Lesson 1: Somebody Decided That
This is the first lesson of the Product Management course, the same one that opens the app. It takes about five minutes. Tap your way through.
Who decided the lunch line works this way?
The scene
Maya counts what she can see from her spot in line: a menu board with fourteen items and no prices, one register with one card reader, a rope that makes the line snake past the cookie rack, and a sign that says “Have your ID ready.” Nobody in the line thinks of any of it as a choice. It’s just how lunch is.
Play
Tap each part of the lunch line to see the decision hiding behind it.
Tap a card to flip it.
Name it
A product
A product is something somebody made, on purpose, that other people use. The lunch line counts. So does the app you were thinking of building to skip it. What makes it a product isn’t the software. It’s that a series of decisions shaped it, and somebody was responsible for them.
The details
Reasons, not accidents
The cookie rack on the bend isn’t lazy design. It sells cookies. Once you see the reason behind a decision, you can argue with the reason instead of complaining about the result.
Decisions age
One card reader was plenty when half the school brought lunch. Nobody re-decided it when that changed. A lot of the products you use are running on decisions nobody has looked at in years.
It’s all products
A menu board, a bus schedule, a sign taped to a register. If somebody made it and other people use it, the same questions apply: who is it for, what is it for, and is it working?
Go deeper: Customer-facing, customer-enabling, and platforms
People who do this for a living split products into three kinds. Customer-facing products are the ones you use directly: the app, the menu board, the line. Customer-enabling products are the ones staff use to serve you: the register software, the schedule the kitchen cooks from. Platforms are the shared plumbing underneath both, like the payment network the card reader talks to.
The lunch line has all three, and a change to any layer shows up in the line. That is why fixing the line is rarely as simple as an app on top of it.
Back to the question
So who decided the lunch line works this way?
A cafeteria manager, a district office and a bus schedule, each deciding one piece for a reason that made sense at the time. Nobody decided the whole thing. That’s the gap a product manager fills: someone who looks at the whole line and asks whether the decisions still make sense together.
Check yourself
Dre asks what makes the lunch line a “product.” Who got it right?
Say it
Talk Card · Lesson 1
A product is anything somebody made on purpose that other people use. Every part of it was a decision, and every decision can be made again.
That’s Lesson 1
The other three lessons in Module 1, and the rest of Part I, are free in the app. No account, no ads.