Effective Altruism for Product Managers
Product managers are always looking to help others and fix their problems - that means that inherently, product managers are both altruistic and philanthropic.
Just about every product manager that I know is aiming to create a positive impact in the world, whether it’s through their day-to-day work as PMs or whether it’s through their personal lives.
But, something that I commonly hear from product managers: “Clement, there are so many worthy organizations for me to contribute to! I’m not sure which ones to help, and I’m not sure whether I should be volunteering or donating money instead.”
No problem - we can use a set of principles called “effective altruism” to decide which organizations to help, and to decide what kinds of resources to allocate to them.
The best part? The principles of effective altruism resonate strongly with the principles of product management!
So, let’s break down what effective altruism is, and how we can use it to guide the altruistic efforts that we commit to in our personal lives.
Using the Lens of Effective Altruism
The key insight behind effective altruism (EA) is to “use evidence and careful analysis to figure out how we can use our resources to help others the most.” (EffectiveAltruism.org)
As individuals, we have limited resources (e.g. time and money) to contribute to causes that we care about. Since we have limited resources, a high-leverage use of our time is to conduct research on how to maximize the positive impact that our resources can yield.
The three levers that we can pull are:
Which cause to back
Which organization to back
Which resource to deploy
Most of the time, product managers already have causes that they care about - so, I won’t dive into “how to select a cause to back.”
Assuming that we know which cause we want to contribute to, the next question we should answer is “which charity should I back?”
After all, hundreds of charities and organizations might be tackling the same cause! How do we know which one we should dedicate resources to?
Well, we want to look at which organization will maximize positive impact.
One way to do so is to look at the organization’s past track record in deploying resources. If an organization spent millions of dollars but has no evidence that it meaningfully improved people’s lives, then that’s not an organization we should invest in.
Conversely, if an organization can prove that it can significantly improve one person’s life using less than $10 per person and that it can do so repeatedly and sustainably, then that organization is likely highly impactful.
Another way to consider organizational impact is to look at its leverage. That is, we should consider whether the organization is tackling a symptom or a root cause.
As an example, an organization that sends eye surgeons to restore vision for the blind is doing meaningful work, but that work is “downstream” from the root cause.
If people are going blind due to parasitic infections, then sending eye surgeons after the fact is an expensive use of resources.
Instead, if we could prevent parasitic infections upstream through inexpensive interventions, then we wouldn’t need to send eye surgeons at all. Even better, we could likely save the vision of thousands of people through prevention, rather than only dozens of people through surgery.
So, we should consider whether organizations are attacking the root cause of the problem, or whether they’re only addressing the symptoms of a problem.
Once we’ve decided on an organization, the final question to ask is “which kind of resource should I contribute: time, money, or influence?”
Unfortunately, we don’t have unlimited resources as product managers. But, by considering the kinds of resources we have on hand, we can make meaningful change in the world.
To put things in perspective, a typical product manager earns hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. A $10 donation can protect 10 people from malaria for 3 years.
If you donate just 1% of your earnings as a product manager, you can literally protect thousands of people from malaria.
Or, as a different example, a head of product typically knows many other heads of product, and typically heads of product are well-respected in society. They can combine their influence together to encourage hundreds of people to donate to high-impact organizations.
So, we now see how effective altruism can enable us to drive outsized positive impact in the world as product managers. Let’s dig deeper into the specific areas of analysis that we should consider.
The STN Framework of Effective Altruism
The most effective way to get the most impact out of what you give is to use the STN Framework. STN stands for scale, tractability, and neglectedness.
Scale is about understanding the impact that “one unit of effort” will yield.
Previously, we discussed two different ways you could tackle blindness. You could send eye surgeons to restore vision, or you could prevent parasitic infections from happening.
Prevention is more scalable than treatment, because prevention works at large scale whereas treatment works at small scale.
Or, consider a different problem. Many people in the United States seek to improve access to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) for students.
You could mentor a high school student for an hour through a 1:1 session. But, that’s not likely to scale well.
A more scalable solution might be to speak for the local high school career center to share your own experiences in STEM. Because you’re speaking one-to-many, you’ll impact many more people, even if your talk is only 1 hour long.
An even more scalable solution would be to record yourself speaking for the local high school career center, and then ask them to share that recording with lots of other career centers.
Now that anyone can access your talk, thousands of people can benefit - and you’ve only needed to invest a single hour of your time!
So, scale is crucial when we consider how to maximize our positive impact in the world.
