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[Music] hey there product gym is an exclusive membership organization and over the past few years product gym has helped more than 500 people land the product manager job of their dreams by showing the community how to secure more product manager interviews more product manager offers for ultimately better product manager jobs welcome to product gym cool what's up everyone welcome to this product gym webinar uh actually quick check can everyone see my screen maybe put it in the chat yes yes cool all right sweet all right that's a lot of yeses we're good all right thanks uh sweet all right um thanks everyone for showing up uh just some quick housekeeping yep as it said in the chat for everyone that's joined if you have any questions please ask in the q a not the chat reason for that is uh that's the only thing that gets saved when we actually read through it and also um i personally will not be looking at the chat as um giving the talk so um please ask in the q a it's also easier to track and all that stuff so yeah that's just some housekeeping cool all right with that out the way i'll just get started so the topic for today is probably one of my favorite topics in product management in general which is systems thinking um i received advice that being a systems thinker and product management is probably one of the best mental models i got that advice early in my career and as i continue on in my product management journey it becomes more and more true every day so really excited to share this topic all right so a little bit about me um just to get started here uh my name is andrew um so i most recently was a product manager on the growth team at linkedin and currently i'm actually working on some election text products for the 2020 election so that's a little bit of a new uh little new thing that came up recently but it's really cool to be able to see what product management looks like when you're working on political tools so maybe i'll do a talk on that at some point in the future but yeah linkedin i worked on the growth team i worked on a product called uh network growth and my network and prior to that i was a product manager uh in ed tech i was also product manager at a startup um doing sales software sales automation and prior to that actually came from a philosophy and political science background um so just a little bit of everything here and there and in my free time i like art you know painting djing doing things like that so these are pictures from when we could travel pre-coded so definitely miss that all right so at linkedin what did i work on so this is just a little bit of a uh snapshot of the kinds of website i worked on when i was at linkedin um so if you go to linkedin you go into the my network tab which is right next to home that was basically my baby um really uh just building out the discovery ui uh you know expanding it just from being like hey you're discovering people to expanding it to discovering all sorts of other things on linkedin and we're going to get into that throughout this presentation because i use a lot of case studies but yeah if you want to see it you can actually just go to linkedin go to that tab that's what i worked on sweet alright so let's set some goals for this talk i think it's good to always have clear goals so that we know by the end of it whether or not we hit those goals so this talk will be a success if i which is you the listener leave here with actual ways to strengthen my product sense by embracing the system's thinking uh every product decision has a consequence every consequence of that product decision has its own consequence um and see i see a hand raised by the way so i'm not going to be able to address them i'm sorry so please ask any questions or things like that in the q a uh that i have up so if you could ask it in the actual q a component that is going to be a lot easier in terms of the flow also zoom needs to figure this out like i feel like this happens every webinar uh so yeah strengthen product sense uh the second piece is discover high impact product opportunities so as we'll talk about today really the really uh high impact benefit of systems thinking is that it's not just some mental model like you can literally identify opportunities in your product to optimize that then drive impact for your business so it's really cool so the third is driving long-term value for users through systems and not individual features so that's another goal of this talk so then agenda let's actually start by defining setting some definitions so first what is even a system right and then defining what systems thinking is and then we're gonna move into the juicy part so four tactical mental models with case studies on how to actually leverage systems thinking in product management um so those are bottlenecks constraints uh leverage feedback loops uh and second order thinking uh and then we have a little bit of an exercise here we'll see how that works on the webinar and then uh we'll answer some q a all right so high level how are the amazon rainforest in sahara desert connected these are two completely opposite vast ecosystems on the opposite sides of the world uh one's an arid desert hottest place in the world another is this very lush uh rain forest so you might you might be asking yourself you know like how in the world are these things too connected so there's actually this thing called the atmosphere atmospheric pipeline i mean when i learned about this for the first time i was i mean it blew my mind so basically this happens constantly where the sand from the sahara desert flows over the atlantic into the uh into the amazon rainforest and that's literally why it's so lush it's because the