Product Slick
Although slicks are collaterals that are mandatorily built by marketing teams, they could also prove to be great for internal teams & here are a few use cases...
Whenever one talks of team alignment the realization of that being synonymous with “shared understanding” sinks in pretty quick.
Teams build a variety of collaterals to help their own team members as much as the other stakeholders. And with minimal experience of working with product teams, one very well understands the onus attached to these assets so as to facilitate that shared understanding. Building such documents could also be considered the first step towards reaching a state of clarity over the nuances of the product & the value it adds to the users, because if someone like say a marketing team member isn’t clear about those, then it could result in:
weak messaging
weaker focus &
not to mention a weak pitch overall
Am sure you may have come across a document that’s landed in your inbox over one of the first steps, pretty early over your interface with a product / feature / org. / brand. Clicking on one of those Ads (banners) over a webpage, or directly hitting the landing page may have intrigued you to fill out a small form asking you for your details & *BOOM* within a few minutes (could also be a matter of a few days in some cases) the e-mail reaches you with an attached PDF / what appears to be a link to one of those online documents, something on these lines (refer image below).
That document could carry enough details that are specific to:
the organization & its history
the product / service one showed interest in
few questions / blockers one may have over its:
working
value addition
integrating / fitting into the ecosystem of products being used now
Definition:
Product slick is a 2-page / 4-page document used to communicate the value to the markets / users & help the market-fronted teams hone the understanding & improve their perception of the product from a technical standpoint.
Originally built by the marketing teams, the situation has grown towards including a few other team members / stakeholders like design, UX research, engineering who actively contribute to the document as of today.
Produced as a multi-page (usually about 4-pages) they are known to contain a greater degree of information when compared to a flyer. They could also carry a lot more graphics although the number of colors used may be limited. When flyers are typically meant to be handed over as is, slicks are usually folded & owing to how they are a 2-sided document.
“A product SLICK shouldn’t overtly be difficult to produce & the [time taken] serves as a good measure for leaders to track the degree of shared understanding & facilitate / fill in the gaps, enabling smoother collaboration between those XfN teams”
Historically there have been many such collaterals product & marketing teams have built & employed targeted at advertising, some of which are:
When there are many variants of the SLICK given its use by really diverse group of people across various domains, there is no given thumb-rule followed over building these. But in case you are new to this, here’s a [generic product slick template *] that you & your teams could use:
* [Chop & change as relevant]
Although largely self-explanatory, here’s a description of the 7 sections of the Product Slick Template.
