Planners: The Chief Product Officers of Cities

Until this Summer my Co-Founder Kam Lasater and I ran product (as well as too many other things) at SeeClickFix. That changed when Slate Ballard joined the team. It became immediately clear what we had been missing by not having someone full-time on product. Slate also brings a new sets of skills that neither of us possessed on our own.

Successful heads of product, Slate amongst them, possess:

1. The ability to listen and digest and contribute to the vision of leadership
2. The ability to listen and digest the vision of the community the product is serving
3. The ability to process 1. and 2. in sync, find the commonalities and highest value targets amongst them and articulate a roadmap for getting to the shared vision.
4. The technical skill-set to execute the design
5. The ability to say, “no” a lot

But what does this have to do with City Planners?

In many cities there are too many cases where Alderman or Counsel have had to make case by case decisions on parking, zoning and cycling. I have concerns about ad hoc legislating of individual zoning, parking and cycling infrastructure issues. Chief amongst the concerns: the self interest of a few could harm the end result for the many. Elected officials are elected and many want to be elected again. Even with the interest of the whole at heart they are more likely to be swayed by the few closest to them. They need them to get elected again. This is not how cities should be planned. In fact that’s not planning at all. That’s disjointed and uncoordinated reacting.

I recently asked an Alderman why we did not have holistic zoning, parking or pedestrian and cycling commuter legislation or plan that matched the interests of the larger community and the elected officials. The response, “City Plan is understaffed.”

It struck me that many cities are having the same problem we were having at SeeClickFix before we had enough resources on our product team. They are understaffed in the place where they need it most: the product team, the heart of City Hall, the City Plan department.

So How Are City Plan Teams like Product Teams?

1. The City Plan department is the team that creates the wire frames for the city. Think location of a park or bus stop.
2. The City plan department is the team that maps the city to the socio-economic vision of the leader, her staff and the users(residents).
3. The City Plan department is the team responsible for the style guide of the city. Think building scale and density.
4. The City Plan department is the team that makes sure that the visual semantics and the language of the built environment are clear and uniform. Think road signs and way finding.
5. City Plan listens to the community and aggregates the collective interests into outcomes that benefit the whole. Think product market fit.

6. City Plan is focused on helping the city engineers reach peak velocity in the progress of the city. But they are equally constrained by the technical debt of aging infrastructure and its ever increasing bugs. After all of the resources are expended on the maintenance and updating of shared built infrastructure as well as the maintenance and improvement of shared natural resources like air and water, City Plan must decide how to pave the best road forward with what’s left over.

I think quite often about SeeClickFix’s value to a city and it’s inhabitants as it relates to the software we use to build SeeClickFix itself. I find our civic communication platform analogous to a hybrid of Slack, Jira, Zendesk Operations and your choice of social network for cities. Without an effective bug tracking and listening mechanism, City Plan can not possess the collective interest of the whole. Without an effective two-way bug tracking and listening mechanism City Plan and other officials can not communicate holistic priorities, set expectations or aggregate success.

Sound familiar product managers?

tl;dr

I was surprised that a quick search did not turn up much on these similarities. I would love to see a panel at an APA event about the intersection of Product and City Plan. Though I don’t know her I would be inclined to invite Natasha Mooney, Product Manager at LiveFyre, as she was the only person who matched my search. She studied urban planning and went into Product Management. https://www.themuse.com/companies/livefyre/people/natasha

Do you know product managers who have become urban planners? Ping them please! I’d love to hear their thoughts. Maybe you googles better than me. What else have you found on the subject?