sand is made from these dead algae from like millions of years ago um and only by blowing over uh does that provide the oxygen for the amazon rainforest to be as rich as it is so it's pretty mind-blowing stuff so similarly if you look at your product ecosystem it's a system like it's not a silo like all these individual features and things like that they don't just live within their own silo they're all connected and as you start thinking about building products and uh you know working for companies that build products that you like the more that you think about the product as an ecosystem the better so here is an example of the linkedin ecosystem it actually literally looks like a world right like kind of the example before and so the linkedin ecosystem you might think is just uh you log on to linkedin and then you edit your profile or something and that's it but that's not the case because of the economic graph that we have we have built uh additional businesses on top of that we built additional products on top of that so the hiring platform um linkedin learning right uh campaign manager which is our marketing product all those things are built and interconnected and dependent on each other um in order to provide the best value for the customer so by having this framework to understand this systems you can create new value and impact for your product and for your users all right so that's a little bit of a fun uh example right the amazon rainforest so let's actually dive into some formal definitions of what a system is so a system is a set of related components that work together in a particular environment to perform whatever functions are required to achieve the objective so like this is a very generic definition and this is from a really fantastic book called thinking in systems by donnella meadows uh it's a really good book uh she's she actually passed away and she had like a magnum opus that she was writing that she never got to finish just a really interesting and cool story but already as you're reading this definition what should come to mind is product thinking right because in product thinking you have your objective you have your goal as it says here you have even metrics that are tied to that goal so then you start working backwards you're like alright we have this goal we have this north star metric what are the different features and different components of our product that roll up into that so already we're starting to see how systems thinking helps product management and this is just a generic definition so then if we start going even more specific right um this is from the same book uh system is a group of interacting parts the key operative word there is interacting and then they have a specific goal and another key characteristic of the system is that as you continue to build there are emergent behaviors and characteristics so for example you're building certain features you're building a feed you're building a profile product uh when you have those two products all of a sudden you have a conversation product that you weren't even thinking about before but by virtue of having this interacting pieces um you can create this brand new product as well how would you define an environment in terms of product is a question that came in yeah that's actually we're going to be addressing that in a bit so i'm going to hold off for now cool and so of course some really uh you know like like we see simple we see systems everywhere right given that a system is a group of interactive parts obvious one is like the human body um another obvious one's like a business system uh a very uh a very um simple one is like your drainage system in your house right these are all examples of systems i think you all understand this at this point so then let's start digging into what systems thinking is so we talked about how systems are made of all these different components and characteristics but actually applying it the application of that understanding is what makes a system syncing so another example here this is one of my favorite examples of system when system syncing is not uh leveraged so i believe this was in the early 1900s when ddt was first created so ddt is like that chemical that gets rid of mosquitoes right so what happened was these farmers they created these ddt crops to repel mosquitoes and they thought that that would just get rid of mosquitoes and bugs and they thought that that would save their crops so the first order right the first order is yes it did because all the mosquitoes and bugs died but then there are all these second order third order unintended consequences so for example as all the mosquitoes died uh the population of the birds that ate those mosquitoes and bugs they started dying so there's like less of the predators for those bugs and then at the same time those mosquitoes started getting repelled they started getting resistant to the ddt and then the next population of mosquitoes that were just even stronger and resistant uh decimated the crops and then there were no birds to eat them right so this is an example of linear thinking where you're just thinking okay if i create this product or if i apply these principles uh that it's just going to create this first order effect and that's it that's linear thinking cause and effect right but systems thinking is thinking through uh much beyond that and thinking through like okay how is this going to affect all components of this ecosystem and how is this going to affect the next step beyond what the initial effect is going to be so as it's written here system thinking provides a perspective that most of the time various components affect each other and various and often unexpected ways unexpected is key here as well by