How Would a Product Manager Make a Better Cup of Coffee? ☕

Experiment, iterate, repeat … and remember your purpose️

Superfluously fancy coffee-corner image by Taj Moore

I am a coffee gearhead. I think of the coffee nook in my kitchen as an art installation; making a pour-over is performance art. I’ve watched plenty of James Hoffmann videos and spent more than too much money on equipment.

So, it made sense when my cousin asked me for advice on making better-tasting coffee. The enthusiast in me was tempted to captivate him with all the wonderful and finicky ways you can make coffee with all the best tools. But the product manager in me won out: I chose the path of lean experimentation, minimum viable products, and desired outcome.

Situation and Resolution: the Bookends of a Good User Story

The first step in defining any product enhancement is to ask “why” … and to ask it twice. I want to know the situation that leaves someone wanting something. Why are they here? What is their difficulty? Then, I want to know how life will be when they have it. What is the resolution? …the desired outcome?

Here’s what he told me:

Cousin: When I make coffee in the morning, I kind of eyeball it with the coffee grounds. I use the hot water from the filter tap and do the pour-over thing into a mug. It’s just always bitter, and I have to add milk and sugar. I’m pretty sure it could taste better and not just be about caffeine.

Me: It sounds like you want to enjoy coffee that tastes good on its own?

Cousin: That’s right, not so bitter. And it would probably be healthier if I didn’t add stuff.

Perfect. Now, we have identified the bookends of this user story:

• The First Why (of the situation): my morning coffee is bitter and requires extra stuff to make it taste good — stuff that may not be healthy for me.
• The Ultimate Why (of a resolution): I want to have enjoyable coffee that stands on its own every morning.

From this point forward, I will write this directly to the reader (that’s “you”)

Test Your Riskiest Assumptions

Every idea has a lot of assumptions. Every assumption carries risk because what if it turns out not to be true? Make a list of your assumptions, rate them on a scale from “there’s no penalty for being wrong” to “this is a linchpin.” Then find a way to test your assumptions, starting with the riskiest.

Before we waste any time optimizing this or that, I need to know one thing: “Do you even like coffee?”

Since the assignment was to brew a better cup of coffee, I noted the assumptions that went into it (at least the ones I could think of):

1. There is a cup of coffee that will taste good to you.
   (Linchpin: if this isn’t true, there’s nothing to be done.)
2. The current equipment in your kitchen will suffice.
   (Affordable risk: as long as we isolate the variables, we can test this assumption)
3. You don’t mind a little extra work making coffee each day.
   (Medium strength risk: feasible solutions might not be viable solutions)
4. You don’t want to buy new equipment.
   (No Penalty: if I’m wrong, you can always buy whatever you want later)

Design Your Tests

Each assumption needs an experiment to test it. A “success” that you don’t understand is a failed experiment. A hypothesis that “fails” in a quantifiable way is a successful experiment.

• What do you want to learn? The assumption is your hypothesis.
• How will you know? You need some form of measurement to validate or invalidate the hypothesis.
• How will you test it? What conditions must you create that will give you the measurements you need?

Remember the Desired Outcome

The entire point is to have a tasty cup of coffee in the morning. If at any point during the experiments you feel you have a good cup of coffee, we’re done! Write down what you know to recreate that cup of coffee.

Image by Taj Moore

The Experiments

For each assumption, we design a test for each and an order of operations to isolate the variables.

Crucial Test: Do You Even Like Coffee?

1. Find a respectable coffee shop and ask to try a variety of coffees at different roast levels, from dark to light. Pour-overs are your go-to, but you can also get an Americano made from their espresso.
2. If you like any of these coffees served black, you like coffee.
3. If you enjoy the dark roast, we know that bitterness at home isn’t because of the roast level.
4. If you only enjoy a light roast coffee here, stop buying any dark roast coffee (obvs).
5. Remember the taste of the darkest roast coffee you enjoy. This is now your reference.
6. Buy two bags: one bag of coffee ground for your home brewer (e.g. Chemex, Melitta, V60) and one bag of whole beans (to grind at home). This is also to ensure you are using fresh coffee.

Image by Taj Moore

Maybe the Old Coffee at Home Was the Culprit?

1. Using the grounds from the coffee shop, make some coffee as you normally do.
2. Is it just as good as the coffee-shop reference?
3. If yes, we’re done! Keep buying that coffee!
   (It doesn’t matter how it tastes to anyone else; we have met the desired outcome. Your wife only drinks green tea, anyway.)
4. If not, is it good enough? If yes, we’re done.
5. If not, move on to the calibration phase.

Check the Water Temperature

1. Measure the temperature of your filtered hot water tap.
2. If it’s below 195ºF, that’s too low for light roast coffee. Stop using it and switch to the electric kettle with temperature control.
3. Set the electric kettle to 195ºF for a dark roast and 205ºF for a light roast.
4. Let’s move on to the next calibration.

How Much Water Is In Your Mug?

