Mastering product teardowns with Lade Falobi

Lade is a General Manager at Early Node, working on SaaS products. Her career in product marketing started at Enterscale where she was introduced to the concept of teardown.

She also writes the newsletter Marketing for Geeks where she dives into actionable product teardowns and user experience evaluations, helping readers improve product alignment with user expectations and marketing strategy.

In our AMA session, Lade shares:

An overview of product teardowns
Common product flaws and challenges
How to build relationships with product teams
Public teardown case study: Africhange
Tips for pitching services to foreign startups
Common mistakes early-stage marketers make
And so much more

What’s a product teardown?

According to Lade, a product teardown is all about breaking down a product, highlighting what worked well, what's wrong and what could be improved. It could be an app, a signup process, a landing page, content, an ad, etc. The goal of every product teardown should be to improve user experience, reduce friction points, and spot missed opportunities to upsell or strengthen brand messaging.

Why should you care about product teardowns?

Whether you’re a newbie or a seasoned pro, mastering effective product teardowns can be a powerful tool in your marketing arsenal. Here are a few reasons to care about the concept:

Builds your analytical skils.
Deepens your understanding of user experience.
Strengthens your brand positioning against competitors.
Informs effective content creation.
Expands your portfolio.

Some key takeaways from the AMA session:

1. Product teardowns are very useful. It's a good strategy to do a product teardown for a company you're interested in working with. The kind of teardown you do should depend on the role you're applying for. Don’t do a full product teardown if you're not going into a role that involves product.

For example, if you're applying for a content marketing role, and you tear down their product, you've given them value but it does not match up with the value of your role. It's best to tear down a vertical of the business relevant to your experience or a role you're interested in.

2. Approach the product experience from the very beginning—often by searching the product name on Google. This mirrors the user journey since no product simply appears in front of users without some initial interaction or search.

The goal should be to ensure consistent messaging throughout: from Google snippets to the website, the app store, and finally, the app itself. Any disconnect in messaging can be confusing. Navigate each stage as a user would and document any inconsistencies found along the way.

3. Before doing a teardown, make it clear that your approach is from the user’s perspective. The next thing is to understand the scope of what you’re tearing down. Is it for the entire product or a specific feature? Ask questions like: What's the purpose? What am I trying to get out of this teardown?

Create a system for documenting things. Then go into it in detail by breaking everything down and then finding real issues that exist.

4. When doing teardowns, be very honest. But there's an art to the honesty. You don't say: “I don't like this, the experience was terrible.” Instead, say: “The experience made me feel this way and I expected it to make me feel a certain way.”

You’ve said the same thing but in a way that doesn't come off as a direct attack on what has been built but you sharing your experience from a user perspective. The teardown must be constructive feedback which gives the product team something they can use to improve the product.

5. Marketing should have a heavy input in guiding product development since it represents the customer’s voice. Involving marketing from the get-go helps avoid issues that arise when customer needs aren’t fully considered.

6. Practice doing more teardowns because the more products you evaluate, the better you'll be at spotting a product’s flaws or strengths. It also helps you build that product sense from the aspect of user reviews.

An image of Lade Falobi plus a quote of how she believes that obsessive people make great marketers because they tend to dive deep into things they don't understand

Bonus content

Lade graciously shared a deck of the product teardown she did for Africhange.

Context: Africhange ran a contest and signing up on their app was a requirement.

Top issues

She was asked to grant app permissions and provide confidential information without explanation and before experiencing the value of the app.
No reassurance about the safety of her private information.
Lengthy signup process.
No option to skip tedious steps in the signup process.