Products vs Programs
A mental model for innovators and funders
A mental model that’s been helpful to me is distinguishing between Products vs. Programs.
A product is something that makes impact by being used. An example is WarChest, which is financial management software for campaigns. Typically the biggest challenge for products is distribution, whereas discerning impact is easier.1 The biggest question is, “Can you get lots of people to use this?”
A program is anything voter-facing to influence beliefs or behavior. An example is Movement Labs’ experiments with texting voters a picture of their polling place to increase turnout. Typically the biggest challenge for programs is impact measurement, whereas distribution is easier.2 The biggest questions are, “Does this work?” and “How cost-effective is this versus competing approaches?”
How this distinction helps innovators and funders
1. Optimizing work on new projects
Lots of projects have elements of both products and programs.3 I usually advise innovators to start with finding success in distributing the product component, because (a) distribution is usually the likeliest failure point and (b) the feedback and iteration cycle for product distribution can be fast and inexpensive, which is mostly not true of programs.
2. Inventing products and programs requires different expertise
The startup world has a ton of wisdom to offer creators of new political products; I’d say that for-profit startup expertise is very helpful for around 60% of creating political products.
In contrast, creating new programs has few analogues outside of politics. Research on what’s been tried, and how well it has or hasn’t worked, lives mostly in academic papers and movement-led research. Absorbing and building on this knowledge is a specialized expertise.
Much of my work is sharing product knowledge with political professionals, who rarely have opportunities to learn this skillset but are the people best positioned to be user-entrepreneurs.
3. Funding products and programs requires different expertise
In my experience, donor advisors and foundation professionals have stronger backgrounds in programs than products. This leads to some behaviors that I consider mistakes:
When evaluating a project with product and program elements, funders often focus too much on evaluating the program and too little on evaluating the product. This is unfortunate because measuring programs is often slow and costly, but measuring products is often fast and easy.
Funders often underestimate the challenges of getting users for new products.
Funders often underestimate the scalability of successful products. While programs typically scale only with greater funding, in-demand products can spread widely inexpensively (and hence create big cost-effective impact).
Closing questions
What other categories would you add to this list?
Are there worthy programs that are both hard to distribute and hard to measure? Or easy to distribute and easy to measure?
Note: The Product/Program distinction first came up for me in a conversation with Yoni Landau of Movement Labs.
If a campaign is paying for and using WarChest, that’s a near-certain sign that the product is creating value for the movement.
Programs typically pay for their distribution, so it’s not as much of an unknown. But measuring the impact of programs is often complex and expensive. The “gold standard” is randomized controlled trials, but these are challenging for many types of impactful programs such as relational organizing.
For example, Indivisible’s project “Neighbor 2 Neighbor” (N2N) recruits volunteers to visit neighbors to build relationships and share voting information. Like a product, N2N only works if it can obtain users (the volunteers who visit their neighbors). Like a program, measuring N2N’s impact on the neighbors requires complex measurement.