Peace Corps & Product Management
How community development influenced my approach to product design
“We spend a lot time designing the bridge, but not enough time thinking about the people who are crossing it.” — Dr. Prabhjot Singh, Director of Systems Design at the Earth Institute
Recently, I‘ve been spending a lot of time thinking about my Peace Corps service. I was a Peace Corps Volunteer from 2011–2013 in Burrel, Albania, and I don’t talk about it a lot — mostly for fear of how it makes me sound. But in preparation for a podcast piece with my dear friend, and fellow RPCV Brenna Grey Mickey, I reached back into my memory box and reflected on that time. Since the theme of our podcast piece centered on how our Peace Corps service impacted our current work in design and technology, I thought about how my experience in Albania has directly, and indirectly, affected my approach to clients and solving their digital problems. And then, I smiled.
Prior to returning to the US from Peace Corps you try and prepare yourself for how you’re going to express your time and work during your service. It’s not easy. There are preconceived notions and generalizations that come with returning home and to the workforce because Peace Corps in and of itself carries a certain brand and identity. It’s not always easy to articulate right away how leading a women’s book club, helping build a senior center, and conducting a week long basketball camp for girls in your community directly relates to specific enterprise-level job descriptions — especially those dealing in design and technology. But there are things in these works that carry over to how you solve problems, manage people, and passionately go after visions. This is something I haven’t allowed myself to observe since returning because I felt I had ‘left that world behind’ but the reality is, that world is still my world today — just in a different context.
Product design requires a “design thinking” mentality. Tim Brown defines design thinking as “the discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity. Design thinking converts need into demand.” My service in Peace Corps directly tied me to this definition without me ever realizing its affect. Design thinking was the majority of my thinking and rightfully so since our motto from the get go was to view our communities from the inside, out.
The idea of human-centered design wasn’t how I intentionally described my days, but it was definitely how I approached the needs, initiatives, and projects in my community. By becoming a part of the local community — from speaking the local language to the way I viewed the world around me — I could empathize more readily with the realities in which people lived through their points of view. This put people, the users, at the heart of the work I was trying to help do. It helped me better understand the problem-solution-fit equation by matching real needs to a vision and solution definition. It also gave me perspective as to the potential strategies, feasible tools, and potential value that could be added to the community by addressing these specific needs. And it provided a framework for crowdsourced ideas, testing hypotheses, and iterating and refining on approaches. These are things we do daily in the design and web development world, processes we use to better create solutions for our users, and a guiding principle that led me through my entire Peace Corps service.
Just like in good product design, good community development follows a guiding vision to a better solution. That vision must come from the ‘what’ and ‘who’ of a problem. From there you must gather the resources necessary to work toward an end goal which requires a unique approach to mobilizing people. The same can be said for building digital products. You have to mobilize both your internal team and external stakeholders to a shared vision, something we both can believe in wholeheartedly, and then push with great enthusiasm towards a potential solution. This isn’t an easy task and it requires flexibility, understanding, and a strong will. It also demands true leadership, one in which you can humble yourself to the knowledge and experts around you while pushing those same individuals to try and provide the best of themselves to complete a larger whole. Peace Corps definitely taught me that; web development validated it.
Today, I owe a lot to the community and the people I met during my time in the Peace Corps. I owe a lot to the country of Albania for giving me a different perspective of the world, cultures, and myself. And I am fortunate that those experiences have helped shape my approach to the work I do now in the digital world and for the clients, I help serve.
