How to break down any product
A teardown takes a real product apart to find the decisions behind it: who it serves, what loop keeps people coming back, how it makes money and why rivals struggle to copy it. This lesson gives you a method you can reuse on any product, a one-page template, and the habit that separates a useful teardown from a screenshot tour: every claim is labelled as a sourced fact, something you saw, or your own inference.
By the end you can
- Start a teardown from a decision you need to make, and pick the products that will answer it
- Walk a product as every side of it uses it: customer, worker, merchant and admin
- Map a product's core loop and find the step where the loop breaks
- Follow the money and guess the metrics, growth loops and moat, with each claim labelled as fact, observation or inference
- Turn a teardown into copy, adapt and avoid decisions for your own product
The everyday picture
A cook eats at a rival restaurant that is always full. She does not stop at "the curry was good". She works out what is on the plate and what is missing, guesses how it was made, and checks the price against what the ingredients cost. She watches the kitchen through the window, notices how fast tables turn on a Tuesday, and sees that the waiters take orders on tablets that print straight to the kitchen.
Then she goes home and decides. She copies the tablets, because her kitchen has the same problem with lost order slips. She adapts the curry, because her customers like it less spicy. She avoids the free refills, because the rival owns its own bakery and she would pay full price for bread. That is a teardown: take the dish apart, understand why each choice works there, and decide what fits here.
Start from a decision
A teardown is a study of someone else's product, done so that you decide something better about your own. Without a decision, teardowns drift into screenshot tours: forty images of onboarding screens and a verdict that the colours are nice. Nobody acts on those.
So write the question first, in one sentence, before you open the app. Good teardown questions sound like these:
- Copy: "Should the Rider app assign riders the way food-delivery apps do?"
- Compete: "Why do some customers order from a quick-commerce app instead of ours, and what would win them back?"
- Partner: "Should we list our stores on a grocery marketplace, or keep customers in our own app?"
- Learn a pattern: "How do mobile wallets make it safe to send money to a phone number?"
The question decides which products to study and how deep to go. Pick from three groups. The leader in the job you care about shows what good looks like at scale. The substitute your users actually use is often more useful: for an internal tool it may be the spreadsheet, the chat group or a phone call, and Watching the work showed how to study those. A product from another industry with the same mechanism brings fresh ideas: a ride-hailing app teaches a grocery delivery team about dispatch, and a bank's approval screens teach a warehouse team about sign-offs.
The question also sets the depth. A copy question needs the mechanism in detail. A partner question needs the business model and who owns the customer. Spend your hours where the decision lives, and write one line on the other lenses.
Quick check
Imran wants to cut how long riders wait at stores for orders to be picked. Which teardown plan fits best?
The decision is about rider waiting time, so the best source is a product that faces the same mechanism, studied from the sides where waiting happens. Screenshot comparisons and feature lists feel thorough but answer no question. A well-designed onboarding flow has nothing to do with riders waiting at a store.
Seven lenses
Look at the product through seven lenses, in this order. Each answers a different question, and together they explain why the product is built the way it is.
- Users and jobs. Who uses it, on every side, and what job each person hires it for (the jobs-to-be-done idea from pm-02). A food-delivery app has at least four sides: the customer, the rider, the restaurant and the platform's operations team. Products are usually shaped by the side with the hardest job, and that is rarely the customer.
- Core loop. The core loop is the repeating cycle that creates value and brings people back. Write it as four to six steps that end where they began. Then find where the loop breaks: the step where a failure stops people coming back. That step is where the company spends most of its engineering, and where you will find the cleverest design.
- Business model. Who pays, for what, how much, and what one unit costs to deliver. How products create value covered the common models; Unit economics goes deeper. In a teardown you rarely know the real costs, so estimate them from public numbers and label the estimates.
- Metrics. Guess the north star and two or three input metrics the team probably watches (pm-21 explains metric trees). Read the company's own reports: what a company chooses to report to investors tells you what it manages.
- Growth. How new users arrive: referrals, content, sales teams, partners, or a loop where each user brings the next (Growth loops).
- Moat. What a well-funded rival could not copy within two years: network effects, scale, switching costs, a licence, data, or a process that took years to build (pm-10 introduced Helmer's 7 Powers; pm-30 covers marketplace moats).
- What you'd change. Two or three changes you would make if you ran it, each with the reason and the risk. This forces you to understand the trade-offs the team made, because most obvious improvements were rejected for a reason.
