Product Management Principles

Give yourself the gift of ideology. Ideology, or being ideological, is often used as an epithet, contrasted with pragmatism. This is incorrect. Everyone has ideology, and knowing and defending your own will help you avoid being guided by the whims of the moment. It is the rubric against which to grade ideas and actions, and without it you make decisions based on what's convenient, or what makes you feel good in the moment, or whatever the loudest, maddest person you talked to most recently said. This is no foundation for strategy.

To define your own ideology, look to philosophers rather than business books. "Be customer obsessed," is not an ideology, it's a cliché. In the interest of transparency and by way of example, the foundations of my own ideology come from John Rawls. Rawls proposed a thought experiment for designing a just society: it should be planned, "as if behind a veil of ignorance." This means that when you design the rules and structures of a society, you don't get to know which person you'd have to be in that society. You might be born into destitution and the most challenging of circumstances. If that's the case, you should focus your efforts on raising the floor rather than the ceiling. Translating this to education, which learners have the greatest challenges? How can you help them? It means consciously deprioritizing advantaged learners. More than likely, all learners will be helped by the systems, structures, and features you develop for the learners with the greatest need.

In Ed Tech (and likely other industries as well), product management presents as a dialectic. The product manager is the person with the most holistic view, while other functions have narrower goals that are often in conflict.

We're oversimplifying here, of course, but you will notice this dynamic play out across the organization. Academic presents the thesis of quality in contrast to production's antithesis of speed, engineering wants scale while SMEs want bespoke, etc.

While your ideology should inform your strategy, there are other inputs you must consider as you prioritize. Your job and your workplace are not the only things in the world. What are the broader macroeconomic trends that your competitors are also noticing? Sometimes an idea's time has come, and its emergence was not contingent on its credited inventor. The mathematical framework for relativity already existed by the time Einstein published E=MC². If he hadn't existed, Poincaré or Lorentz would have published it shortly after. Amazon launched its own streaming service, Unboxed, before Netflix began streaming. The consequential idea of video streaming was not contingent on any one company. Still, Netflix's early dominance was contingent on its ability to license content from studios—its innovation was legal, not technological. What are the consequential macroeconomic trends that affect your product, and what are the contingent features of your product or organization that your competitors cannot replicate? That is where opportunity exists, not in aping your competitors' successes in hopes of catching lightning they have already bottled.

Strategy also means solving big problems, not small problems. You are not in the commodities business—if someone can easily do something for themselves, let them. You have an engineering team, a learning design team, a customer experience team, a research team, and more. What do the resources and scale you have access to enable you to do that will be challenging or impossible for your customers to do on their own? What problems are your neediest learners fundamentally unable to solve without your help?

Product management runs on relationships and favors. There is no RACI chart that covers 100% of the business's needs; there will always be gaps that aren't anybody's job but are nonetheless vital for success. As a product manager, you need people to like you enough to do things that aren't in your job description because they believe in you or because they like you. The two quickest ways to build rapport are sharing a meal and sharing an enemy. The former may be impossible in a remote-first workplace, so it is worth being transparent with your frustration. You are not the only one bothered by some ill-considered feature or policy, and that transparency gives other people permission to share their own frustrations. Be careful not to over-index here: the goal is to build camaraderie, not to be the person always complaining. Can you build that frustration into action and a solution to a problem? If you can alleviate someone's long-held frustration, you now have a favor you can call in later.

You will need to draw on these strong relationships to get things done. One of the great things about the job is that nothing is ever, "Not your business." You have a license and a mandate to be nosy, and even pushy and annoying when called for. Strong relationships are how you do this without making enemies.

The trust that exists in strong relationships is vital to becoming a good arguer. Recall that product management is a dialectic, so you aren't necessarily arguing to win but rather arguing to provoke and strengthen your product strategy. Be clear with the people you argue with: "I'm highly persuadable on this, please tell me what I'm missing or how I'm wrong," or, "This is one where I know I have the right idea, but that doesn't mean that now is the right time for that idea." As the person in the organization best positioned to see the whole forest, you owe it to your tree-focused colleagues to both hear them out and bring them along.