the way um i have some war stories and we're gonna we're gonna share uh some of those in the case studies but oftentimes you'll create a tweak in your product you'll optimize for one thing and it'll create this completely unexpected impact uh on a different product so let's be more specific let's start narrowing down now that we laid that groundwork um these are four very practical very tactical um mental models of systems thinking that you can apply to your product practice you know right away right so bottlenecks also known as constraints uh leverage uh feedback loops and then second order thinking it says here three so i guess i got a fourth one in here for you all but they will combine to form our multi-tool system uh multi-tool toolkit for systems thinking so let's jump in so the first one is bottlenecks so i think the most obvious example of a bottleneck is a traffic jam right this is a literal 50 lane traffic jam somewhere in china i think it lasted several days but it was actually like 50 lanes so it's pretty crazy um but if we're being more precise here uh the definition of a bottleneck that we're gonna work with here is that um in a chain there's always gonna be a weakest constraint within a system um and by solving for that weakest constraint that will actually provide the biggest value so for example in this traffic jam example right like if we wanted to clear this jam if we started applying uh we just started applying um like moving cars out over here towards the back where nothing's really happening that's not gonna create any impact at all right but if we created it right where the bottleneck is that gives us a lot of opportunity to gives us a lot of opportunity to drive impact so this is a very simplified example of what that looks like only an improvement here right here where the bottleneck is is going to make a difference not on the outside not over there but only in the middle right there all right so now we're getting into the juicy good stuff so let's talk about an actual case study this is something that i experienced when i worked at linkedin that illustrates the concept of a bottleneck and solving a constraint of bottleneck to drive impact in the systems thinking model that we have here so the goal for this product which is the sales solution linkedin sales solutions um if you're not familiar with you can basically generate leads you can drive sales by finding people to sell to on linkedin it's called the linkedin sales solution so our goal here is to help sales solutions generate leads and drive business for their customers and then of course for linkedin as a whole so here's what the flow looks like in order for that to happen you need people on linkedin you need like actual profiles that you can search to provide leads or to generate leads right so if there's no people on linkedin there's no such thing as a lead so that's the first constraint but then on top of that if you have profiles but they're not filled out they don't have the necessary uh necessary attributes filled in such as like uh company or industry and things like that then the the sales uh lead sales generation platform doesn't work so here's an example of what the flow looks like more profile customization customization tools leads to more profile completeness leads to more network building so people talking to each other connecting to each other that's the product that i worked on smiley face what that leads there's more engagement across linkedin so now you have me a product manager i'm interacting with another product manager on linkedin because i know that they're a product manager because it's listed on the profile that person introduces me to someone who's on let's say a data science team um who works at google which is in a space that i'm interested in but i only know that because they filled that part of their profile in we're starting to form these connections and then someone who's using the sales tool can search for product managers who are you know affiliated with data scientists and google um we want to sell product to them right so only by creating those uh connections through the completeness of the profile could this thing even work so what's the constraint here what we learned uh when we were working on this product was that whenever there was a lack of profile completeness this led to there being a lack of connections and so basically if we wanted to distill it down to this like bottleneck statement is that the profile completeness was the bottleneck for the linkedin sales solution working as best as it could so it's interesting right because you wouldn't really think that this particular what's on the screen here right now which is basically your profile editing ui you wouldn't necessarily think that that impacts the sales product which is a completely different pillar if you're thinking linearly you're thinking oh this is just a profile and it's just a field and like oh we're gonna not show that too much attention right but if you're a systems thinker you know that they're all connected that's why the uh the original title of this is that everything is connected like in your product ecosystem whether or not it seems obvious whether it's tangentially whether it's downstream whether it's upstream everything is connected and if you're going to be an excellent product manager you need to understand exactly how they are connected and like what the metrics are for those so that's one example all right so number two this is tactic number two leverage so leverage is the ability to influence a system in a way that returns maximum effect per unit of effort so the key operative word here is maximum effect the one of the traditional examples that they give you in systems thinking is a bathtub if