The Power of First Principle: How Great PMs Embrace It

What happened this week?

This week, our product squad got to hang out in person at our quarterly meetup, and it was a blast. Between tackling the Escape Room, hitting the golf balls at Topgolf, and chowing down on some great dinners, we also found time to dive into our OKRs and brainstorm growth areas for our team.

During one of our sit-downs, a fellow PM threw this to me: "How can I speed up my decision-making game?" It immediately brought to mind a dusty old slide deck from my previous life.

I spent a good chunk of this week diving into this research, breaking it down, and deciphering the fundamental principles behind first-principle decision-making.

This piece is longer than usual, so, kick back, enjoy, and let's turbocharge your decision-making skills!

What’s in there?

1. The Tale of Two Brains

2. Principle A: Maximizing Mission Impact

3. The Optimal Path: Where Inputs Intersect

4. Principle B: Achieving Through Others

5. Product Managers Are Like Sports Coaches

6. Your Tactical Summary to Keep

1. The Tale of Two Brains

Many successful Product Managers I've met make decisions by sticking to some core principles. These principles are like building blocks for decision-making, and they're called 'first principles’. They help make faster and more correct decisions, often.

For example, our developer platform team has one: 'Make all platform features work like Lego blocks.' This means developers should be able to easily combine different features when creating an app, just like Lego blocks fit together. Those principles can be true across teams but can also be specific for a particular product.

First principles help Product Managers a lot because they make it easier to explain why they make certain decisions, both in the past and for the future. This helps everyone on their team and those they work with to understand and agree on the direction. It also allows them to handle challenges and make the right decisions (80% of the time) even when the Product Manager isn't there.

But can we use first principles to think about Product Management itself?

If we can use these core ideas to help Product Managers guide their teams in building great products, I'm convinced they can also help Product Managers think about how to do their job better.

That's what this post is all about finding the basic ideas of Product Management that can't be deduced from anything else.

On one side, we have:

A. Make the biggest impact on the company's mission: come up with a plan for your product that has the most impact on the company's mission using the resources you have.

B. Get things done through others: Product Managers don't personally build or run the product. Instead, they help the people around them do it more effectively.

These two principles correspond to the analytical and creative aspects of your thinking. The analytical side involves logic, research, and precision, while the creative side involves imagination, intuition, and empathy.

Outstanding Product Managers seamlessly integrate both of these principles into their decision-making process, and all their actions should be rooted in them.

Upon reflection, most of my prior writings can be seen as variations of these two principles. 7 Mental Models for Clear Problem Framing as a Product Manager centers around principle A, while Learn how to say NO as a product manager and Elevate Your PM Communication Game: 3 Frameworks for Product Manager are focused on principle B.

The concept of MVP Management (Minimum Viable Product) incorporates elements of both. I wish I had articulated this concept from the outset, but truthfully, it took me some time to fully grasp it. Let's explore this further.

2. Principle A: Maximizing Mission Impact

Every employee in a company should focus on fulfilling the company's mission, whether it is to generate profits, create social good, or both. Most employees are involved in delivering the product or service to customers, including engineers, designers, marketing and sales teams, and customer support.

Product management is not about building or running the product, but about guiding the builders and operators towards the best path to achieve the mission. This path is known as the product strategy, which aims to maximize impact in line with the mission.