The PM trick from 8th-grade math
By: Krishnan Raghupathi
Tags: Math, Framework, Strategy, Product Management, Tips And Tricks

The PM trick from 8th-grade math

One of my most vivid memories from college is from an Advanced Math class wrangling with Markov chains in the third semester of my Computer Science major. Circumstances had moved this class to a sunny Saturday morning, ruining a delightful day off for most of the 19-year olds in the class, and as the probabilistic formulae became increasingly arcane and incomprehensible, I remember my friend turning to me with pained exasperation and exclaiming “When are we ever going to use any of this?”

He wasn’t wrong. While data scientists may lap up advanced probability theory with breakfast, I‘ve barely used anything in that course in over a decade of PM life. That said, some of the more foundational math from school has been way more useful and applies almost everyday in product strategy.

And what is that? Turns out, it’s the ability to draw two dimensional charts.

Why two dimensions?

For the most part, as PM’s we’re trying to build products and services that our audience will use and love. Fundamental to that process is identifying the core incentives that drive people to adopt something new or get new value, while still retaining their original job-to-be-done.

Sometimes new tech enables a huge change along one key dimension: a movement big enough to be really attractive to at least a large swathe of early adopters. It’s infinitely easier to have your ride come to you (Uber) than hang about trying to hail a cab hoping one will show up. It’s infinitely easier to have your shopping come to you (Amazon) than to go to multiple stores finding the things you want. These products enabled massive movements along the effort dimension, and reaped immense rewards.

This seems simple and obvious. It is. So much so that:

You’ll have loads of competitors (& market incumbents) trying to do exactly the same thing. The world isn’t really that simple. There’s a lot more nuance in how people at large make decisions.

As a PM, I’ve found that adding that second dimension can often make the key difference in growing your product beyond its earliest fans. Putting a bit more thought into the examples above, it’s easy enough to find the one other key dimension that both Uber and Amazon needed to grow like wildfire.

A personal story…

Early in my career, I had my own personal brush with the second dimension of user needs. Our team was re-architecting a unified communication toolset used by millions, deployed from their company and the chat feature was a core part of the product. Our updated chat feature was faster, more modern and had several bells and whistles making it really fun to use, but at its core it enabled two things really really well:

You could chat 1:1 with someone You could create a group and chat with the group (adding or removing anyone from the group at any time).

While customers loved our fun and modern enhancements, there was one glaring problem: many of our users had spent hours, months (or even years) setting up special interest groups of people they worked with and chatting with them. Having to set up all those groups yet again was just an impossible endeavour and too hard for people to do. So, despite the fact that they all wanted to move to our newer chat, it was just too hard to transition. We’d never thought about “Ease of transition” as a second dimension.

This is why I now keep some graph paper in stock so I can chart every aspect of my user’s problems in 2 dimensions 😊

There’s more than 2 of everything

Of course, sometimes things can get really more complicated, and you can think about many more than 2 dimensions to evaluate what’s next for your product. But what I find really satisfying about this framework is:

It forces you to evaluate the core tradeoffs involved and eliminate what’s unnecessary. It’s very easy to communicate as a basis for strategy and decision making.