you want the bathtub to be filled with water you could do all sorts of things right you could like pour a bucket into it you could uh you could i think that's like the worst way to do it but the best way to fill a bathtub is to actually just use your pinky finger and just nudge the uh nudge the uh what's that called the knob uh nudge the uh i guess it's a knob but the point is that the sink for the tub is created in such a way that such a tiny little effort can be used to create this maximum effect another example of this is of course the 80 20 rule as you all know right like 20 of uh 20 leads to 80 of the impact and then vice versa so here's some here here are some examples like 20 of drivers cause 80 of all traffic accidents 20 of all employees are responsible for 80 of the results we call those like high performers um 20 of students have grades 80 or higher um is also known as uh yeah it's just the 80 20 rule uh so basically before you build an elaborate apple picker from scratch make sure you check for the low hanging fruit that could potentially give you outsize impact right that's the principle of leverage here so then let's uh let's talk about a case study um this is from a friend of mine who worked at airbnb so let's say the goal is to drive value to hosts like you want people to to book more you want people to book more for a particular host so that they can get more business from their airbnb right so given that that's the goal what would be the highest leverage change that we could create in the product like in the actual ui in some feature what could we do so this case study is really interesting because if we work backwards what actually drives more more bookings on airbnb there's a lot of different factors but one of the biggest factors for what drives bookings on airbnb is that you have you're highly rated and that you have a lot of ratings um to back it up right so you wouldn't want to if i'm going to thailand for example i don't want to stay at a stay in airbnb that's two stars and has like four reviews although i think those get automatically rejected or something like that um i want to stay at a place that has i think it's five stars yeah that's five stars and has like a thousand reviews so if we want to drive more bookings for hosts which is more value then we need more five-star reviews for that host okay how do we do that well if someone has already stayed at the booking we want them to leave a review asap okay how do we do that so this is an actual email that i received when i saw this product which is that after i stayed at an airbnb uh they have a flow in place where the host writes your review first and then that incentivizes you to write a review for them right so this is the email find out what tao wrote and you can only read tao's feedback once you've left a review of your own and there's a time there's like a time limit so if we're talking about the principle of leverage and the goal here is to drive more bookings for hosts and we know that more bookings happen if they have a high rating and there's a lot of them and of course you should be working with like your data science team to get the actual data for this right and let's say we know for a fact that if we increased the number of ratings by like three percent or something like that then we would see like x dollars in uh bookings like let's say we knew that from an analysis then this is such a tiny change like this is literally one email right like this is just one email you can add in the flow of the booking process um that could create uh more reviews and and sure enough this actually did like this is a known case study where um this actually led to more bookings simply because of this additional screen so that's awesome so the next principle here the next tactic uh for system syncing uh is feedback loops so you all may know the lion king um and simba's dad dies spoiler alert because there's a stampede of uh i think they're they're not buffalo they're like uh i don't know wildebeest that's what they are there's a bunch of wildebeests that just uh go on a stampede in a rage and uh they end up killing actually a scar that kills mufasa because he's the one that you know put he like kicked him off the cliff but basically the point is that there's a stampede that happens so this is one of my favorite diagrams not only just of systems thinking but i think ever so stampede happens because there's a number of cattle running it could be like one or two right and that actually increases the amount of overall panic in the herd so that actually leads to more cattle running and then there's more panic and that that's like literally how stampede happens and that actually is how it happens for human beings as well like there are cases of people that get trampled when they're trying to like leave a stadium or something like that right so that's that's like the power of a feedback loop it's very recursive and it builds on itself so let's apply that to product so a feedback is defining is defined as sending um information into a system and again like a feedback loop does not exist linearly by definition it has to exist within the scope of the system so again like the more you think of your product ecosystem as a system the more you can like start seeing these so there's different types of feedback loops there's um there's one that's like a balancing feedback loop where the whole point is to like maintain uh the equanimity of the whole system uh so i think one good example of this is our just um forget what it's called but it's like what maintains our uh like our temperature our body temperature that's an example of the balancing feedback loop but then there's a reinforcing feedback loop which brings growth or decay to a system