Tractability is a measure of how difficult a problem is to solve. We need to consider difficulty because we want to ensure that we’re creating real positive impact in the world.
If a problem is literally unsolvable, then it doesn’t matter how scalable our approach is - nothing we do will fix the problem.
The great news is that most problems are solvable. But, solvability sits on a spectrum.
As an example, “preventing people from aging” is something that seems incredibly difficult to solve. While preventing people from aging would be hugely scalable (since it impacts literally every living person right now), it’s not particularly tractable.
On the flip side, a more solvable problem is “how to reduce the likelihood that people get chicken pox.” When problems are easier to solve, it takes fewer resources to make meaningful progress against the problem.
Neglectedness is about how many people are already trying to solve the problem. Like the law of diminishing returns, there is a law of diminishing marginal utility which means if more people are already trying to solve the problem, the less impact you’ll have.
A perfect example would be the problem of global climate change. There are already non-profit organizations, government agencies, and even private companies that already do something to minimize their negative effects on the environment.
This means if you joined a tree planting activity in a weekend to plant 10 trees, you’ll individually have less impact on overall climate change than other organizations doing massive tree replanting drives.
To make myself clear, my point is not to minimize people’s efforts to help. If we’re passionate about helping in a particular way, then we should go for it!
Rather, my point is that we can make an even bigger positive impact by thoughtfully considering the levers of scale, tractability, and neglectedness.
Instead of taking an “either/or” approach (where we either “donate with our hearts” or “donate with our minds”), we can take a “both/and” approach to get the best of both worlds.
The Overlap between Product Management and Effective Altruism
Effective altruism shares many core concepts with product management. Product managers are always operating with constrained resources: time, money, and influence. Therefore, we can apply the principles that we use at work to increase our social impact.
And, if you’re currently an effective altruist who is not yet working in product management, you should consider a career in product! Many of the principles that you use to make a positive social impact can also be used to help customers and businesses succeed.
Below, we discuss some of the shared mindsets between product management and effective altruism.
Resourcefulness
As a product manager, you’ve already been using the STN framework on a daily basis!
Scalability - We seek to maximize the effectiveness of our resources, and that means that we’re looking for scalable solutions.
As product managers, we don’t just want to build for a single customer. We want to serve all of our customers and acquire even more customers.
As effective altruists, we’re not content with only helping a single person. We want to scale our impact to entire populations.
So, product managers are naturally good at effective altruism, and effective altruists are naturally drawn to the discipline of product management.
Tractability - If a problem is literally unsolvable, then we need to focus our attention elsewhere. While we’re ambitious and we dream big, we also know that our efforts have to turn into actual results in the world for our actions to matter.
All else equal, product managers tackle solvable problems and deprioritize intractable issues. Similarly, effective altruists focus on maximizing resource flow towards currently solvable problems.
The great thing is that tractability changes over time.
Many issues that used to be impossible a decade ago are now tractable, and many problem areas that were difficult a decade ago are now trivial to solve.
So, as product managers, we’re optimistic that problems will become more tractable over time, but we’re realists in that we aim to maximize impact in the immediate term.
Neglectedness - Product managers know how to specialize and delegate. They know that their products excel at solving particular kinds of user problems, and they know that other products exist in the ecosystem to solve adjacent problems.
A short-sighted product manager would attempt to rebuild products in adjacent spaces to try to compete with them. On the other hand, a great product manager will integrate their product with other products to unlock exponential impact.
After all, if someone else is already solving a problem in an excellent way, why try to beat them at it? It’s far more productive to partner together rather than to compete.
When each product team focuses on separate problems and dedicates time to integrate seamlessly with one another, they create so much more value in the world.
Similarly, effective altruists focus on neglected problems that can yield significant upside, while they delegate less-neglected problems to other altruistic organizations (e.g. the American Red Cross for disaster relief or The Sierra Club for environmental conservation.)
Effective altruists tackle neglected issues like existential risk, global health, global economic development, and animal welfare. In these areas, solutions and breakthroughs create much deeper impact than in more saturated areas.
Prevention
Product management and effective altruism always think about addressing the treatment and the prevention, rather than just the symptoms of a problem.
In the face of customer asks, product managers aren’t simply order-takers. We have to better understand the “why” behind their request. By truly understanding their pain, we might find that there’s a deeper problem to solve more thoughtfully, rather than addressing surface-level issues.
Similarly, effective altruists aim to attack the root cause of a problem, and they seek to prevent the problem from happening in the first place.
