Product management, as explained by Darwin’s theory of natural selection
A Product
A product is a meta-organism with replication (or more unit sales) as its goal, given a set of constraints imposed by its environment consisting of multiple stakeholders.
Sounds familiar? The comparison of products to organisms is not co-incidental. The ‘meta’ in the definition signifies that a product is neither living nor non-living but just an abstract entity or a concept, which may or may not have physical manifestations in the environment. The boundary of what classifies as an organism or living is, first of all, debatable. To put things in perspective, the largest living organism, Armillaria ostoyae, is a giant fungus in Oregon that spans more than a thousand soccer fields and is 2,400 years old, and the smallest living organism, Nanoarchaeum equitans, is a 400 nanometer microbe found in rocks and sendiments. What’s common amongst the two is an individual identity of their respective species, carved out by a sequence of proteins called genes, a subset of DNA.
To preserve the individual identity of its species over longer periods of time, the gene has to replicate itself. Gene replication can via both intra-organism (cellular multiplication) or extra-organism (sexual or asexual reproduction). Intra-organism replication is constrained by the organism’s natural age encoded in its DNA. Extra-organism replication is unconstrained as it makes an organism’s species practically immortal within its habitat as long as the habitat remains unchanged.
Product-Market Fit
Habitat, or an environment, is everything for the gene. Change the environment, and the gene dies. COVID-19, for example, is found to have a higher reproduction number (R) in highly populated cities compare to smaller towns as it thrives in a human body and its replication rate is thus directly proportional to human body density in an area.
Products, similar to organisms, are even today designed for replication or increasing sales in a given market. More products being sold in a market is analogous to more virus being replicated in a host. To change the target market, is to change the host environment. That’s why many international expansion plans fail as products, like viruses, are not able to survive an ‘away’ game.
Porter’s Five Forces
A product’s market or environment brings in external forces such as competition, regulatory hurdles, new set of suppliers and buyers (aka Porter’s five forces) in the mix. Akin to organisms in natural selection, the product needs to prove its worth in the environment by adding more functionality to better its competition. It will have to stay clear of predators up the food chain by investing in R&D and patenting technologies no one else can use.
Some products stand on their own individually, but some need a platform. The latter will have to form partnerships with existing platforms to be able to spread their pollen, attract more bees, and replicate faster.
Genetic mutations lead to improvement of R over time for a living organism. Retention and referral rate together, are an analogous metric for product that directly influences its success. The higher the retention rate for the product (or R for an organism), the faster it spreads and captures the market, beating the competition.
Goal of a product
The widely perceived interpretation is that a goal of a product is to solve user or customer problems, however the modern interpretation revolves around all stakeholders. Each stakeholder- be it purchaser, supplier, deliverer, storer, marketer or seller of a product- should be the center and focus of product design stages. No one entity is significantly more impactful than the rest. In today’s age, brands and products are not just expected to meet customer expectations and quality standards, but also need to adhere to modern societal values of sustainability and social impact adorned not just by the end-customer but also by suppliers, partners, marketing agencies and media outlets alike.
It is thoughtful consideration of each stakeholder across the entire value chain of the product that remains the key to a product’s success. Traditional definitions and narrow-sighted goals, such as ‘user’ publicized by Google and in ‘customer obsession’ by Amazon, are already being tested, as companies are engulfing more and more business and are finding that their customers often also turn out to be partners or influencers (TikTok), suppliers (Etsy), investors (Bitcoin), caretakers (AirBnB) riders (Lyft), etc. Further, using traditional customer/user driven product management approach often lands executives or teams into prioritization paradoxes, regulatory hurdles and questions over fair business practices.
Moreover, each Big Tech player is a customer of another. For example, Facebook’s thrives on iOS, Apple stores data in AWS, Amazon uses MS Office, Microsoft markets on YouTube, and Google sells on Facebook. Everyone is everyone’s customer, albeit for specific products.
Stakeholder focus is practiced by not only keeping different parties in mind, but by thoughtful deliberation of each and every interaction of the product with each stakeholder, at each step of the value chain. This not just inspires trust, humility and confidence in the product but also in the management team behind it.
Product Innovation
To survive, an organism has to similarly be ever-aware and ever-evolving to solve day-to-day problems thrown by the environment, consisting of predators, weather conditions, draughts and famines, etc. It is only by considering and making adapting changes at every step of interaction with the environment, does the organism get to survive longer.
Organism, as we know, adapt to the environment through natural selection. What is commonly ignored is the acute similarity between it and the ‘innovation tournaments’ theory, which is used by many venture capitalists and big tech companies to have several similar products compete with each other and pick the winner. The venture capital industry thrives on ‘natural selection’ applied to startup products.
So how can an entrepreneur innovate? It’s popularly advised to put the product out in the market early and keep innovating through iterations, tests and surveys until you get the ‘product-market fit’ right. Think of each product version (alpha, beta, v1, v2) as a generation in ‘natural selection’ with each generation adding some new features that increase its adaptability to the market or environment. Each generation brings to the product managers’ knowledge new problems to solve in the next generation.
Product Management
One universally identified success metric for a product is customer retention or renewals. These can also be referred to as just retention metrics, which could be compared to replication metrics in organisms. This again points out that the goal of the product is indeed replication, and that it manifests itself in business as more unit sales.
If retention or replication is success, then a product manager’s responsibility is to ensure that more people buy and buy again the product , just the way organisms replicate themselves to spread in their environment.
Product Design
To increase the life of the product, decisions need to be made in the design stages. Just as once the gene for an individual is encoded it can’t be changed for that individual for that lifetime (at least with current technology), the design of a product cannot be changed once that version or generation is launched and sold in the market (remember that the market includes all stakeholders, and not just customers).
Features of a product are similar to organs of an organism. Each carries a purpose, and each needs to be improved or deleted for the product or the organism to thrive in a constantly changing ‘moving target’ environment.
Product Marketing
To increase the unit sales of the product (or reproduction rate R), even after design is frozen and product is launched, there is product marketing. Not quite different from taking the help of bees to spread the pollen around to spur reproduction in flowers, products take the help of media to reach the right stakeholder (be it partner, seller, supplier, influencer, artist, media, etc.). The process of optimizing the interaction of the product with its environment to ensure a high R, reproduction rate, is product marketing.
The Takeaway
The takeaway here is that when a product is designed and developed while considering each step of its interaction with all its stakeholders in the environment in a way that allows it to grow or scale, it is nearly given a life of its own.