Quick check
In the loop above, why does the teardown mark "item missing" as the place to look hardest?
The break point of a core loop is where failure costs repeat use, so it attracts the most design and engineering effort. That is where a teardown learns the most. Review volume, screen counts and staff costs don't tell you where the loop breaks.
Walk it as every side
Do the job yourself, for real, before you read anything about the product. Sign up, complete the main task, and then try the edges: cancel, ask for a refund, order something that is out of stock, lose signal halfway through, pay in cash. Write down each step, how long it took, and what the product did when something went wrong. Note the date and the app version, because products change every few weeks.
Then find the other sides. Most marketplaces publish their driver, rider, shopper or merchant apps, and many let anyone install them. Even when you can't sign up, the other side's help pages are public, and they are the richest source you have. Help centres and pricing pages describe the rules each side lives under: how payouts work, what gets an account suspended, which features need an admin. Square's pricing page, for example, says offline card payments are declined if the device does not reconnect within 24 hours. One sentence like that tells you about a hard trade-off between selling during an outage and losing money to cards that later fail.
Add three cheap sources. Job postings show what the company is building next and which skills it lacks. Engineering blogs and conference talks explain the hard parts in the company's own words; this site's system design teardowns of Uber, WhatsApp and Amazon are built from them. App store reviews sorted by "most recent" show what breaks for real users this month, though they over-represent angry people.
For an internal tool or an operations product, walking it means shadowing the work. You can't install a rival chain's store app, but you can watch your own staff use the spreadsheet that competes with yours, or visit a supplier who uses three retailers' portals and ask what each one does better.
Facts, observations and inference
Most of what makes a product work is not public. You won't see the dispatch algorithm, the fraud rules or the real cost per order. A teardown is still useful if you are clear about what you know and what you are guessing. Label every claim as one of three kinds:
- Fact, with a source and a year. "Instacart has about 600,000 shoppers, most of whom shop fewer than 10 hours a week (company figures as reported on Wikipedia, read in 2026)."
- Observed, with a date and the conditions. "On 3 October, on a mid-range Android phone on 4G, the app offered a replacement for a missing item before checkout."
- Inference, with your reasoning and a confidence. "Shoppers picking from the retailer's own shelves means it needs no warehouses, so it can add a retailer in weeks (inference, medium confidence)."
Sources are not equal. From strongest to weakest: audited filings and annual reports; the company's own documentation, pricing and help pages; engineering posts and talks by the people who built it; regulators' and industry bodies' data; reputable press with named sources; your own observation; reviews and forums; and anonymous claims, which you should leave out. When an inference matters to your decision, try to upgrade it: find a filing, a help page or a person who knows.
Put a year on every fact, because products move. Square charged 2.75% per swipe in 2011; its US price for an in-person card payment is now 2.6% plus 15 cents on the free plan. A teardown that mixes the two years without saying so will mislead whoever reads it.
Quick check
A teardown draft says "The app is popular because its prices are the lowest in the city." How should it be labelled and improved?
"Because" claims about causes are inferences. They belong in a teardown, labelled, and the important ones should be upgraded with evidence: here a dated basket comparison, or interviews asking customers why they switched. Using the app makes you an observer of the app, not of why other people choose it.
From teardown to decision: copy, adapt, avoid
The last step is the only one your team will act on. For each mechanism you found, ask what made it work there. Usually it is a constraint: density (many orders close together), a rule (a licence only a few companies hold), money (years of losses funded by investors), scale (millions of users), or a habit (customers who already pay a certain way). Then ask whether that constraint holds for you.
- Copy when the reason holds for you too. Food-delivery apps time a rider's arrival to when the food is ready because idle riders cost money. Idle riders cost Mangrove money too.
- Adapt when the reason partly holds. A ride-hailing app raises prices when demand jumps. A grocery chain whose customers compare prices every week may get the same balancing effect with a rider rain bonus and fewer "Now" slots, without raising prices.
- Avoid when the reason is missing. A design that only works with millions of users, years of investor funding or a licence you don't hold will fail when you copy it, however elegant it looks.
End the teardown with one test. The cheapest way to check whether a copied mechanism works for you is usually a small pilot in one store or one city, using the methods in Testing ideas cheaply.
Do it
Write a one-page teardown in about three hours, ending in a decision for your own product.
