Product Audits

Have you ever seen the tip of your nose without a mirror? What about licked your elbow?

An audit is a structured and critical review of a digital product or experience. Like a mirror, the product audit is meant to help find our blind spots, to help us reach those places that are unattainable because, unfathomably, we are too close to them to touch them.

As a product manager, one of the core aspects of success is the diversity and collaboration of my team. We rely on our UX designers, UX writers; content creators, and copyeditors; technical engineers and developers; and users to help us fill out our perspectives and give us the scope to zoom out and take that high-level view. For the lone wolves, the consultants, the solopreneurs, the one-human-bands out there this can be a major challenge. Even if you consult a developer or graphic designer, their context largely relies on your ‘brief’, your directed instructions that tell them exactly what to build.

In this article, I’ll review several different kinds of audits and some helpful tricks to help you choose the right kind or combo. An audit might be a perfect process for helping you get a distanced perspective when you’ve been deep in the product/brand-building process.

Product audits are a great tool to use in conjunction with user research. In Research 101: Tips for starting research processes, I forewarned that finding representative users, especially before you launch your first product can be tricky. In this gap where you may have very few unbiased opinions, a product audit can provide an additional perspective.

Bringing on a product or community consultant to conduct an audit means you’re bringing in someone with a developed internal perspective of quickly uncovering the necessary context and goals of your business and laying this lens on top of their expertise in building digital products to help you assess your product’s accuracy in relation to how it does or does not reflect your organisation’s positioning.

Shameless plug: This is one of the unique bits of a consultant community like Candid! where members can develop awareness and familiarity of each other’s brands through building community and then pull on others’ skill sets for ad hoc contract work with better results! Enough distance for perspective, enough familiarity to get specific and critical.

The Building Process

Building anything new is an organic process. It won’t look the same for any two people, products, or teams.

Ultimately, a product audit is meant to judge how ‘good’ your product is but ‘good’ is not a fixed concept! Controversially, I’d argue that a product audit is not meant to tell you the ways your product is good, it’s meant to uncover how your product could be better.

Placing yourself in an echo chamber or community of people telling you how great your product or product idea is might feel great in the moment but it can stunt your ability to break into that next layer of accelerated growth.

How you’ve built your product might influence the approach you take or need from an audit.

For some, the process starts by building something very focused and then reflecting back on the learnings from that process to try and understand scalable foundations. Immediate need leads to learning, which leads to a long-term ‘business’. These people launch a product parallel to or before defining a brand, org strategy, etc.

For these individuals, a product audit can help ground your focused idea into real-world contexts that it will need to adapt to in order to survive and thrive. Often, these products are developed out of a need the entrepreneur has personally experienced or their desires (e.g. I want to provide this kind of service because I get joy from it) rather than by a known market need.

In this situation, a product audit can help optimise your initial product within the wider market landscape, helping you reach more users or find product-market fit. This might include uncovering:

• Biased language in your copy or user-focused messaging opportunities

• Gap analyses, market trends, or misalignment

• Usability issues or niche/redundant applications of functionality

• Technical debt or long-term scalability issues

Alternatively, there are solopreneurs that come into this space, ready for it to be a *whole journey. These individuals seek to set up firm foundations from the start before starting any development. If this is you, you’ve spent the early days focused on building a business for your skillset or industry rather than creating a specific product.

This approach pays long-term dividends but can wind up with a lightweight initial product that provides limited value to users, often buried under the context of long-term hopes and dreams. You’ve been in the space of building the big, idealistic picture which doesn’t always translate into a scrappy, minimal, focused first product. You’ve thought so deeply about all the details, you can miss the obvious assumptions you’ve made along the way that cause gaps for your eventual users.

In these cases, a product audit helps close the gap between promises, hopes, and dreams and what your first product can actually deliver. This might include uncovering:

• Adjustments to help a product or functionality better reflect strategic priorities

• Agile opportunities and roadmap creation

• Scalable practices focused on financial returns or integration potential

• User-centred perspectives on usability or accessibility

• Ways to focus messaging and reduce copy

Specialised Types of Audit

A product audit can take a generalist or specialist approach, just like any other skillset or process. Auditing based on a build process or approach is great when combined with coaching/mentoring or when you have the opportunity to delve deeper into context with a consultant. The goal of that approach is to get an external, unbiased perspective from someone who better understands the details and goals of your bigger picture.

If you’re engaging with a specialist, you might ask for a specific type of audit based on their skill set and a more limited, structured brief.

Sometimes these audits won’t be conducted by people who have product management or product strategy experience as much as from the people who specialise in areas that are hands-on in creating products. Some examples might include:

Technical Audit/QA Audit

Best conducted by: a technical product manager, software architect, technologist, or developer (front-end, back-end, or full-stack dependent on product or scope)

Key questions:

• Can the platform scale efficiently without performance degradation?

• Are integrations (identity systems, content platforms, and analytics) working as intended or scalable?