For example, effective altruists know that the root cause of homelessness is not “people being too lazy to work to pay rent.”
Instead, homelessness is driven by politics, where governments cause housing shortages because they’re reluctant to change the way in which they allocate land to homes.
Effective altruists aren’t focused on sending donations to individuals to meet rent payments in the short term. Instead, they apply pressure to governments to allocate more space to homes, and to increase the density of housing so that housing becomes more affordable.
Evidence-based hypotheses
In order to have the best outcomes possible, both product managers and effective altruists review data first before making a decision.
They both make use of iterative testing to refine their proposed solutions, and they dive into the data to find ways to further improve their results.
In fact, the most effective charities approach each of their initiatives through an iterative approach, much like how product organizations do.
These charities start with a minimum viable solution that has been thoughtfully scoped to provide maximum learnings.
Then, once they’ve shipped their intervention, they measure their results to see whether it made the change that they wanted.
From there, they incorporate new learnings and further expand each iteration of their solution until it unlocks the largest possible return on investment for donors.
So, now that we see how product management and effective altruism overlap with one another, let’s talk about how product managers can put effective altruism in place to make a bigger positive impact in the world.
Practicing Effective Altruism as a Product Manager
Here are three ways for product managers to practice effective altruism:
Earn to give
Donate to effective organizations
Spread ideas through stories
We dive into each approach below.
Earning To Give
In product management, your scarcest resource is time. Therefore, donating your time through volunteering is usually not the highest-leverage use of your time (though of course there are exceptions).
Here’s a tangible example: you could spend 4 hours on a weekend as a volunteer tutor to help one child.
Or, you could work 4 hours as a product manager and earn $500, then donate that $500 to an education nonprofit.
That nonprofit could then use that $500 to bring on a dozen volunteer tutors, who might be able to help a hundred children over the course of a year.
Or, they could use that $500 to fund 10 hours of applying to grants, which might enable them to fund a program that helps a thousand children over the course of a year.
This approach is called earn to give in the effective altruism community.
Product management is one of the highest-paying professions in the world, so we can create significant leverage by earning money at work, then donating the money to drive highly-scalable outcomes.
Making Your Donations Effective
When we donate resources (time, money, or influence), we need to determine which charities will create the most benefit through our resources.
GiveWell or Giving What We Can are excellent resources that use evidence to evaluate which organizations have a strong track record of shipping high ROI initiatives.
As a suggestion - each time you decide to donate to a cause such as a local fundraiser or a GoFundMe, make a matching donation through a GiveWell organization.
That way, you can still donate to immediate causes that you care about, while also amplifying your global reach and impact.
Spreading Ideas and Encouraging People to Help
Spreading awareness is crucial. By convincing others to back charitable causes, you scale up your impact across multiple people.
The best way to spread ideas is to tell a compelling story. Telling them why you want to help, who you are helping, and how they can help can drive lasting, meaningful action.
Spreading the concepts of effective altruism can be a hugely powerful lever, because you give people a repeatable framework for how to maximize their positive impact in the world.
You increase the likelihood that they will donate resources, and you increase the chances that they select an organization that is effective.
Effective altruism is a great topic of casual conversation with friends, colleagues, or loved ones! That said, don’t rush people to align with your perspective, or else you might damage your relationship with them.
One way to introduce people to effective altruism is to share a copy of the book“The Live You Can Save” by Peter Singer. You can get a free copy of the book at https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/the-book/ (and the audiobook is narrated by celebrities like Paul Simon, Kristen Bell, and Stephen Fry).
Download options for “The Life You Can Save”
Or, if you’re looking to make a more immediate impact, asking people to donate to a charity that practices effective altruism helps you increase the benefit that you create in the world. For example, on your birthday, you can ask people to donate to charities like GiveWell.
Closing Thoughts
As product managers, we’re advantageously positioned to create a positive impact for the people around us in our workplace, around our community, and in the whole world.
Whether we spread stories, donate our money, or volunteer our time, we should keep the STN framework in mind. By leveraging the concepts of effective altruism, we can maximize the good that’s created in the world.
As a side note, Product Teacher regularly features PM jobs from EA organizations (including companies and nonprofits). You can check out all active PM job postings here: http://product-teacher.pallet.xyz/jobs
Thank you to Pauli Bielewicz, Siamak Khorrami, Goutham Budati, Markus Seebauer, Juliet Chuang, and Kendra Ritterhern for making this guide possible.