so a lot of viral loops like a lot of viral marketing a lot of product growth those things leverage feedback loops and that's we're going to be jumping into right now so this is a really fun case study so feedback loops and product with youtube so let's say our goal is to drive high quality content for viewers i think youtube is at a place now where they know that they don't it's not just about driving views and just driving uh watch time it has to be high quality so it's like all right how do we drive the quality up for the content so that this isn't just some site with videos uh where there's just people posting whatever they want and by the way a goal like that only happens when again you've run the numbers and we know for a fact let's say that if we increase the viewership by x minutes per person uh that doesn't necessarily lead to retention um but if we increase the quality that does lead to retention of course quality is really difficult to measure but let's say that's the goal all right so then here's what a potential flow could look like increased value to viewers means that more creators join and create content so what happens is that value to viewers increase okay and then you suddenly then you have more viewers watching youtube because the content is better and then that is more value to the content creators they actually you know they monetize off views and then more creators join because the values to creators increases and more creators join to create more content so like it starts getting really uh recursive and loopy fast which is good which is what you want so the more creators there are the higher quality it will get there's like competition all those kind of things the more higher quality it is the more people will start watching right i mean i can testify i'm like a youtube premium subscriber i cancelled netflix because youtube is so good now and then the more people are watching more people are going to start creating content because it's like hey that's that's a place where you go to make money and create content um and so one uh concrete example of how they created this feedback loop for creators is youtube created the youtube creator awards like you see these plaques um it's like silver gold and platinum or something like that and then you have i mean you have like literal content creators who will create uh videos of them unboxing the uh like the plaque that they get right so that's like a that's a whole next level of meta but like they're creating more content because they got this award and that's driving more views and it's just this amazing you know virtuous loop right but the point is like if you leverage this um this tactic of feedback loops in your product like imagine if youtube was thinking linearly right like they would just say okay uh content creator joins they make content and then their views go up that's it they could have just ended there and that's that would be a pretty bad product team but they really harnessed and leveraged this concept of feedback loops um to the point where they now have this whole ecosystem they have creator awards i mean it's a force in culture now um so yeah this is one of my favorite examples of feedback loops um in product all right the last one is second order thinking and by the way like these are all these different tactics are by no means um siloed like they are all interconnected again applying systems thinking right they're all interconnected they can all be leveraged uh together in parallel um in any given problem that you're working on which is like a systems thinking problem you'll see all of these and i say that for this one in particular because second order thinking or nth order thinking right like beyond just one uh is underlying all of this so second order thinking is it's really simple at the end of it it's basically asking and then what like okay i'm gonna do x and then what well blah blah blah is gonna happen okay and then what well then maybe this xyz might happen okay but what happens after that right um there's a really good book called the great mental models by farnam street which is where this which is where this visual comes from uh but i think they do a pretty good job of showing what second third order thinking can look like because for example you might have these first order consequences like the mosquitoes in the example we showed before right uh with the farmers and then the second order is like there's this chaos let's say that forms but then sometimes the third order is that there's more order that's formed so you just never know and i think just to distill it to his essence and just asking and then what then what happens so i got a really fun uh i got a really fun example for you all uh this is the product that i actually worked on so let's say the goal was to drive more linkedin premium subscriptions right so a linear thinker would say something like all right well maybe we can make the buy button bigger right that's like the classic uh ui optimization or maybe they'd say something like uh let's uh let's um rank the seo of the page for linkedin premium pricing higher something like that right but what happens is like because everything is so interconnected all these different other parts of the linkedin ecosystem impacts uh the sales of linkedin premium so here's an example of something that actually happened so if you use linkedin you probably know this uh feature called who viewed my profile right where you can see who viewed your profile basically and it's it's a great feature because you get to identify what recruiters are looking at you um what people in different industries are looking at um so they may be looking at you they may be looking at other profiles um and prior to linkedin this