Bridge the learning gap: product theory vs product practice

Bridging the gap between theory and day-to-day practice is one of the most important and difficult responsibilities of any good product manager. And it’s something that can catch you out, no matter how many years of experience you have or where you are in your career. What do you do?

Let’s start with a quick consideration of the theory – today’s product management marketplace is awash with frameworks, books, blogs, podcasts, coaches and gurus telling you how best to “do” Product. The market has grown dramatically over the past 10 years, both in size and sophistication. What was once a niche, ad-hoc practice dominated by tech startups has evolved into a structured, commercialised ecosystem spanning tools, courses, certifications, books, and B2B services. In the 2010s, product management frameworks were pretty much limited to classic agile/scrum rituals and MVP-style thinking, whereas today there’s an extensive landscape of discovery, prioritisation, strategy, and delivery frameworks.

Beks Yelland, Product Transformation Director at British Gas, has long been vocal about the product management obsession with frameworks and methodologies – what she calls ProductTech – and the way they over-complicate the work and alienate product teams from the rest of the organisation. In this post, ProductTech: The industry, the discipline, have we gone too far?, from two years ago, she wonders if the product function has been left unchecked and unquestioned, and has become too complicated. In her post, she says: “I currently mentor several people, from product managers in blue chips in huge teams, solo operators in pre-seeded start-ups to first-time VPs in scale-ups. Time and again, I see that both my mentees and the teams I lead feel coerced or pressured to overthink how they do things.”

Two years on, does Beks feel any differently about this problem? Certainly, the problem hasn’t been resolved – she feels it’s still very much an issue in new-to-product and junior roles, but people at a senior level are talking about it more and calling out purist thought leaders more than they used to.

However, the need for a pragmatic approach is as vital as ever. Beks says: “If you make the principles and discipline of product inaccessible – because the art of product has become so complicated, you will disenfranchise your stakeholders and they won't want to work with you.” It’s something she’s seen happen time and again – and has often been brought in as a product leader to an organisation to try to fix a product function where someone has tried to “make a square peg fit a round hole”. She even recounts a talk when she asked her audience if they’d ever worked anywhere where the CEO or sales team went directly to the tech team and bypassed Product – everyone put their hands up.

Become a pragmatic product person

There’s still the flood of theories and frameworks, and no one can dismiss the idea of a gap between product theory and product practice. But how do you decide which theories or frameworks work for your situation, how they all fit together, or when to use them? Understanding the landscape, let alone being confident about what to use, is difficult enough, but when you add factors like cognitive load, pressure to deliver and still be strategic or time constraints to the mix, it can feel overwhelming. Beks says: “That gap between theory and practice is really simply defined, in my opinion, as the art of the pragmatic product person.”

How do you become a pragmatic product person? Experience is one factor that helps enormously of course, but in the absence of this, Beks has two concrete, practical suggestions – find a mentor and find a community.

Find a mentor

We’ve got lots of useful articles on finding a mentor on Mind the Product. This article, The dos and don’ts of mentoring in product, looks at the benefits of a mentor/mentee relationship. This article What (and what not) to expect from a product mentor?, offers some advice on ways to get the best out of the relationship, and this podcast episode, The power of mentoring – DeVaris Brown on The Product Experience, provides an in-depth look at how a mentor can make all the difference to your career.

It’s worth reiterating that you should shop around, you don’t have to stick with a mentor if you feel they’re not right for you – maybe their experience isn’t quite right or their communication style doesn’t fit with yours. Define what you want and need out of the relationship and bear in mind you may well need a different mentor at different stages of your career.

Find a community

There are a number of communities that not only serve to help you network with other product people, but they’ll also rally around to help you solve a problem. Beks points, for example, to a community she helped to found, The Female Product Lead, which runs a full calendar of events. It has a very active Slack group where you can ask any question you like and get a quick response. She says, “If you're struggling, you can lean in and people will help. There are so many people like me who've done 10,15, 20, 25, years in Product and want to give back, want to support, and want to make sure that people aren't struggling on their own.”

Take a step back

When you start to feel overwhelmed, take a step back. Adam Warburton, Co-Founder at startup Rove and a trainer for Mind the Product, points out that the product theory that many of us take as gospel may often be just something that was tried and tested in one company, in one scenario, at one moment in time. Over time, it gets souped up and embellished in the retelling and then becomes sacrosanct, such that product people are disheartened when they can't apply it in their own organisations. Adam says: “You have to take the theory for what it is, something that worked in one circumstance, in one moment, in one organisation.”

Adam’s advice is to take a step back and look at what the theory is trying to tell us. He says, “It's trying to tell us that we should align on a problem. We should learn about the problem. We should then figure out how we're go

ing to solve the problem, and then we should solve it, and then see if we've actually solved it by measuring it.”

Ultimately all frameworks fall into one of a few types, he says. A product strategy framework or canvas, for example, asks whether there is a customer problem worth solving. “Does it matter if our canvas conforms to the same structure in the same format as the theory? No, it’s irrelevant. The canvas gives us a structured way to understand a customer problem and understand if the thing that we're going to build fits the customer problem. As long as we're doing that, I don't really care if we're following the theory to the letter or not.” 

Like Beks, Adam finds there’s a tendency to treat product theory as gospel and not challenge it in any way. He likens it to cookery – an experienced cook might feel the need to follow the recipe to the letter. Someone with more experience will be happy to omit or substitute ingredients, and someone with lots of experience might be comfortable to freestyle and create their own dishes.

As a product manager you need to respect the theories – they’re borne out of much expertise, trial and error – but you also need to know when to bend or even ignore them to fit the needs of real teams, real users, and real-time pressures.