First principles Product Management 👌

“PMs are missionaries, not mercenaries.”

This famous quote attributed to Marc Andreessen, founder of the famous silicon valley VC fund is well known in PM circles.

There are many examples which showcase this quote in practice. PMs want to own and understand the whole user journey, be most connected to the users pain point, and how a solution can generate value. I like to call this ‘end to end ownership’, as the user journey might stretch into various places, but might have a significant effect on perceived (and realized!) end user value. Even if the part we control is a subset of this journey, the overall outcome will very likely color the users judgement on our contribution. PMing is hard: not just do we all the responsibility with now authority, we will also get all the blame even for things outside of the immediate control of our product.

End-to-end ownership and the investment in end user value is by far more product-relevant than being tied to any which solution. Serving the users as best as possible is the goal. The solution follows this goal, and articulates what is technically & operationally feasible. The beauty here is that software is highly flexible, much more so than other engineering spaces (such as hardware, or construction), and this flexibility can be exploited to (within reason) make delightful and magical experiences a reality.

There is a more subtle area in which the quote also applies: accountability. The kind of accountability which pressure tests all assumptions down to ‘solid ground’. The constellations governing accountability are delicate and intricate. Most times, we are inclined to overestimate the power of authority, and follow them more or less blindly. Experiments have shown that is we recognize an individual as having authority, we will more likely surrender our own principled evaluation of the situation and follow their lead.

What does this mean in context of PMing? Well, for starters, we might overestimate the knowledge someone higher up has about the problem at hand. Secondly, we might assume the goals have been verified for accuracy and ‘market fit’, and that all we need to do is simply ‘follow the order’. The classic mercenary behavior.

In my experience, one of the main areas of growth for a PM is what I like to call ‘first principles product management’. In this world, we do a few things differently:

• A team job: Everyone of the x-functional team is required to identify & highlight assumptions
  
• Find solid ground: Assumptions are decomposed, until they are no longer themselves relying on assumptions
  
• Verify them all: The x-functional team is verifying assumptions until all are verified directly and conclusively

Once there are no more assumptions to verify, we found ‘solid ground’, and have gathered information which can be called ‘first principles’.

So let’s talk shop here for real. For example, I was working on Google Analytics supporting team team in the early days of wondering about a GA4 migration. At the time, there were speculations which percentage of clients are already tagged with the correct page tag.

We defined ‘tag ready’ like this: Clients track all data of a given GA property with a tag that would also support GA4. When talking to people across the org, the readiness was characterized anywhere from ‘not at all’ to ‘near 100%’. Ok, so that wasn’t great since volatility in a dimensions so critical to success is clearly a massive red flag.

We spent 4 months verifying this. We did other stuff alongside, of course. But we always had a work stream which focused on verifying this assumption: which %age of our customers are actually ‘tag ready’. And boy were we in for a surprise.

It is helpful to note that we had very limited control over ‘tag readiness’ on my team. This was way more a risk control mechanism. My leadership at the time was convinced we were ‘tag ready’ on the higher end of the spectrum I mentioned. Well, this could have been a massive disaster for us. But thankfully we had the data ready when it came to review time. Leadership had to intervene. The tag readiness, a fundamental prerequisite for our work, needed to be looked at and staffed if we wanted to have success.

Another time I wasn’t that lucky, like many of us we learn by doing, and doing means failing.

“Experience leads to good decisions, and experience comes from bad decisions.”

Not sure who said that, but I like to remember that.

Take Action 🎬

📅 Book a private coaching session with me to grow your PM career. I will share my 15+ years of experience as a Product Manager, all my learning and pitfalls, with actionable tips and concrete lessons to model after.

📚 To learn about First Principles, I recommend reading The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. This book is one of a kind when it comes to breaking things down into their root causes. I read it almost daily. You can open this book at any place, and I promise you’ll find value reading what you find there. It is one of the rare summaries which explain the foundational powers which hold everything together.

📚 Solid Ground: A Foundation for Winning in Work and in Life by T.W. Lewis gives a very down-to-earth example of how building a company from the ground up relies on setting the right foundations. Sharing many valuable insights from building a construction company, and leading it through the housing crisis has shaped the authors understanding of leadership, culture, and a principled approach to business.