just didn't exist right you would be working and you would never know what recruiters are interested in you or who in other industries are interested in learning about you and your industry but because of this feature um now there's a lot of like interconnectedness across the global workforce so that's great that's one feature but how are those who viewed my profile notifications even generated right well people have to be looking at your profile right okay how are they looking at your profile or there's a number of ways that uh people can be looking at your profile maybe they go directly to your profile maybe they uh were recommended by someone else but there's al there's this other product uh called people you may know right and so what that is is you scroll through people's profiles and then if they're interesting you look at their profile so what happened was um as a pm on this project we changed uh the profile viewing experience for a com for like a completely different reason like this was unrelated to any of this stuff that's why i was saying unexpected uh is something that you need to like drill in your mind when you're thinking about systems thinking so we were changing the ui of uh their profile viewer and like people you may know for some completely different like machine learning related reason uh and then we started noticing that the who view your profile notifications were going up and down like they're just starting to get a little chaotic right and that actually directly impacted how much linkedin premium subscriptions were being purchased because the who viewer profile is uh one of the key drivers of linkedin premium subscriptions it's a great benefit because you can actually drill down and look at who you get these analytics on the left um and if you if you see here on the left it says premium right so yeah second order thinking is thinking okay if i change the ui on this profile viewer what's gonna happen next um okay people are gonna look at it more people gonna look at it less okay so then what okay well there's all these other things that are contingent upon profile views there's um there's actual profile views um there's like who scrolled on my profile but then there's also who viewed my profile okay so then what all right well if we start uh if we start augmenting uh the notifications that are being shown for that then there's a chance it's going to affect linkedin premium subscriptions so that is that's an example of second order thinking that's an example of probably fourth order thinking to be honest like that's like four orders removed from the product decision that we made uh but it was a great learning experience um you you kind of got and of course like it wasn't good when it happened because we actually led to some uh subscriptions going down but this kind of thing is uh what gives you like it's a really solidifies the idea that everything really is connected um and you should really be thinking of your product as a full ecosystem where one change here could create a change all the way over there uh just like the sands in the sahara desert um you have no idea like that these camels walking on these sand have anything to do with the rain forest but they do and not only do they do but it's very directly related to uh to that cool uh this is usually when we're in person uh pre-covered but we can do this mentally right so just to yourself think through this like what product do you currently work on and think about how is it a system and how can you apply systems thinking and more specifically how can you apply the principles and tactics of bottlenecks leverage feedback loops and second order thinking so this is more like homework you can you can think about this and um uh think about how to apply to your own product so let's summarize everything that we talked about here today key takeaways your product is a system pretty sure i've made that clear uh just by saying that over and over again look at your product as a group of interacting parts with a specific goal i mean if there's anything just if you had to just take this away and take away the whole presentation in a sentence it's that interacting parts specific goal like if it was just interacting parts it would be a system sure but there's nothing to optimize right there's nothing to build and if it was just a specific goal that's linear but it's like those two together it's like these interacting parts that work together for a specific goal so that's one takeaway the second takeaway is systems thinking is just better than linear thinking um i mean like if you look at product managers and just the kind of craft and art of product management thinking um the best pms i've ever worked with are just systems thinking is it's just like baseline for them where we'll be in meetings we'll have like product review conversations and we'll be talking about you know we'll be going through designs and then we'll talk about metrics and then they'll bring up some insight that seemingly seems nothing to do with what we're talking about but if you stop and think about you're like oh wow like i didn't even think about i didn't even think about thinking about that right like i didn't even think about the potential that uh i should even think about uh this problem this problem space in this way so the long and short of it is that systems thinking is better than linear thinking um you want to move away from cause and effect as much as possible because you can uh as i said in my uh actual example that i gave you can lead to like metrics going down uh it could lead to uh subscriptions going down and you you may not even know why if it's just cause and effect um so yeah move towards systems thinking in that way and then the four practical