Define your product backbone

Transcript

It’s so important to keep your end-users at the core of your planning. The best way to do this is to first define your product’s backbone. The backbone consists of all the user journeys in your product.

In the case of our Discovery Map, modelled on Airbnb, our top-level journey names could be Find accommodation, Book accommodation, List my property, Manage my property and Learn about Airbnb. Notice how these all start with a verb — this is a good way to describe what your users are trying to achieve in your product.

Pitching the level of these journeys can be challenging. For instance, with “Find accommodation”, we could go more abstract — like “Purchase”, or we could go more specific, like “Find an apartment”. Ultimately you need to pitch at the right level for your product and business. This is something you should experiment with.

In Avion, your backbone consists of journeys and steps. It’s important to realise that these are typically not things that will become “completed” or shipped. There will always be improvements to be made, features to add and bugs to fix in the context of your core user journeys. So these remain generally consistent, and you should always plan your work in the context of them.

Remember that you can drag and drop individual steps and even entire journeys in Avion and also collapse them down to focus your view.