1. Get a kitchen scale and set it to metric — the math is always easier in metric.
2. Tare the scale for your regular mug (zero it out with the mug sitting on the scale).
3. Fill your mug with water to the level you normally brew your coffee.
4. Weigh the water; how many grams? (Let’s say it’s 350 g of water.)

Coffee-to-Water Ratio

1. The ideal ratio of coffee to water is between 1:18 and 1:16, so we’ll use 1:17 to start with.
2. 350 g ÷ 17 = 20.6 g
3. You will be using ≈21 grams of coffee for now.

Calibrating the Brew: 1st Try

1. Heat water in the kettle to 200ºF
2. Weigh out 21 g of ground coffee, add it to the filter, and get your mug ready to brew (next to the sink).
3. Note the time; start pouring water slowly from the kettle over your grounds, saturating all of them, until the coffee slurry rises about halfway to the filter’s edge. Let it settle for 30–90 seconds.
4. Slowly pour water into the filter basket, careful not to overfill it. Pour a little faster if the grounds don’t float with the water.
5. Take a peek in the mug. Are you getting close to full? Stop adding water when you’re close to volume. (You can always take the filter basket off and let it drain in the sink if there’s too much water.)
6. Note the time. How long did that take to brew this mug? Was this in the 3–5 minute range? Faster? Slower?
7. Let your brew rest on the counter until it reaches the 140–150ºF range (the same thermometer you used to measure the hot tap).
8. Taste it. How is that? Does it taste as good as the reference brew? If yes, we’re done!
9. If not, is it good enough? If yes, we’re done.
10. If you didn’t like this cup, remember from the coffee shop reference that this coffee can taste good. Let’s move on to the next experiment.

Calibrating the Brew: Too Bitter?

If you didn’t like the 1st brew, it was too bitter, right? Most likely, the temperature was too high, or the coffee-to-water ratio was off. I like to narrow things down by halves to save time, so we’ll bump both of these factors at the same time for the next brew.

1. Set the kettle to 185ºF (lower than before).
2. Was the last batch “strong and bitter” or “thin and bitter”? If too strong, measure 18 g of coffee grounds into the filter basket (about 1:19). If too thin, measure 23 g of coffee (about 1:15).
3. Brew another batch as you did before. Let it get to 140–150ºF before you taste it.
4. Still too bitter? Adjust the coffee ratio in the opposite direction as above.
5. Still too bitter again? Did it take more than 5 minutes to brew? If so, the grind may be too fine. (You will need a courser grind to get the brew time closer to 3–4 minutes; see below.)

Calibrating the Brew: Too “Bright”

If the second cup was too bright (some might say “sour,” “tart,” or “acidy”), you now know that the right conditions are in-between the 1st and 2nd try.

1. Iterate, moving the temperature back up in increments.
2. Try bumping up the amount of coffee.
3. Eventually, you should find the sweet spot.

Calibrating the Brew: Grind Size

You have a coffee grinder. But do you? That thing that looks just like an electric spice grinder is a miniature blender, a “coffee chopper” if you will. You need a burr grinder — a $20–$40 hand grinder bought online should be good enough for this experiment.

1. Set the grinder to “medium fine” and see how it compares.
2. Once you have dialed in the grind to match what came from the coffee shop, you can dial the grind finer (to slow the flow and reduce brightness) or courser (to quicken the flow and potentially reduce bitterness)
3. Experiment!

How Can I Make This Easy?

After you’ve been diligently brewing coffee for some weeks now, maybe the right conditions for that perfect cup of coffee aren’t worth the effort. How might we make this easier?

Eyeball It

Once you have established the correct weight of coffee for your everyday mug, see if you can eyeball it in a calibrated way.

1. Visually note how much coffee is in the filter after weighing it out.
2. Try to recreate that volume by noting how many scoops or spoonfuls are needed (beans into the grinder or grounds into the filter).
3. Weigh your guesses. Are they consistent and close to spec? Does it result in a brew that tastes the same? You nailed it!

Try the Filtered Hot Tap Again

Try brewing everything with the correct ratio but go back to the hot water tap (it was only 175ºF, but maybe that doesn’t matter after all). If you still like the results, that’s one less thing to worry about. (The filtered tap will dispense water at a slower flow rate than the tea kettle, which makes brewing easier.)

Try Brewing It the Old Way

Remember how you had to put cream and sugar in your coffee in the old days? That was before you learned to drink coffee black. Your tastes have changed by now. Maybe if you brew coffee the way you used to, it’ll be better. You’re likely to be better calibrated than before. And your palate should be more tolerant of what used to be too bitter. You never know until you give it a try! And then you can think of the humble stonecutter.

Summary

Your coffee-making situation may be different, but the same principles apply:

• Identify your situation and desired outcome: what drives you to improve your experience, and what does “good” look, feel, and taste like?
• Test your riskiest assumptions: craft experiments that measure something that will confirm or invalidate the hypothesis behind your assumption.
• How can you make this easy? Remember, it’s really about good coffee that’s easy to make daily. Once you get a good cup of coffee, make sure the process of making it isn’t a pain.

Hopefully, you’ve learned a little something about product management and coffee. ☕