Mastering Product Reviews: A Guide to Best Practices

One of the most effective ways to open a product review is with discussion points and goals upfront.

In my experience, about 60% of product teams have the content part of product reviews down.

Where they could really use help is structuring around a product review.

So How Should You Structure Things?

I love the way Will Lawrence ran his product reviews at Meta.

He actually built a great product review document.

Then, he’d add these 3 slides as scaffolding around it:

1. Discussion Points

This helps people understand what to do, and are prepended with clear labels like:

• FYI
• Align
• Decide

This lets everyone clearly understand how to react to specific slides. It helps you to avoid getting derailed.

2. Goals & Non-Goals

We’ve all had that product review where random topics take up valuable time.

That’s the point of non-goals.

Long product review documents often zoom right into the specific goal area. So it’s worth getting 101 and outlining the goals and non-goals.

3. Discussion Follow-Up

Some of my favorite executives would actually share their screen and write these up together live as a group.

Choose your style, but be sure to send it to all attendees after the review.

And then add it to the deck for those tracing back history.

This Yields Returns

Sometimes, we have great preparation. But the product review still fumbles.

I find structure could often solve the problem.

For more on content, templates, and more, check out the deep dive.