From Brexit to Bernie: What Product Managers Can Learn from Politics
Brexit. Hillary. Trump. Cruz. Bernie. Benghazi. Have you noticed that lately politics has become such a dominant focus across our culture that political figures and events have earned the single-name designation once enjoyed only by celebrities? Indeed, would you have ever guessed that you could overhear a conversation at a dinner party about a public figure whom both people referred to only as “Cruz” — and not assume they were talking about Tom Cruise (or at least Penélope Cruz)?
Now, unless you’re a political junkie, you’re probably starting to tire of the nonstop discussions, debates, news headlines, TV segments, and radio conversations dedicated to national and international politics. It probably seems as though no matter which news sources you consume — or even which entertainment outlets you tune into or which dinner parties you attend — you just can’t escape today’s endless yakking about politics.
But that might not be such a bad thing. In fact, as a product manager you can actually learn some valuable lessons from observing politics. Politicians and political campaigns have, after all, a lot of similarities to product management. They package themselves as products and attempt to sell what they’re offering to customers. They jostle and battle constantly with competitors, they use surveys and other intelligence-gathering strategies to learn what their constituencies want, and they often redefine themselves when the market calls for it. Plus, they are always working towards a “release date” — usually an election or re-election in the case of politicians, or, in the specific case of Brexit, an actual release.
So let’s examine politics from a new angle — as a source of insight and learning for product managers. You might discover a couple of useful nuggets for your job in the political truisms below. Besides, today politics is everywhere anyway, so we might as well get some value from it.
Disclaimer: Before we begin, it’s important to point out that this is not a political post. We will use current examples of political figures and events to find new ideas for product management. But we won’t express a political opinion about any of them. (And nope: You won’t be able to tell where we stand by reading between the lines.) We at ProductPlan are here to make the best product roadmap software, not political commentary.
No matter where you stand on all of this, we hope that when you put your product manager hat on, you can make use of some of the lessons below — even from the guy wearing the “Make Donald Trump Again” hat.
4 Lessons Product Managers Can Learn from Politics
1. Keep your focus strategic and high-level; stay out of the weeds.
Yes, Hillary has almost certainly won the Democratic nomination by now. But that’s not the only story of the Democratic Party’s 2016 primary. Hillary Clinton — a single-name designee in politics for decades, and by far the most famous female presidential candidate in history — faced a real challenge right up until the final primaries from an obscure Vermont senator nobody had ever heard of until a few months earlier.
So how did he do it? How did Bernie Sanders — now just “Bernie” to us all — mount such an impressive challenge to the most presumptive of presumptive nominees ever?
Here’s where we find a great lesson for product managers as well as political campaign managers. Love him, hate him… or really hate him, Bernie stayed strategic, spoke of high-level, visionary ideas, and always stayed on message. Hillary, on the other hand, spoke as a true technocrat. Her zillion-point plan for improving America included endless details of marginal tax rates and updates to trade agreements and using government to craft an economic environment in which… something or other. And as for a consistent message? Hillary famously had four or five “campaign launches,” as her staff kept trying to figure out how to best sell her to voters.
Bernie built a following and packed theaters and auditoriums with an energy that we typically see only from rock stars. And that’s largely because he presented incredibly clear ideas centered on an equally clear vision: standing up to Wall Street, reducing poverty, making college affordable, etc.
Any product that hopes to compete, let alone win with customers, needs to be equally clear and visionary in its approach and execution. If your users can understand what your product does and how it solves their problem with little or no explanation — and, just as important, if they can easily communicate that vision to friends and colleagues — you might have a winner. But if it takes spreadsheets, diagrams and long conversations to fully grasp what your product does, you have more strategy work to do.
2. Go beyond surveys. Identify a problem and find product/market fit.
For this lesson we’ll use Trump. Love him, hate him… or really hate him, Trump violated almost every major political rule ever articulated by a campaign manager, Washington pundit or other expert. And he won his party’s primary!
Of all of the rules he broke, perhaps the most important, the one that played the greatest role in his success, was Trump’s refusal to ask permission, to listen to what that day’s polls said, to change his message for different audiences, and to “soften” when everyone told him to do so.
