The Product Design Playbook

Twelve stacks, one system

Every consumer app lives or dies in the same twelve areas. Each stack below is a set of named building blocks for one of them: what tends to work, what tends to backfire, and the prompts to shape it all to your app.

• 76 cards

  Onboarding

  Onboarding is everything between a user's first open and their first win.

  

• 66 cards

  Activation

  Activation is the stretch between someone trying your app and someone deciding it is theirs.

  

• 61 cards

  Retention

  Retention is whether your app earns a place in someone's life after the novelty wears off.

  

• 61 cards

  Monetisation

  Monetisation is the craft of asking for money at the moment the answer is most likely to be yes.

  

• 56 cards

  Engagement

  Engagement is what a session feels like while it is happening.

  

• 56 cards

  Habit Formation

  A habit is a return trip the user stops deciding to make.

  

• 51 cards

  Growth & Viral

  Viral growth is what happens when using the product naturally creates exposure to it, or pride worth showing.

  

• 51 cards

  Conversion Optimisation

  Conversion optimisation is removing everything that stands between a willing user and the thing they came to do.

  

• 51 cards

  Trust Building

  Trust is the quiet conviction that this app will not waste, trick, or endanger you.

  

• 46 cards

  Experience Refinement

  Refinement is the discipline of designing the moments nobody puts in the pitch deck.

  

• 46 cards

  Intent Shaping

  Intent shaping is the craft of noticing what a user is trying to do and quietly making that easier.

  

• 46 cards

  Premium Positioning

  Premium is a feeling users form long before they see a price, and mostly from things you would not list on a pricing page.