Write the decision question and pick the products
One sentence. Then choose one to three products: the leader, the substitute your users use, or a product from another industry with the same mechanism.
Do the job yourself, as every side
Complete the main task and three edge cases. Install or read up on the other sides' apps. Record steps, minutes and what happened when things went wrong, with the date and app version.
Map users, jobs and the core loop
List every side and its job. Write the loop in four to six steps and mark where it breaks.
Follow the money
Who pays, for what, and roughly how much. Estimate one unit's economics from public numbers and label each estimate.
Guess the metrics, growth and moat
Name the likely north star and two inputs, the main growth loop, and what a rival could not copy within two years.
Keep an evidence log
Every claim gets a label (fact, observed or inference), a source or a date, and a confidence for inferences. Upgrade the inferences your decision depends on.
Decide and propose one test
Copy, adapt and avoid, each with the reason that holds or doesn't. End with the cheapest test of the riskiest copy.
Markdown# Teardown: Instacart (as a model for a local grocery marketplace) Owner: Imran · Date: 14 Oct · Time spent: 3.5 hours ## Decision question Should Mangrove list its stores on the marketplace, and how, without losing customers who order in our own app? ## Users and jobs - Customer: groceries delivered in a chosen slot, from a store they know - Shopper: flexible paid hours (most work under 10 h a week) [fact, read 2026] - Retailer: online sales without building delivery [inference] - Brands: reach shoppers at the moment of choice (ads) [fact: ad tools since 2022] ## Core loop (breaks at: item missing at picking) order -> shopper picks in store -> delivered in slot -> orders again -> more orders per store -> more work per shopper -> faster slots ## Money - Customer: item prices, delivery fee, service fee (5% when added in 2018) [fact] - Retailer: pays the marketplace for orders [inference: terms not public] - Brands: advertising [fact that it exists; size not checked] - 2024: revenue about $3.38B, net income about $457M [fact] ## Metrics (guess) North star: orders delivered as promised per week [inference] Inputs: active customers, orders per customer, share of items found ## Growth and moat Growth: retailers bring their own customers into the app [inference] Moat: owns the customer relationship and order data across many retailers (an aggregator); shopper supply in every city [inference, medium] ## Evidence log (sample) | Claim | Label | Source / date | |--------------------------------|----------|-----------------------| | About 600,000 shoppers | Fact | Company figures, 2026 | | Substitute offered pre-checkout| Observed | Android, 4G, 3 Oct | | Owns the customer relationship | Inference| Receipt and brand seen first | ## Copy / adapt / avoid for Mangrove - Copy: substitution choice before checkout (9% of our orders have a cut item) - Adapt: list "Later" slots only, 40 stores in one city; keep "Now" in our app - Avoid: sharing customer contacts; their shoppers picking at our peak hours ## Test 8-week pilot. Measure new customers reached, and how many existing Mangrove customers move their orders to the marketplace. Stop if more than 1 in 5 pilot-city orders on the marketplace come from our existing app customers.
Bring it to your team
Ask these when someone shares a teardown or proposes copying a competitor.
- What decision is this teardown meant to inform, and does it end with one?
- Which sides of the product did we actually use or study, and which did we only imagine?
- Where does their core loop break, and what did they build at that step?
- Which of these claims are facts with sources, which did we see ourselves, and which are our guesses?
- What constraint makes this work for them, and does it hold for us?
- What is the cheapest test before we copy it?
Red flags
- Forty screenshots and no decision.
- Claims about a company's internals with no source and no "inference" label.
- Facts with no year, mixing an old price or feature with today's.
- Only the customer side studied for a product whose hard problems are on the worker or merchant side.
- "They do it, so we should" with no constraint check.
Practice
Label the claims
Here are eight lines from a teardown draft about a grocery marketplace. Label each as fact, observed or inference. For each inference, name a source that could upgrade it. Rewrite any line that is none of the three into one of them.
- Instacart was founded in 2012.
- Most of its shoppers work fewer than 10 hours a week.
- It makes most of its profit from advertising.
- When I ordered on 3 October, it offered a replacement for a missing item before checkout.
- Retailers list on it because they can't build their own app.
- It added a 5% service fee in 2018.
- Its north star is probably orders per active customer per month.
- The app is slow.
