product-riff

Product Riff Skill

Purpose

Build product sense by actively exploring product news, launches, and announcements from multiple angles. This isn't passive reading — it's structured exploration that forces you to form opinions, challenge assumptions, and extract transferable lessons.

The riff format is deliberately quick (15-20 min) compared to a full teardown. It's designed for the daily cadence of staying sharp on product news.

The Eight Angles

Every product announcement can be explored from these angles. You don't need all eight every time — pick the 3-4 most relevant.

1. The Strategic "Why"

Core question: Why did they do this, and why now?

• Timing: What changed in the market, their business, or their technology to make this possible or necessary now?
• Strategic play: Is this offensive (creating new advantage) or defensive (responding to pressure)?
• What it reveals: What does this tell you about their internal priorities, roadmap, and where they're headed?
• The move behind the move: What are they setting up for next? This announcement is rarely the endgame.

Frameworks to apply: 7 Powers, counter-positioning, platform strategy

2. User Impact

Core question: Who does this actually help, and who gets hurt?

• Winners: Which user segments benefit? How much does their life improve?
• Losers: Who gets disrupted, displaced, or forced to change behavior?
• Adoption equation: Is motivation high enough to overcome the friction of switching?
• The non-obvious user: Beyond the obvious target, who else is affected? (Developers, admins, partners, the users' users)

Frameworks to apply: Motivation types, friction analysis, segment analysis

3. Competitive Ripple

Core question: What does this force everyone else to do?

• Direct competitors: Do they need to respond? With what? How fast?
• Adjacent players: Does this expand or compress their market?
• The "why can't they just copy it" test: What's defensible here? (Network effects, data moats, switching costs, brand, process power)
• Asymmetric response: If a competitor responds, does the original move get stronger or weaker?

Frameworks to apply: 7 Powers, differentiation classification (differentiator/MMR/neutralizer)

4. Business Model Lens

Core question: How does this make or save money?

• Revenue play: New revenue stream, expansion, retention, or CAC reduction?
• Pricing signal: What does the pricing/packaging tell you about their strategy?
• Growth loop: Does this create, strengthen, or close a growth loop?
• Unit economics: Does this improve or hurt their unit economics? (More users at lower margin? Fewer users at higher margin?)

Frameworks to apply: Growth loops, retention mechanics, monetization strategy

5. Second-Order Effects

Core question: What happens next because of this?

• 1st order: [announcement] causes [direct effect]
• 2nd order: Because of 1st order, [what changes in the ecosystem?]
• 3rd order: Because of 2nd order, [what breaks, emerges, or accelerates?]
• "Who didn't expect this?" Think about the stakeholders (regulators, partners, developers, investors) who now have to react.

6. Contrarian Take

Core question: Why might everyone be wrong about this?

• The bear case: What would need to be true for this to fail?
• Hype vs. substance: Is the reaction proportional to the actual impact?
• Hidden costs: What are they giving up to do this? (Focus, simplicity, existing user satisfaction, engineering resources)
• Survivorship bias: Are we only looking at this because they're successful? Would we notice if a smaller company did the same?

7. Steal This

Core question: What would you take from this for your own product?

• The transferable insight: Not the feature, but the underlying principle
• The application: How would this principle manifest in your context?
• The constraint check: What's different about your situation that changes the calculus?
• The anti-lesson: What should you explicitly NOT copy, and why?

8. Pattern Match

Core question: Have you seen this play before?

• Historical parallels: What past product moves rhyme with this one?
• What happened then: How did the parallel play out? (Success, failure, unexpected twist)
• The rhyme vs. the repeat: What's similar, and what's importantly different?
• Category patterns: Is this a known archetype? (Platform play, bundling, unbundling, vertical integration, horizontal expansion, going upmarket, going downmarket)

Riff Quality Indicators

A good riff:

• Has at least one opinion that could be wrong (you took a stance)
• Identifies something non-obvious (beyond the press release narrative)
• Connects the announcement to broader patterns
• Produces at least one "steal this" insight for your own product
• Surfaces a question you can't answer yet (intellectual honesty)

A bad riff:

• Just summarizes the announcement
• Only has positive takes (or only negative)
• Doesn't connect to anything beyond the announcement itself
• Has no transferable insights
• Doesn't acknowledge uncertainty

Pattern Library

Over time, riffs build a library of strategic patterns:

Pattern	Description	Example
Platform play	Opening up to third parties	Shopify apps, Slack integrations
Bundling	Combining separate products	Microsoft 365, Apple One
Unbundling	Extracting a feature into a product	Figma from Adobe, Notion from Confluence
Going upmarket	Moving toward enterprise	Slack, Zoom, Notion
Going downmarket	Moving toward SMB/consumer	HubSpot free tier, Canva
Vertical integration	Owning more of the stack	Apple silicon, Stripe Atlas
Category creation	Defining a new market	Figma (collaborative design), Linear (opinionated PM)
Counter-positioning	Model incumbents can't copy	Basecamp vs Salesforce, Linear vs Jira
Land and expand	Free/cheap entry, grow usage	Datadog, Twilio
Aggregation	Owning demand, commoditizing supply	Google, Uber, Airbnb

How This Skill Gets Used

This skill is loaded as context by:

• /pm:riff — The primary riffing workflow
• /pm:differentiate — When analyzing competitive moves
• /pm:strategy — When incorporating market context
• /pm:teardown — When a teardown is prompted by news

It connects to:

• strategy-craft — For 7 Powers and differentiation frameworks
• simulation — For user impact modeling
• growth-systems — For business model and growth loop analysis
• analytical-thinking — For structured reasoning patterns