mental models bottlenecks uh identify the key area you should focus on in order to maximize efforts uh same thing with leverage except it's um just more broadly applicable and then feedback loops um identify where you can create a feedback loop to create more value for your product ecosystem and second order thinking is just constantly asking yourself and then what like what happens after this what happens after that cool all right so that's that for the presentation i will now pause and then go to q a all right awesome well i hope that was helpful for everyone i'm starting to read through this now cool all right sweet q a um i do have a hard stop at in 10 minutes so it's probably gonna be like 10 minutes yes the recording will be available yes so let's do that answer live wow these are some really really good questions all right this is a great one if you don't have a team of data scientists thank you thanks to yeti for this question if you don't have a team of data scientists to help narrow this down is it just best to test and learn how do you get that first action in the loop yeah i mean i'll tell you straight up like prior to working at a bigger company like linkedin um i was working at startups where i mean one of them had a data science team but the startup before that that i worked on like didn't right and so the short answer is like you don't have to have a team of data scientists to narrow down like opportunities and things like that but what you should have for sure is data like even if it's something small like um we were using google analytics like the free tier or something like that you need to have some kind of um like you just need data to back up your hypothesis um for like why you want to even run an experiment or build a feature to drive a loop um like the youtube example that we had right so yeah you don't need like a whole team but you definitely need data to back it up um i mean we could do like a whole presentation on hypotheses and um like hypotheses generation through data um but yeah the short answer is you don't need a whole team it's obviously better if you do but you can just start you can be the one at your team and your company that that starts that culture of um like data-driven experimentation and data-driven hypotheses so so yeah um let me see how can i make this start this from a look um how can i make a start make my foundation and systems thinking yeah so i think part of what i wanted to really get across in this presentation is that like it could have been really nebulous where it's like oh system thinking is great here are some examples but i really wanted to make it clear that there's like tactical things that you can do so let's actually go back to these tactics real quick like even at this level they're still pretty um they're still pretty like vague and principled right they're like okay identify your bottlenecks identify your leverage points that kind of thing but what you can do is you can operationalize this you can like you can actually for whatever product you're working on um like list these out you could list out like let's say you even have a spreadsheet let's say you have a you can put these in your spec even like for every requirement that you write for your um for your product you can write down what are the constraints and then like list them out what are the leverage points and list them out or it's like where can where can we apply feedback loops and list it out of course this doesn't apply to like every single product right like you're not going to be able to apply all of these in a like a self-driving car let's say right actually i'm not sure i think you i think you could i bet there's a way to do it but to answer your original question how can i start using these as a foundation and systems thinking i would do that i would literally just go through your spec your product requirement document and like list these out and a lot of times you may just be like nothing like oh we don't have we don't have opportunity for this which is fine but just by doing that exercise um you will build that foundation and i've had the i've been lucky enough but also like i've gone through the pain of having teammates i'll do that for me right uh like managers will be like all right so what like so then what like that second order thinking thing um and it was beneficial for sure i mean there are just there are times when it was painful right where you'll be proposing a feature idea and in the product review they'll be like okay so so what like what happens after that um but that's how you build the foundation it's just by like doing it as much as possible um in as many places as possible cool let's see uh open questions please do okay how do you use is there a difference between the feedback loops you're describing and network effects that's from richard yeah um it's a good question feedback loops are more generic um network effects are more around like networks are more specific they have like more connotation where there's like nodes and edges and then the edges themselves can have characteristics too where they're either like uni-directional or bi-directional so for example an example of network effects in linkedin is that if you follow me that's just one direction and i'm not following you so like like nothing can happen in that relationship it's basically like you follow me and uh you just get stuff from me like content from me but if it's bi-directional we're both connected to each other then your stuff will show up in my feed my stuff will show up in your feed and that's like the next level of uh connection and um like emergent properties that can happen from that so yeah to just to answer that more succinctly um i would say feedback loops are more