As a technologist and product leader, I’ve observed brilliant teams usher exciting new ideas from conference room to marketplace. Teams are full of inventive energy, and product managers (PMs) are tenacious and encouraging. It’s a process I love to watch unfold.
I am constantly inspired by how PMs, Designers, Engineers and teams continue to find creative ways to solve tough challenges. I often hope to see more of this creative energy directed towards social impact, solving global problems, or serving underrepresented customer groups. And I’ve come to realize that skillful and purpose-driven PMs and technologists could make this possible. Purposeful product management could drastically improve our world by merging a key role in shaping innovation with a mindset of service leadership. I am grateful for the opportunity to work in an industry where creativity and innovation thrives by striving for impact.
What does purposeful product management look like?
Purpose can take a variety of shapes, especially in the business world. At its core, though, it is about showing determination to achieve a specific goal, usually one that has roots in fostering social good. A purposeful person is someone driven by a clear vision. A purposeful project is one that is driven by compassionate intentions.
Skilled product managers are fundamentally purposeful since they must drive action forward on every product they build . PMs are responsible for guiding the success of products by helping cross-functional teams create and improve them. Someone in this role operates like a CEO/GM of the product. They define the vision, understand the customer needs, identify opportunities, lead teams to building solutions, and ensure that the product is set up for success end to end. . To do all of this even passably well, a PM must be naturally focused and goal-oriented.
But the purposefulness I’m envisioning goes beyond this. Since PMs hold sway over the strategies, roadmaps, and features for their products, they have the power to direct their teams toward world-changing iterations of their shared ideas. If the group is tasked with creating a mobile app, the PM can push for features that make it accessible to users with vision impairments. If the group is working on LED technology, the PM can urge them to design with solar power in mind. If the group needs to build software for schools, the PM can ensure it is tested in a variety of classroom settings with older and newer tech and by a diverse group of students to ensure it won’t just serve a tiny subset of privileged learners. These PMs constantly evaluate both revenue and impact as part of their business model.
Product Managers as Radical change makers
Product Managers are builders. They are problem solvers. Purpose-driven people love solving tough social problems. Purposeful Product Managers are people in whom those two loves intersect. They are passionate about creating lasting impact and enjoy solving complex business problems. Clearly, this is a group of smart, driven, resilient people who have the potential to become radical change-makers.
And the world needs them right now. When all challenges are viewed through the eyes of a purposeful PM, impact can be delivered at scale. Even a handful of these PMs inside each large company could start building products that address issues ranging from racial inequity to climate change, and do so across industries and across the globe.
We see a lot of examples in the industry as social entrepreneurs. They are applying the fundamentals of Product Management like design thinking, lean practices, testing, iterative development, data driven insights, etc., Some of these leaders who are already pushing radical and meaningful change forward through their innovative products..
When childhood friends Ankit Agarwal and Karan Rastogi noticed flower waste choking the waterways around the temples of Kanpur, they didn’t just decide to address the pollution. They launched Help Us Green, a thriving social enterprise that transforms the flower waste into organic incense and fertilizer.
Four Stanford students in a course titled Design for Extreme Affordability turned a group project into an industry-disrupting product: their Embrace Infant Warmer costs 99 percent less than standard baby incubators, giving it the potential to save millions of newborns in developing countries and underfunded hospitals.
After winning the Financial Deepening Challenge Fund — a competition that encourages private sector companies to launch financial services projects in emerging economies — Safaricom and Vodafone launched M-Pesa, a payment service that allows users to store and transfer money through their mobile phones. M-Pesa is now used by tens of millions of people across Africa, and is a life-changing option for underbanked or unbanked people.
Just think if more PMs viewed their products through a global lens and with a social justice focus. Imagine a world where more PMs pushed boundaries and looked deeper, leading their teams to serve customers with acute and unaddressed needs, or solve for problems that affect populations in resource-poor areas. We will always need the herculean efforts of nonprofits and NGOs to move the needle on global issues, but those organizations would benefit from hiring more Purposeful PMs to apply their problem-solving techniques from within. In addition there is a woefully untapped pool of talent in the corporate realm that could support and augment those efforts.
Radical global change is possible, and I believe that Purposeful Product Managers can lead the charge. Are you one? How can you start to look deeper into your customer needs? What steps would you take to address any of the broader social impact challenges?