• Is the system secure and free of technical bugs or inconsistencies?

Content Audit

Best conducted by: Product managers with a content background, learning experience designers (LXD) or instructional designers (ID), UX writers, or content strategists

Key questions:

• Is content accessible and inclusive for your target users?

• How do tone, messaging, and styling of the product impact the way it is engaged with or absorbed?

• Are content formats (video, text, interactive exercises) optimised for impact against your goals?

Positioning Audit

Best conducted by: Product Marketing Managers, brand strategist, or market researcher

Key questions:

• Is the value of each functionality or section clear and supported by relevant call-to-actions (CTAs)?

• How does the product or messaging compare to product alternatives or target user expectations?

• Is your positioning balanced to focus on your target user against wider market appeal?

SEO or Conversion Audit

Best conducted by: SEO managers, conversion rate consultants, UX researchers and writers, or growth marketers

Key questions:

• What are potential drop-off areas in the user flows?

• What is the findability and relevance of messaging and keywords?

• How can conversion costs be reduced through product changes?

Self-Audits

I wouldn’t personally suggest self-audits for solopreneurs unless these are milestones during development that ladder up to a third-party audit and your user research. The best positioning for these is to think about self-audits as intentional points of reflection.

Some key tips for conducting self-audits are to:

• First, reflect on your own biases concerning your definition of good (Do you LOVE capital letters or punctuation for emphasis! Do you gravitate towards breaking up text with imagery, even if the imagery isn’t connected to a rationale?)

• Create a structured list of questions or ideals

  • Tip: Challenge yourself to do this first, put it away while you build, and then return to it after time to see if your process has aligned with your initial vision or requirements

• Try to empathise and put yourself in the shoes of a persona different from your own

• Read text aloud or record yourself as you test (like a usability interview); watching back to see where you’ve made assumptions on how something might work, alternative paths a user might take, or areas where text was lacking grammar, long-winded, etc.

Do these self-audits as an intentional space of time. Speak slowly (if recording yourself), take hours or book a full day, not cramming it into 20 minutes between other business-as-usual activities in your calendar.

In a self-audit, try (as much as possible) to act like you are putting on a very specific pair of sunglasses as you look at your product from a niche angle (I am a Gen Z new user that’s stumbled across this website from a Reddit thread). Don’t convince yourself that a massive box of text is okay because of what it says. If it distracts the eye during a visual design review, it will distract the user too!

Some self-audit types may include:

Requirements Audit

When you begin developing a product, write down what it must accomplish in terms of solving a problem, technical requirements, etc. Use this as a checklist to review an in-development product to see how closely you are progressing against your requirements.

If you have a lot of content or functionality built that isn’t integral to those requirements, consider that you are probably over-building and you need to just launch! Some of these nice-to-haves will become useless anyway once you learn more from your users.

Usability Audit

Sometimes, we build products (unintentionally) as a weird fruit salad of features.

Have you sat down and clicked through, step-by-step how a user would? Have you seen what actually happens when you play that video or click that link? Have you completed the entire sign-up process and looked at the confirmation email?

Knowing your product is minimally usable can start with yourself, seeing what the user will see and experience before you put it before users through testing. Give yourself a time limit for changes (can only take me up to one day) unless you discover something that is completely, technically broken.

SOP Audit

Your audit and your development processes are symbiotic for developing how your business works.

You can review your product to help identify new standardised operating procedures (SOPs) to create or to assess the efficacy of SOPs- is your end-product reflecting the value you intended by creating an SOP.

If you want to know more about SOPs, read my article Standardising Operating Procedures: Work Smarter, Not Harder.

Values Audit

As product development takes a life of its own, reflect on the core values of how you define ‘good’, how you are assessing the viability of your business, how you want to work, and how this product will solve a real problem for your users.

Final Tricks for Auditing

Whether you’re now looking to conduct some interim self-audits or find a consultant who can help you with that outside perspective, some of my top tricks for auditing are:

Follow a structured method

• Define the scope and questions to answer.

• Follow a structured process.

• Empathise and get critical.

• Create a report.

• Follow-up on improvement actions.

But a checklist will only take you so far…

Structure is great, but there is a bit of an art to auditing as well. It’s about viewing a product through several layers of lenses and then removing certain layers in different order to see how your product looks holistically.

Prioritise based on impact, not preferences

We all have opinions on what good looks like. Yes, you have to be happy with your product, but ultimately it’s more important that your user is. Figure out who your user is, what they like, what they need, and then make decisions based on what provides the best impact to them.

Do your research - but then launch it

As much as I will encourage audits and research, don’t end up in a cycle where everyone’s opinion matters and your product never sees the light of day. Learn to detach yourself, see success as a process and one you won’t reach (usually) the first time.

Get it out the door as soon as you are 70% confident and then revisit everything else during iteration and with data.

Have you used product audits or bookmarked one of these types for your next steps? Share your experiences with the community.