That’s what politicians do. They poll likely voters. They hold focus groups to test which words and phrases will resonate with their constituents. Indeed, politicians running for office seem to be constantly asking for the opinions and permission of other people. This approach might make for a more polished candidate, one who does and says what we’d all expect, but it rarely excites anyone.
Similarly, with your products, it’s easy to fall into the trap of only soliciting advice from your user and buyer personas, surveying prospects, reading industry analyst reports — and using all of this data to develop products you think people will want. And who knows? That might work.
But as a product manager, you are a leader. You should also know your personas, your market and the problem that your product solves so well that you’ll be in a better position than even your own customers to know what should comprise your next release.
Trump identified issues in the United States that he believed in strongly. He developed a product (read: campaign) and found incredible product/market fit with voters who are frustrated with the Republican establishment. He went beyond polls and the surveys to truly understand voters’ “pain points”, and then he addressed them.
3. Your product must have emotional as well as logical appeal.
Brexit. The name itself offers an emotionally satisfying feeling — conveying in just two syllables that Britain could actually free itself from the international organization some of its citizens have long believed was keeping the country from being an independent nation.
Of course, the rank-and-file members of the “Remain” camp, those who wanted to keep the United Kingdom in the European Union, had equally strong feelings about their position. But that campaign’s de facto leader, Prime Minister David Cameron, underestimated the value of using an emotional appeal in his pitch to the British people.
Instead, Cameron made his case for keeping the UK in the EU almost entirely on logical grounds. He warned about the difficulties of disentangling the bureaucratic ties between the nation and EU’s leadership in Brussels. He warned about the economic hit Britain might suffer by losing their favored trade status as an EU member and having to create complex new agreements with international trading partners. And on and on.
The Brexit or “Leave” camp’s approach, on the other hand, was primarily emotional. They spoke of Britain reclaiming its status as a leader among nations (yay!), about freeing themselves from the thousands of petty EU regulations they were suffering under (ick!), and about regaining the ability to control their own destiny (hear, hear!).
The result? The “Leave” camp won by a small margin. Brexit made it into the international vocabulary. And as for the logic-focused leader of the “Remain” camp? He was forced to resign as prime minister. Don’t discount the major role that emotion plays in buying decisions. Sometimes it can be the dominant factor — even if your customers themselves don’t realize it. With that in mind, it’s a great idea to prioritize themes and features, even small ones, that will surprise and delight your customers. Logic is great, but emotion sells.
4. Don’t compromise your product for a short-term win.
Let’s return one more time to Trump. Among the hard-and-fast rules of politics that he broke was speaking in a “non-presidential” way, as many of his critics put it. Trump called Senator Cruz “Lyin’ Ted.” He called Senator Rubio “Little Marco.” And he called former Florida Governor Jeb Bush “Low-Energy Jeb.”
Whatever your feelings are about Trump, you have to admit the man was being himself. That got so much attention precisely because it was something voters aren’t used to experiencing in a political candidate. And whether it was working or not, it seemed, Trump was going to continue unapologetically delivering his product.
Now, let’s contrast that with the other Republican candidates vying for the nomination. As they saw the Trump Train gaining momentum, and their own poll numbers and delegate counts suffering, several of these politicians compromised their integrity in a desperate attempt to keep their candidacies alive a little longer.
Senators Rubio and Cruz, for example, both resorted to responding to Trump’s non-presidential behavior by behaving similarly themselves. Cruz referred to Trump as “utterly amoral” and a “pathological liar.” In response to Trump’s “Little Marco” references, Senator Rubio answered with an off-color joke about the size of Trump’s hands.
In other words, these candidates compromised their larger message and everything they had built their candidacies on for the sake of grabbing a few more votes. Without blunt, polarizing figures such as Trump in the race, is it conceivable either of these men would have resorted to such nasty personal attacks on another candidate? Not likely.
And what’s important to understand here is that these tactics didn’t work. Both the Cruz and Rubio campaigns suffered serious setbacks after the candidates behaved this way, primarily because it seemed totally counter to the political personas they had cultivated.
The lesson for politicians and product managers alike: Don’t compromise your product for a short-term win. Don’t radically alter your product’s priorities or message or key elements just to please an aggressive but unreasonable constituent, or to hit a quarterly revenue goal, or to achieve some other short-term objective.
Like politicians, you want your product to be successful for the long-term.
