Product thinking for your life and career


Reach your incremental potential

The work context we’re operating in is rapidly changing. Working in the tech sector, it might be hard to imagine the exact kind of work you’ll be doing in a decade, and what setting you might be in. Life is unpredictable. So, why not approach career and life planning in an iterative and flexible way? A series of experiments, a ‘product’ that is never finished. No more 10 year plans or forever projects.

Start-ups and digital product studios are blending the efficiency of Lean and Agile software development with human-centred design. They are able to launch innovative products quickly and without waste, and create valuable experiences for users. What happens when we use the same thinking, principles and tools to develop ourselves?

“When you begin with the finish line in mind, you miss all the fun stuff along the way. The better approach is to tweak and grow, tweak and grow. I call it the incremental potential.” — Sophia Amoruso, #GIRLBOSS
Life’s just an iterative process, baby

A holistic approach

When designing the life you want, simply applying a new action planning or project delivery approach isn’t going to stick if you haven’t got to some depth of understanding your needs. Using JIRA or Trello to project manage career goals or to organise a wedding is nothing new. It’s the holistic approach of whole product thinking that could offer life transformation in the way it can transform businesses.

As a product manager you need to be able to have empathy for your customers, grasp biz strategy and care about producing high quality software and experiences. As ‘product thinkers’ we can develop our careers, health and personal lives using this same balance, keeping principles — not process — at heart.

Using product thinking for your life and work:

On a more practical level we can apply our product manager toolkit to our lives and careers using activities and rituals from Scrum or user-centred design, adding in biz modelling, marketing, and branding along the way:

  • First seek to understand your needs, behaviours, interactions, values
  • Map your stakeholders, understand your customer needs, audience, context. Be a really good listener.
  • It’s all an experiment: Test your assumptions through build, test, measure. Remain flexible and curious.
  • Create your vision (your ‘true north’), underpinned by your personal values
  • Value proposition and biz modelling: What is your unique value and where do you fit in? When we work to our strengths we do our best work. Sniff out opportunities to use them.
  • Personal development sprints: what is realistic to commit to change or achieve in a fixed short time?
  • Ritualise reflection: retrospectives, check-ins, personal stand-ups, tracking your wins
  • Roadmap and prioritise: Take care of your goals backlog. Considering your most important needs, decide which goals (epics!) into things you can actually do (stories and success criteria!). How do your current efforts work towards your long term vision?
Whole product thinking: for life

The power of the upfront discovery phase


Countless start-up failures will tell you they wish they realised the value of getting to understand their users before they began building their product.

Looking at the ‘product’ as your career, you’ll need to understand your customer’s needs to create value for them (whether these are actual customers, clients of your freelance biz, or your colleagues at work). Likewise, the life you create has to fit your personal needs or it won’t be sustainable.

In a discovery phase for a product we don’t just look for obvious “pain points” or “problem areas”, we seek deep understanding and insight. We listen and observe habits and behaviour, and uncover themes, patterns and needs. And we never stop listening to our users.

Designing a meaningful life requires some serious upfront discovery. Start with a whole lot of reflection and research, and ask for feedback. Use your vision as your guiding light, and dive in with short experiments. Keep trying things out, keep asking for feedback and keep reflecting.

Product success is aided greatly by being at the “right place at the right time”, and situation sensing is key. Stay open to opportunities and be ready to seize them! Good luck.

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I’m an ex-Product Manager and now People Development Coach at @ustwo, a digital product studio in London. I care about building learning cultures, and helping creative people navigate the future of work.

Have you ever tried using product thinking or PM tools in your work or personal life? I’m going to share some more ways of using them in future posts— it would be great to swap notes. Say hello on twitter: @heathery_tp