Crafting technology products with a mission

I graduated from the University of Michigan in December 2020, and I’m currently a product manager on MI Start Map, a COVID-19 dashboard to inform Michiganders about the status of COVID-19 across the State of Michigan. In the past I’ve worked as the lead product designer for a University of Michigan COVID-19 symptom-screening product, MI Symptoms, and as a product manager at the National Institutes of Health.

I got into mission-driven product management when I realized the technology companies that everyone at college talked about didn’t exactly work on the problems that most interested me. So I looked elsewhere. I was amazed to find an incredible variety of technology products working on challenges accessing essential human needs–accessing food stamps, immigration services, justice, and many, many more–that are looking to hire technologists (even ones right out of college!).

I’ve found a lot of meaning, community, and excitement in this work, and I think many others might as well. This article is to share what I’ve learned and a few ways you can get involved.

What is mission driven product management?

According to Brainmates, mission-driven Product Management is “A Product Management discipline that seeks to generate sustainable, long-term business and social benefits.”

There’s a misconception that corporations are the only places that you can work on product management at. But there’s a need for product managers, software engineers, product designers, and data scientists at mission-driven organizations as well.

Roles like these may be less talked about, but they are no less complex or data-driven than working on product management at traditional technology companies. Mission-driven technology is something you can get involved with this summer and later in your career, and has a need for people like you to contribute to making technology better across the board.

My journey

After spending time in classes and doing some software/pm work for a company, I felt like I could do more with what I was learning. I found a program for working in technology roles in federal government departments called the Civic Digital Fellowship. There were people in this program my age–many younger–that were working on software that improved the speed of immigration processes or accelerated crucial medical research.

I was placed as a Product Manager Intern for the National Institutes of Health, and for a summer worked on a variety of challenges improving the usability and product roadmap of a maternal health research platform. These problems were uniquely interesting not only because they were challenging technology problems to understand let alone solve in a summer, but because they required learning how federal technology must work. Federal technology is used by an incredibly diverse group of people and has to be designed to be accessible to everyone who might need it, while still serving specific personas and use cases. At the same time, working in the federal government meant working with large systems with a huge number of stakeholders, and changes take time. Although things may move more slowly, they often move more permanently than industry, which meant my frustration with some slow movement was all part of the process.

Around this time, I got the chance to lead product design for a university project to help business owners in Michigan survey their employees for COVID-19 symptoms. Working on a project to serve people at the state-level instead of federal felt like a different type of work entirely. The stakeholders were more plugged into the communities the tool would be used in because they lived and worked with them. At the same time, local or state governments have much larger technology gaps than federal governments, so instead of finding a problem to solve, you’re often prioritizing between large technology problems that could significantly help people.

Because the project solely focused on Michigan residents, I got a lens into technology that’s made at the state-level focus. People across the board — stakeholders, engineers, users — are so much more engaged, because the communities are literally “closer to home.” The work you do can help improve your hometown, which is a very motivating feeling. At this level, there’s also a closer view to the more specific technology problems people are experiencing, which can be exciting and overwhelming, as there are many technology problems that could benefit from a skilled product team.

However, government technology (or “civic technology”) is just one of many applications of technology towards sustainable social benefits. There are plenty of mission-driven technology opportunities that let you work on exciting problems while still teaching you about product management.

How is mission-driven product different from other product work?

Empathy

Empathy is already a huge part of being a good product manager, but even more so in mission-driven work. Often, the people you’re trying to help have very specific needs unfamiliar to your own life experiences. Early on when I was working on a COVID-19 screening tool for Michigan businesses with in-person operations, I approached learning about the problems some business owners faced by reading up on business owner challenges during the pandemic and mocking up different user experiences. We were here to solve an exciting problem–how do we help business owners make sure sick employees don’t come into work?

We started user interviews with the intention of checking usability and readability of the application. During the interviews, however, I realized I was missing an entirely different perspective of the picture. Some business owners were asking about regulations they had to follow and how hard it was to make sure they were on track. Some businesses talked about how important it was to be able to check in with employees that were feeling sick. My team and I realized that beyond just trying to solve a market gap, we had to work on easing the pain that the pandemic had created for business owners and their employees. It would take stepping back and sitting under the dark cloud that business owners and essential workers were facing; imagine running a workplace where you’re trying to stay afloat while keeping your employees safe or coming into work when you know there could be a risk of you getting yourself or your family sick.

If I wanted to make something that really eased this burden, I had to communicate often with employers, work with them to build an application that served them, and build all of this into my priorities.

It’s very likely that your user research reveals that the assumptions that went into the initial design of your app were wrong, or that technology isn’t the answer. There were definitely engineers on the team capable of creating incredible native iPhone and Android apps, or a machine learning model predicting which types of workplaces might have COVID-19 cases, but what epidemiologists and employers needed was a simple platform to take symptom surveys that was secure and operable within months. We have to acknowledge the bias we come into these problems with as people who studied technology before studying the problems people are facing.

Metrics

In mission-driven product management, you can really see your impact through your metrics, because they align closely with the situations you’re trying to improve. As a product manager at the National Institutes of Health, I had to think about how the changes to the tool I was working on would improve research on child and maternal health. Although I was still focused on measuring a traditional product metric like engagement on different pages of the platform, as a federal government PM I was also thinking about how my tool fit into the mission of the National Institutes of Health and research in child and maternal health. One of these goals is accessibility; the federal government is uniquely funded by all Americans but the tools are often designed for people of higher socioeconomic status or ethnicities with greater privileges, so as PMs, we must actively work to design and build tools that are available and accessible to people of all backgrounds. For the tool I was working on, I had to consider a broader persona of researchers than just those from traditional well-endowed universities. I found an interesting insight–while users from large and small universities ran into challenges using the interface, users from large universities usually had a small community or point of contact who could point them in the direction of particular resources. Users from small universities rarely had this, so I focused on studying the experience of finding research studies and designing it to be more intuitive.

Although my work at the National Institutes of Health sounds quite similar to work for for-profit companies I’d done in the past, I felt driven and excited by the progress I could make improving a metric like engagement in this realm. In this case, it meant I was removing obstacles to finding maternal health knowledge and cures.

How can I get involved?

A great place to get started is Impact Labs’ article on finding specific mission-driven technology opportunities.

A helpful practice for mission-driven technology work is to dig into an area that excites you, and find some organizations active in that area. This could be government, non-profit, for-profit, startup, or corporation–it’s helpful to be open to trying places you wouldn’t normally associate with technology or product.

Some more helpful resources for finding recruiting opportunities:

• Tech jobs for good — exactly what it sounds like, a job posting website for mission-driven technology work
• Coding it Forward’s job drop newsletter — an email newsletter with monthly updating civic technology jobs and internships
• Impact Labs’ newsletter — an email newsletter with technology opportunities at a variety of exciting mission-driven organizations