From Classroom to Roadmap: Five Things Teach For India Taught Me About Product

From Classroom to Roadmap: Five Things Teach For India Taught Me About Product

I came into product from a two-year Teach For India fellowship, teaching in a low-income school in Hyderabad. People sometimes treat that as a detour from a "real" career. I think it was the most important product training I've had. Here's what stuck.

1. The user already has a workflow. You're competing with it.

A child in my classroom didn't arrive without strategies. They had ways of avoiding eye contact during cold-calls, copying without looking like they were copying, surviving English class by mimicking sounds. Whatever I introduced — a new ritual, a new game, a new homework format — was *competing* with these existing strategies, not building on a blank slate.

This is exactly true of users. Every product feature you ship lands in a world where the user is already coping. If you don't understand their current workflow — including the workarounds — you can't displace it.

2. Adoption is about effort, not value

I used to design wonderful lesson plans nobody followed. Then I started designing slightly worse plans that took less effort to start, and adoption tripled. The lesson: users don't optimise for value, they optimise for effort relative to perceived value. A great feature behind three taps loses to a mediocre feature behind one tap, every time.

When I'm reviewing a flow now, I ask: what's the effort cost of the *first* productive action? If it's higher than the user's tolerance, the feature is dead, however clever the rest of it is.

3. The data is downstream of the relationship

Marks and assessments told one story. Sitting next to a kid for fifteen minutes told a richer one. The kid who looked weak on paper had a parent doing night shifts; the kid who looked strong had a tutor at home. The data was real, but it wasn't the cause.

In product, dashboards are seductive because they're available. The richer signal — *why* a user behaves a certain way — is rarely in the dashboard. It's in a thirty-minute conversation that, somehow, no one ever has time for.

4. You'll over-design for yourself if you're not careful

I was a novelty in my classroom — an English-medium graduate teaching in Telugu. My instinct was to build elaborate, ambitious lessons because they reflected what I had enjoyed as a student. Most of them missed the room. The lessons that worked were boring to me and exciting to the kids.

Same trap in product. PMs build for themselves — sophisticated flows, advanced settings, configurable everything — and miss the user who just wants three taps to a useful outcome. The discipline is to keep checking: am I designing for the user's life, or for what *I* would find interesting to build?

5. The classroom is the roadmap

Every Friday I left school with a rough sense of what was working and what wasn't. By Sunday I had next week's plan. The cycle was tight, low-fidelity, and brutally honest. Compared to that, an annual product roadmap looks ridiculous — a year of bets, made in a quarter of confidence.

I now treat my roadmap the way I treated my weekly lesson plan: a hypothesis with a known expiry. The strongest PMs I've seen are the ones who hold their roadmap loosely, test cheaply, and rewrite often. The classroom taught me that's not a sign of weak strategy. It's the only kind that works.