Product thinking for creating transformative learning experiences
What is a product mindset? And how does it apply to things like education? Part one in my series on product thinking in learning.
🧩 This is part one of my series on product thinking for learning.
A result obtained from experiencing something.
This is the secondary definition1 of the word product.
As in, ‘they are a product of their time’.
The outcome is the product, not the output.
This definition is the most instructive when you’re thinking about applying a product mindset to things that can improve the world in someway.
Things like education.
Another fun fact: the word product’s root is from the Latin to Bring Forth.
Outcomes
The primary definition is what most people associate with product. A thing that is made by humans through some sort of industrial process, designed to be sold.
This is the reason that for many involved in education, the word product can feel too commercial and transactional. They see education as for the benefit of individuals and society. And rightly so.
Framing the endeavour as creating a learning experience and learning outcomes provides a more helpful sense of purpose.
And yet…
I believe that adopting a product mindset and taking a collaborative approach can help create more successful educational experiences.
And so it’s the second definition that I’m going to be exploring in this publication. How to use a product mindset to create transformative learning experiences. And to use it to build more than (just) software.
Technology plays a role. But it’s an enabler, not the thing that we should be focusing on. Something that those of us working in tech sometimes forget.
In product circles, for sometime the conversation has been that the focus should shift from delivering features to delivering value. We should lean further into this direction of travel.
Delivering valuable outcomes is what a product mindset is all about. Not building software.
Solving complex problems in new ways
I believe the adoption of a product mindset has so much potential outside of the world of technology.
Increasingly, companies building software are having a much bigger impact on human experience - technology is powering everything, software is “eating the world”. The dawning age of generative AI is only likely to accelerate this.
That’s why it’s important for non-technology organisations to understand the product mindset. But then to go beyond understanding and harness its power in the way the world’s biggest companies are.
The reason it’s used in building innovative software is that it is good for building new solutions and tackling complex problems where there is a lot of uncertainty.
We increasingly live in a world where there are more of these kinds of complex and uncertain problems.
We need better ways to tackle them and be able to develop radical and new solutions to deal with the challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, aging demographics, unequal societies to name but a few.
And better ways to create more accessible and effective learning experiences designed for today’s learners. These will provide people with the skills to tackle these challenges.
The scientific method + the art of creativity
The product mindset is about trying to understand this complexity, empathising with humans, framing the problems and opportunities, ideating potential solutions and then rapidly testing them.
It’s about experimenting and learning. The scientific method.
But it’s also about creativity and ideas.
Being human, thinking outside of the box and developing a sense of taste also play a big role in being successful.
Science and art in balance. Taking multiple perspectives.
Desirable, viable, feasible and usable
As is perhaps apparent from the above, the product mindset is a close bedfellow of Design Thinking. One of the definitions that is now commonly used to define product builds on ideas the design thinking pioneers IDEO developed in the early 2000s2.
When you’re building innovative businesses, services or products they need to be desirable, viable and feasible (DVF). Marty Cagan of SVPG has popularised this idea in product and added usable to the list (DVFU)3.
DVFU for education
To bring these to life in the context of education, you could define these as:
Desirable: you’re delivering a learning experience that learners want and need
Viable: you can reach and retain learners sustainably (and make a profit delivering it)
Feasible: you can deliver the learning outcomes in a repeatable and scalable way
Usable: learners can achieve the learning outcome in a way that is practical for them
These four qualities are helpful for thinking about a number of the fundamentals of developing a product mindset.
The idea of product-market fit
The focus on opportunities, solutions and outcomes
The role of the ‘generalist’ product manager and how they collaborate with different experts in cross functional teams
I’ll be exploring these each of these topic in depth over the next few articles and attempting to bring them together into a coherent framework and contextualise it for education.
Collaboration
A product mindset is about being able to keep all four of these things - desirable, viable, feasible, usable - in your head at once. And collaborate effectively with experts and specialists in order to achieve all four.
Which brings me on to the final important part of adopting a product mindset. That of collaboration and being able to work with experts and specialists to understand opportunities and develop solutions.
Building new and as yet unknown solutions for complex problem requires both generalists and people with specific expertise.
In the world of building software, this is typically product managers working closely with designers and software engineers.
In education this idea can be extended to educators, learning designers and student experience and course coordinators…
You might also need to go further and involve scientists, doctors, content creators, other kinds of engineers and designers… the list is endless and context specific.
But for these people to genuinely understand the problem they are solving and be able to rapidly experiment and learn and find novel solutions, they need to be able work effectively together in small teams.
As a generalist interested in creating solutions to complex problems you need to understand your role, the limits of your own expertise and how to work with specialists. Not only that, you probably also need to be an expert in inspiring, motivating them and helping them work effectively together.
This is the second area that I will be exploring.
Please join me on the journey.
To recap
A product mindset:
is about focusing on outcomes and not the output.
is particularly useful where you need to develop new solutions to complex problems where there is lots of uncertainty.
is about embracing the scientific method but balancing it with the art of creativity.
is about finding solutions that are desirable, viable, feasible and usable.
is enabling the collaboration of different specialists to find these solutions and embracing new perspectives.
I’m developing this thinking so please let me know your thoughts in the comments.
And if you would like to explore this in depth, I run a fellowship programme on Finding Product-Market Fit in EdTech.