Mental Models and First Principles Thinking for Product Management
The nature of product management requires a deep understanding of business and user needs, and as early career Product Managers, it can be easy to become overly focused on frameworks and recipes.
Product management is an art and a science. Many early career product managers obsess over frameworks and recipes, but the reality is building products It’s like deciding between preparing an omelet or a sandwich – you don’t know what you want until you understand the business and user needs deeply.
I was thinking about this topic a lot in the past but decided to prioritize it after reading this tweet by the great Shreyas Doshi. So this article is me taking a stab at outlining how to conquer and go past this ‘hacks obsession’ that Shreyas so accurately portrays.
Executing Recipes is Efficient
I wanted to start with an interview that Lex Fridman did with Jim Keller on his Artificial Intelligence Podcast; in this clip, right at the start, they talk about the difference between understanding and using recipes.
One key message is that executing recipes is efficient, and this is why we leverage frameworks and recipes in the first place. There’s nothing wrong with using frameworks and I sometimes use them myself, but as you grow in your career there comes a moment when you have to decide whether you want to dive deep and figure out a problem yourself or leverage a framework or recipe.
Regarding the last point, there’s a phrase that caught my attention
"If you constantly unpack everything for deeper understanding you never get anything done. If you don't unpack and understand it when you need to, you'll do the wrong thing."
Mastering the art of making the right choice is what differentiates a good PM from an average PM, so the real question is how can you develop this skill?
First principles thinking
Before jumping to the solution I want to introduce the concept of first principles, if you want to take a deeper dive here I recommend this article from Farnam Street, this one from James Clear (who wrote Atomic Habits), or this great book by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann that covers the topic and many more.
For the purpose of this article, I’ll try to give a simplified definition:
First Principles is a method of thinking which involves breaking a problem down to its most basic and fundamental elements. It involves asking basic questions about a problem and examining the answers to those questions to build a better understanding of the problem.
This concept was an eye-opener for me, if you start thinking about frameworks (or recipes) as a set of assumptions that have underlying first principles the way you approach learning frameworks is completely different. I mean, instead of memorizing the inputs for the framework to provide an answer you learn why that framework makes sense in the first place and what are the principles behind. In the end, I see a framework as a commonly accepted generalization of a certain reality and context that will not necessarily apply to your product.
My first piece of advice would be to take your favorite framework and start thinking about which are the first principles behind it, you can find a nice set of instructions in the Farnam Street article to perform this task.
Generalization and Mental Models
In the last section, I mentioned generalization. This is a concept that I learned in the university (I’m an engineer btw) that kept popping into my head whenever I thought about frameworks.
I’ll do my best to provide a simple (and hopefully accurate) definition of generalization. We can think of it as an abstraction, this means taking a set of specific results and trying to find the essential set of characteristics that describe them.
More concretely, maybe you learned this at school:
A perimeter of a square equals the sum of all of its sides.
The area of a square is a^2 where a= length of one of its sides.
Yes, these are all generalizations, so we’ve been using frameworks since we were little.
My second piece of advice comes from this concept, and it’s to get familiar with mental models; again Super Thinking by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann would be a great place to start learning about this.
Mental models are also generalizations but they span across several fields of knowledge: Psychology, Economics, you name it. My key takeaway here is that mental models being broader could be used as shortcuts or as an extra layer between thinking in first principles versus using a fully refined framework.
Building your own frameworks
Once you’ve mastered and really understood how mental models and frameworks are built, and you’ve spent a good amount of time reverse-engineering how they work you’ll get ready to build your own frameworks in no time.
There’s not a secret recipe for this (that I know of), but I can provide some guidelines that could act as design principles for frameworks.
Simplicity: Frameworks should be simple to use and explain to the rest of the company, not only for other PMs that might be using your new shiny prioritization framework but also by stakeholders and peers from adjacent roles where you’ll likely use your framework for buy-in.
Scale: Information needed to feed the framework should be easily accessible by every person that is interested in using it.
Relevance: Priorities change over time, treat your frameworks as experiments or mini products so there’s no need for them to stand the test of time.
Common use-cases:
Initiative prioritization: maybe you’ve heard of ICE, RICE, IE, MoSCoW. A common theme is to build prioritization frameworks that are relevant to your company’s context.
New Opportunities or Expansion initiatives: It’s a particular use-case and heavily related to the first one. Think of initiatives as features or projects and this one as decisions such as: entering new markets, building new products for a current audience, and building new products for current audiences. These are high-stakes decisions and you want to factor in your company strategy and vision in the framework.
Brainstorming sessions: Sometimes we need to do more targeted brainstorms and the general frameworks that are available are too broad or explorative. I think this is also a good place to start building and testing your own frameworks.
Conclusion
We have discussed the importance of learning how and when to use frameworks in order to differentiate good Product Managers from average ones. To truly differentiate a great Product Manager from a good one, mastering first principles thinking and getting familiar with mental models is essential. By understanding the principles behind frameworks and questioning them as generalizations of a certain reality, Product Managers can become highly competent professionals and make decisions that are based on evidence and data.
If you are interested in having me as a product mentor or coach, hit me up for a free consultation call. Let's talk about how we can team up and tackle your challenges together!