The discipline of product management and the business goal of exponential growth have emerged in tandem.
Literally billions of dollars have poured into startups and tech companies on the promise and execution of growth, even to the point where actually making a profit has relatively little weight.
Interviewing for my last job in tech, I asked the founder, “what’s the business plan?” and he said (in effect), ‘in Silicon Valley, we don’t need a business model. Our (blue-chip) investors fund us to grow and then, once we have the growth, we’ll figure out how to make money.’
The belief in growth has been so religious that there was actually no need to have a plan to make money (it helps if you have white, male, Stanford grads on the founding team for this model to apply. No shade to that particular company who are now on a revenue track and are genuinely focused on connecting people). I have also been told that having revenue can be a problem for getting investment, and you should fundraise before you’re making money, presumably because it ties the prospects of the company to something real. Investors naturally are seduced by and/or promoters of the breathless aspirational optimism that just saying “we’re on track to have billions of free users” provokes.
There are wild stories of companies spending vast sums to ‘own a market’ so they can keep growing at a rate that admits no competition, even when there’s really no clear path to being profitable.
And look, all of that ‘works’ in a system in which the primary way things work is to attain some growth milestone and then get to ‘exit’ into public ownership. All of this ‘works’ in the sense that people who put money in as equity investors sometimes get it out at a multiple. Ideally most of the losses are written off, avoiding taxes on whatever revenues come in, or underwritten by infrastructure that’s publicly funded. It works for the investors and sometimes the founders, and everyone else? Perhaps for some well-paid employees who can live well until the layoffs start cascading.
We as PMs learn about moats and owning a market and strategies that involve winning. We listen to well-produced podcasts about blitzscaling and subscribe to the YouTubes of founders and marketers who tell us about the magic of network effects and how worth it selling a lot of your company is in service of having the capital to grow, grow, grow. You’d rather have 20% of $2B than 80% of $1M, right?
So, what if we’re burning down the world in the process?
Like, literally?
How much computing power is wasted, how much money, how much electricity, how many downstream social and economic effects does this approach have?
Product Management => Problem Management
We can use the skills of great product management to play a different game.
PMs are fundamentally problem solvers. Our skills are synthesising needs and creatively building solutions. When we are doing product well, we’re orienting around customer needs and business goals. What if we continue doing that with a much more holistic approach?
Post-growth is a term used to describe what must happen when we approach the limits of growth from a systems standpoint. There are many signs we’re at the limit:
1. We’re overloading the biosphere with pollution and using up the irreplaceable natural resources of the planet
2. We’re creating wealth creation machines that extract from the general public and only benefit a few powerful people
3. We’re living under systems of corporate surveillance and in some places, state surveillance
4. We’ve created global systems of human interaction that essentially commodify our identities and our relationships
5. Social mobility is decreasing, economic inequality is increasing
6. Pandemics
7. We’re experiencing a aack of affordable housing and increasing houselessness
8. We have heath care inequities and many people living in heath-related precarity
9. There’s a co-incidence of obesity and malnutrition
10. Ongoing wars and conflicts have a cascading effect on supply chains
11. Climate changes are affecting food production and housing
12. Probably many other things you’ll be able to come up with just by scanning a newspaper
So what might this world look like if we approach changing the outcomes from a product management perspective? (By this, I mean a good PM approach, not a “CEO of the product” approach!)
Human-centric Product Management
First, we’d be trying to understand what people actually care about. This might come from direct research, but as humans with a long history of self-documentation, it’s pretty clear that indicators of satisfaction are tied to some pretty consistent things:
- Having our basic physical needs met (shelter, clean air, water, and enough nutritious food)
- Healthy diet and exercise
- Feeling loved
- Having a sense of self-worth
- Being free of oppression, abuse, and domination by other people
- Living without a threat of violence
- Spending time in nature
- Being part of a collective or community where we matter to others
- Having some sense of security and serenity
What’s crazy to me is that the vast majority of products tech companies are building don’t serve those needs, and many of them directly subvert them. In many cases, companies may have a mission to support well-being or happiness but the actual way the company operates is antithetical to those goals.
Everything is connected, so if we truly understand what supports people, it won’t be a narrow solution for some small problem without an understanding of what problems the solution itself creates. In the old world, that’s not a problem, just more “opportunities” to make money. We can’t keep thinking this way.
Internal Shifts Ahead
One thing I’ve learned in being alive for a while and seeking answers is that change begins within and reverberates.
The way we are in ourselves and in the world informs what we build and how we affect the world around us. So even with the best of intentions to ‘solve problems,’ when we’re coming up with solutions that must meet a concurrent goal of “winning a market” and increasing our status and wealth so that we can have more power or feel more important, we’re just going to fail to truly see the reality of our impact.
I was 100% into playing the game that the rule set laid out. I wrote an actual guide to “startup pirate metrics.” But these days, there are too many signs that this approach leads to very bad global outcomes and I have been on my own journey that has found me feeling like personal responsibility is real freedom.
We can do things differently, but we will have to start small, and what’s more, we’ll need to abandon growth as our measure of impact. As soon as we put growth as our top line metric, we start to undermine the practices necessary for change. It’s not that our products and companies won’t grow, but they will grow like trees, not like kudzu.
What if we tried to solve problems with these constraints instead?
1. We start by understanding what our customers value and what truly matters to them
2. We reject strategies or solutions that involve inevitable extraction
3. We reject building products or services that exploit human psychology rather than fostering well-being
4. We do the work to uncover our own assumptions and biases
5. We prioritise ensuring that the people with whom we work are taken care of and we foster healthy interdependence among our team
6. We put sustainability before growth, meaning that we don’t need capital just to juice our numbers
7. We collaborate with other teams and companies who are working on the same problem rather than trying to beat them
8. We work together in ways that recognise different roles, skillsets, and experience without creating hierachies that entrench power over and don’t allow for the possibility that people with non-traditional backgrounds may be suited and able to do work we’ve traditionally gatekept with hiring requirements
Why is it that we’re so creative and love solving problems but we also hold the belief that things have to work in the way they do now? Aren’t we ‘disruptors’ and ‘innovative thinkers?’
To think this way, we do have to give up some of the status-seeking and lottery-winning mentalities that drive our industry today, but in return, we have a big blue ocean and lots of opportunities to prototype and test. And the best part is, we can do it together, collaboratively, using the very superpower that has made humans such a growth-oriented species in the first place.
Start small and be a listener first
The first step, I think, is to create more partnership between people served by technology and builders. If you’re a technologist, don’t ignore the cultural, emotional, and societal dimensions to what you are building. Work with researchers, UX practitioners, and above all, customers to consider what might be valuable, not how you can exploit behaviour, make things sticky, or otherwise try to growth hack your way into success. Growth may be a consequence, but if you’re moving at the speed of trust, you can build with care, to create something lasting, to have responsibility to your customers and the world at large, not to make some already-wealthy people money within a short time horizon.
How else might we use our skills to solve problems, without shifting into paternalism and manipulation? Mostly, it’s about being willing to recognise our training, to find internal integrity, and to practice with others who can see our blind spots. We need to put down the master’s tools and learn a new approach, one that sees product far more holistically. I’d love to hear how this idea lands for fellow product people and how we might support one another to make a change.