Classrooms are microcosms of the world: diverse, unpredictable, and endlessly complex. As an educator, I’ve spent years navigating these spaces, watching students wrestle with problems, confront their own limitations, and find surprising paths to success. What’s most striking isn’t the content of the lessons—it’s how the design of the environment shapes the outcome.

For product leaders, there’s a lesson in this. Great products, like great classrooms, aren’t just about delivering outcomes. They’re about creating spaces where people feel empowered to explore, struggle, and grow. This requires a shift in thinking—not just about what we build, but why and how we build it.

Start with the real problem

In education, the most effective solutions don’t come from focusing on symptoms. They come from understanding the root challenges. A student struggling to complete assignments might appear unmotivated, but the real issue could be gaps in foundational knowledge or fear of failure. The teacher’s role is to dig deeper, identifying barriers and designing experiences that help the student overcome them.

Product leaders face a similar challenge. Users often articulate problems in surface-level terms: “This takes too long,” or “It’s too complicated.” But these are symptoms, not causes. The real question is: What’s driving this frustration? What unseen obstacle is holding them back?

Empathy is the foundation of great design. It requires looking past what users say they need and uncovering what they truly need.

Friction isn’t failure

In the classroom, struggle is not the enemy of learning—it’s the engine. A well-designed math problem, for example, isn’t about arriving at the correct answer quickly. It’s about creating moments where students wrestle with uncertainty, connect ideas, and ultimately understand the concept at a deeper level.

For products, the same principle applies. Not all friction is bad. The question isn’t how to remove every obstacle, but how to design purposeful friction that adds value. Does the process help users think critically or make better decisions? Does it build confidence by guiding them to success instead of handing it to them?

Purposeful friction transforms products from mere tools into experiences that challenge and empower users. It’s what turns passive engagement into active growth.

Balance consistency with adaptability

Every classroom operates on a delicate balance between structure and flexibility. Rules and routines create predictability, which helps students focus and feel secure. But rigidity stifles creativity and ignores individual needs. A teacher’s job is to find that sweet spot, adapting to students’ energy, questions, and unexpected challenges without losing sight of the day’s goals.

Product leaders face a similar balancing act. Consistency builds trust—users rely on familiar patterns and predictable interactions. But adaptability is what makes products truly effective. A one-size-fits-all approach fails to account for the diverse ways people use your product or the evolving needs they bring to it.

The best products are those that scale structure while leaving room for users to adapt the experience to their own context.

Measure what matters

In education, it’s tempting to rely on test scores as the ultimate measure of success. But anyone who’s spent time in a classroom knows those numbers only tell part of the story. The real success is harder to measure: the student who gains confidence, the one who learns to ask better questions, or the one who finally feels seen.

For product leaders, metrics are essential, but they’re not the whole picture. Engagement time, conversion rates, and NPS scores are useful—but what about user confidence? Empowerment? Connection? These are harder to quantify but just as crucial to long-term success.

The challenge is to define success in human terms, not just numerical ones. Metrics should guide decisions, but they should never replace intuition and empathy.

Build for people, not personas

Classrooms remind us of a profound truth: no two people experience the same journey in the same way. Students bring their individual histories, challenges, and aspirations to the table, and teaching them effectively requires acknowledging that diversity.

Product design is no different. Personas and user stories are helpful starting points, but they’re abstractions. Real users are messy, unpredictable, and full of contradictions. Building for them means creating experiences that embrace that complexity—not by over-engineering, but by allowing flexibility, exploration, and personalization.

The goal isn’t to eliminate variability; it’s to design for it.

The human heart of innovation

Classrooms and products have one thing in common: their success depends on people. Whether you’re teaching a room full of students or building the next great app, your work ultimately serves humans with their own hopes, challenges, and goals.

The best products, like the best lessons, aren’t about efficiency or novelty. They’re about empowerment. They’re about creating experiences that inspire curiosity, build trust, and leave people better than they were before.

The future of product leadership lies not in designing faster or shinier tools, but in designing with humanity at the center. Because at the end of the day, it’s not about what you build. It’s about who you build it for—and how they feel when they use it.