- Lines 1, 2 and 6 are facts, and you name the kind of source (filings or company figures) and keep the year
- Line 4 is an observation with a date
- Lines 3, 5 and 7 are inferences, each with an upgrade source
- You notice evidence against line 5 (the company bought a white-label store-app maker)
- You rewrite line 8 as a measured observation
Show a model answer
1 Fact (company filings or a reliable reference, 2012). 2 Fact (company figures; record when you read them, because shopper numbers change). 3 Inference: the annual report's revenue breakdown would upgrade or kill it; without it, "advertising is a growing revenue line" is as far as you can go. 4 Observed, already dated; add the device and network. 5 Inference, and a weak one: interview two or three retailers, and note that buying a white-label store-app maker in 2018 suggests some retailers do want their own app. 6 Fact (2018). 7 Inference: check what the company reports to investors each quarter, since companies usually report what they manage. 8 None of the three; rewrite as "Observed, 4 October: search results took 3 to 4 seconds on a mid-range Android phone on 4G, five tries".
Tear down your own product as a rival would
A rival wholesaler wants to win Mangrove's partner shops. Write the seven lenses of a one-page teardown of the Partner app from the rival's point of view, using only these facts. About 1,800 independent corner shops order wholesale stock through Mangrove. About 4,000 partner orders a week; about 62% are placed in the Partner app and about 1,500 a week by phone to about 40 sales reps. About 1 phone order in 12 is corrected after delivery. About 12% of app order lines are short-shipped because the app shows stock the DC can't ship. The app is built by an outside agency. Four DCs and about 120 drivers make about 15,000 deliveries a month. End with the one weakness the rival would attack first.
- You name at least three sides (shop owner, sales rep, DC staff or driver) and the job of each
- Your core loop ends where it begins and names where it breaks (short-shipped lines)
- You separate facts given here from your inferences, and label them
- Your moat lens is honest: what is hard to copy, and what isn't
- The weakness you pick is backed by a number from the facts
Show a model answer
Users and jobs: shop owners restock without losing a day at the market; sales reps keep their accounts and commissions; DC pickers and drivers ship what was ordered. Core loop: owner orders, DC picks, driver delivers, the shop sells, the owner reorders; it breaks when lines are short-shipped (about 12% of app lines) and the owner phones a rep next time. Business model: wholesale margin on goods; the app is a cost-saving channel (fact: about 1,500 phone orders a week take rep time). Metrics (inference): share of orders in the app (62%), lines delivered as ordered. Growth: reps move shops onto the app; no referral loop (inference). Moat: four DCs, 120 drivers and existing relationships with 1,800 shops are hard to copy; the app itself is not, because an agency built it and nothing in it is unique (inference). What the rival would attack: reliability. Promise "what you order is what arrives", because 12% short-shipping and the 1 in 12 corrected phone orders are the pain shops already feel.
Check yourself
Your team wants to add a "delivered in 15 minutes" promise because a quick-commerce rival shows one. Which teardown finding should most affect the decision?
The promise works for the rival because of a system: warehouses, accurate stock and density. If you lack those constraints, copying the badge breaks the promise. The badge's design, the reviews and the founders' words describe the result, not what makes it possible.
You can't find any public information about how a delivery app assigns riders. What should the teardown do?
When internals are private, observed behaviour plus labelled inference is the honest and useful answer. Leaving it out loses the lens your decision may depend on. Presenting a guess as fact, or using an unsourced forum post, misleads the people who act on the teardown.
A teardown of a ride-hailing app recommends that Mangrove copy its in-app tipping for riders. Which question tests whether the idea transfers?
Copy, adapt or avoid depends on whether the constraint behind the feature holds for you. Tap counts and screen quality matter only after you know the feature fits. What the rival spent says little about whether it would work for Mangrove.
Flashcards
Key takeaways
- Start with a decision question; it picks the products and the depth.
- Walk the product yourself as every side, and read the other sides' help and pricing pages.
- Map the core loop and look hardest where it breaks.
- Label every claim as fact, observed or inference, and put a year on every fact.
- End with copy, adapt and avoid, each tied to a constraint, and one cheap test.
Sources and further reading
- Instacart, Wikipedia (founding, retailers, shoppers, service fee, acquisitions and 2024 results as reported there), read October 2026
- Aggregation Theory, Ben Thompson, Stratechery, 2015
- Square pricing, Square, read October 2026 (offline payments rule and current card rates), and Block, Inc., Wikipedia (the 2011 rate)
- Status as a Service, Eugene Wei, 2019
- Hamilton Helmer, 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy, Deep Strategy, 2016