Products and politics are very much the same
This piece was previously published on LinkedIn in Swedish, before the Swedish parliamentarian election that took place a few months ago.
No one in Sweden has been able to avoid the fact that elections are coming soon. Debates, panels, promises, red lines, you name it. But in the midst of all this, I mostly find myself sitting there shaking my head and wondering what the hell everyone is up to. I’m actually extremely interested in politics, but election campaigns leave me so uninspired. Why is that? Well… maybe creating uninspiring politics is the same as creating uninspiring products? Yes, goddamit. It’s the same thing.
Let’s compare a political party to a product company. A party should have values and visions. They should have an ideology and believe in something bigger than just the political issue that is currently on the table. The same applies to a product company.
Let’s then compare political leaders to product leaders. Political leaders are responsible for formulating (and perhaps reformulating) vision and values. They should drive the public opinion. But also listen to your citizens. The same goes for product managers.
Let’s then compare the citizens to the users. As a political leader, it is important to listen to them. What problems do they have? What do they see down from “reality” that you might not see? The citizens help with the problem description. Sometimes they also think they have the solutions. The same applies to the relationship with your users of the product.
Finally, let’s compare factual questions to features. Good politics should start in values, visions and ideologies. Then when a matter of fact comes up, it should be able to be “bounced” against these. It provides predictability for the voters about which policy will be pursued without knowing which substantive issues may be on the table. This leads to a policy that is coherent. The same applies to the features of the product.
So product managers have a lot in common with political leaders. We are responsible for developing a “why”, a product vision and perhaps even an ideology. What kind of product should we be and, above all, what should it not be? We must keep our ear to the ground and listen to our users, but be very careful before building the solutions they present. If you just throw one feature on top of the next one depending on how the wind blows today, you pretty quickly end up with a product that is half-assed at a lot, not the best at anything, disjointed, unpredictable and it simply doesn’t hold together. In product lingo, we usually refer to this as a “feature factory”. Building products based on a list of functions is like building politics based on factual issues.
Time and time again, journalists try to put politicians against the wall by demanding promises, asking them to choose sides and draw red lines. “Can you promise the voters not to raise property taxes? Is it a red line for you that party X does not gain influence?” It sounds very much like a company that is not product driven. “Can you promise I’ll get that feature? Will you be able to do X and Y?”. Some want a precise plan for “the coming term”, but of course no one talked about the pandemic, war in Ukraine or NATO membership in the last election campaign.
The only thing I as a product manager can reasonably promise (and I argue that the same applies to good political leaders) is
We believe in this. This is our ideology, our “why” and it will always permeate our product. We think these things are more important than those things and so we will prioritize based on that. Question X is most important right now and after that question Y is next. But anything can happen and we must be prepared to re-prioritize. You don’t always know what questions will pop up around the corner.” I realize I am lucky to be able to work in an organization that allows me to have this attitude and clients who show understanding when I explain our philosophy.
I would have liked to see the politician who said something similar. If I also believed that they had good possibilities to get their visions through (in relation to their distribution of mandates), then my vote would have gone to them. If I were to compare the politicians we have today to product managers, they now try to trump each other in having the most features, throw shit at the competitors and when the competitors have a good feature, they “have copied us”. They create huge backlogs of all the features (with questionable anchoring in their ideology) they are supposed to build for the next four years. But what will actually be built, we all know, is something different. Because reality will come knocking.
I think that if you as a product manager or a political leader want to create followers, you can’t just build features that people ask for or pursue policies that match public opinion. You can’t just try to position your product or policy based on what the competition looks like if you don’t fit into that space yourself. You have to believe in something bigger and drive public opinion yourself.
