The Biology of Product Management
Biomimicry. Every once in a while I hear a word, from a discipline totally foreign to me, that perfectly encapsulates what I’ve been trying to say for a long time. Biomimicry is one of those words. And, who better to define this word than the Biomimicry Institute: “Biomimicry is an approach to innovation that seeks sustainable solutions to human challenges by emulating nature’s time-tested patterns and strategies.”
The idea is simple, we can look to nature to find solutions to human and design problems. Leaves of the lotus plant are self-cleaning, so let’s look to the lotus leaf for inspiration as to how to create a self-cleaning paint. Makes sense. If you’ve ever painted a weatherboard house, you won’t be one to argue with the biochemistry of the lotus leaf. So, what does this have to do with Product Management? What do lotus leaves have to do with experimentation, metrics and MVPs? Well, a lot actually.
Let’s look at a product management concept I’m very passionate about: experimentation. I could — as I often do — spend countless hours telling you why experimentation is important for organizations of all shapes and sizes, why a continuous cycle of ‘testing and learning’ is critical to the success of a product. By now, you should be able to guess my argument: biomimicry. We talk about experimentation as a new way of working, and if you’re a product manager at a large organization, you’ll likely have expended a good amount of energy fighting for you company to become more experimental; you may have even resorted to the cliched plea of, “guys, let’s embrace failure”, and then looked in the mirror and felt, for a brief moment, like Michael Scott or David Brent from The Office. But, if we look to nature, experimentation — or evolving though iterating — is nothing new.
Let’s look at something very natural. Let’s look at how a baby learns to walk. A baby doesn’t sit there for 11 months and one day get up and say, “hey, I’ve done some research on this concept of walking, seen a few of the oldies do it pretty easily, I might just get up and stroll over to fridge and help myself to some milk”. They fall a thousand times. They get up. They fall again. They get up. Slowly, they graduate from sitting to crawling to walking. Let me repeat that, they FALL a thousand time. Notice I didn’t say they FAIL a thousand times. We never say a baby fails, so why do we associate such a negative word with experimentation in business? It’s not about failing (and having an inspirational story for the first five minutes of your Ted Talk), it’s about the very natural process of falling and getting up, learning through iterating, that the value gained from each fall is far greater that the pain derived from it. In business speak: the insights gained from experimentation, far outweigh the downside of running (or failing) an experiment.
We fall over 1,000 times to take our first step. We’ll end up walking 200 million steps in our lifetime. So, how many times small falls are you willing to take to make a $200 million product? The answer: I hope well over 1,000. The argument: biomimicry.