like just more way more generic um whereas network effects are more i think network effects actually imply scale too like you got to have like some kind of threshold for network effects to really take hold whereas a feedback loop can just happen on like a very small scale like you could have a feedback loop that's just between two nodes for example um you have a feedback loop in like a a relationship right it's like one person with another person like if you're your boyfriend's mad then you get mad and then they get mad you know like that's feedback loops whereas network network effects are like much bigger i think um yeah cool let's see um let me see answered and open we'll do like two more what cross-functional partners are most critical to system thinkers man it's a good question because like my first my first thought is to say all because that's like the proper thing to say as a systems thinker is like oh everything is connected and you know all that but if i'm being honest i would say that i think data science is huge as a product manager data i mean just anything data related is probably your like you know your best partner um but i've also found but let me explain why actually so because for all of these things like identifying the constraints identifying the possible leverage like an example of identifying possible leverage is like okay if we changed the ui for this thing we could see uh potentially like 20 increase in the metric we care about okay that's great but how do you even go about identifying that leverage that is data like you you need data to even identify those things um i mean you can do it where you you you like identify these things without data but that's just like flying blind so i would say definitely data science team or whoever does like analytics on your team um i mean it should be you like you should be able to do most of this stuff um so i'd say that's number one and then number two um i think biz ops like business operations is really good for this stuff because for them their primary goal and objective is to make sure that they're monitoring the health of the business and that it's it's like stable and that um for whatever uh time frames they're looking at that they'll predict that'll still be stable right so for example if i'm looking at this month um i can run some kind of prediction that says all right if we don't change xyz soon uh this quarter we're gonna see like business is gonna be bad right and so there i think business operations people are really good about like driving that system's thinking muscle almost out of necessity because it's kind of like if they don't identify these things like constraints leverage loops second order thinking then it's on them like the business is gonna uh this is gonna tank so yeah i would say i would say data science i'd say or data analysis and then um definitely business operations but of course like if you're if you're talking from like a product sense standpoint like design right like design is like there's design systems like like everything needs to be um like things need to be usable uh in the first place uh in order for there to even be metrics um so this is a really good question because like the more you think about it the more the answer is just like everyone like engineers obviously um like other product managers um but yeah it's a good question um let me see uh i think we have time for like one more to find oh okay this is a fun one how would you define the difference between first order thinking and first principle thinking yeah this is good because they're they're they're like they're actually completely different so this is a good question because like i think there are all a lot of these terminologies that are out there that seem similar um but like at first glance but then are actually very different so first principle thinking that's like the like elon musk has made that really popular right which is that um like it's it's a good thing to be a first principal thinker which is to think through like the foundation of like what it is you're even addressing um in order to problem solve so like his example is like oh rockets cost a lot to make right and first principle thinking is like yeah but but but do they actually make a lot of sense do they actually cost a lot or is it that the materials cost a lot and then like when you dig down to the first principles it's like oh steel is like worth it still costs like x dollars per gram so like that's the actual foundational first principle and so we should build from that um and so by doing that i think what they did is like they looked at the raw material costs and then like completely changed uh the overall expenses um so that's like first principle thinking whereas first order thinking is bad right first order thinking is just like okay if i push this button then then like the elevator goes up and that's it but maybe it's like okay if i push this button and the elevator go up that means i'm going to the 13th floor okay if i push the button and the elevator goes when i'm going to the 13th floor that means i'm meeting someone there and there's just like next consequences thinking is basically like the opposite of first order thinking right so yeah i think they're just different things but both can be applied to product management for sure cool uh i gotta run but um yo reach out actually definitely reach out um what's the best way you can andrew cu.com is my site uh all my stuff is on here you can email me from here i'm on twitter a lot so definitely hit me up on twitter that's my jam and yeah thanks everybody this was uh this is really fun um definitely feel free to send more questions this is like one of my favorite topics in product management sweet bye [Music] you