you like what you read and want to see more, clap me some love! Follow here, or connect with me on LinkedIn

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Rohit Verma

Group Product Manager @AngelOne, ex-@Flipkart, @Cleartrip @IIM Bangalore. https://topmate.io/rohit_verma_pm