“Praxeology”, “Ontology” & how it applies to you!?

In spite of learning, gaining the experience have you ever had really very basic questions about few domain-related concepts? Well! That may have to do with praxeology & ontology.

Question Stubs

In recent times I’ve come across many of these questions (related to “product management” - which kind of ought to go without saying if you’ve been reading my articles) from aspirants, APMs, JPMs, PMs & Sr. PMs that all point to some or the other troubles they seem to be facing over their regular workflow.

When some of them questions are pretty deep, requiring a whole lot of application of concepts, deep structured thoughts as relevant after getting an understanding of the space / problem one is operating in & seem to require an iterative process taking it from envisioning / ideating, brainstorming, designing, experimenting & taking them ahead to the markets in an aim to look for learnings that could well be factored in to incrementally improve the product offering, some look pretty basic which of course ought to be perfectly fine as there is nothing wrong in asking questions to people who you think have the capability to solve them (well at least guide / set you off in the right direction / put you on the right path to getting there slowly if not solve for them).

But, when analyzed deeply some questions could point to a lack of proper structure & immersion in the course content & practical learning which gets all the more worrisome when they say they have taken up courses and seem to carry basic doubts.

Here is a quaint selection of them (collated from across all channels I use to communicate with product people, mentors, peers, organizations, teams on a regular basis).

Call it a force of habit, but applying product thinking & an acute sense empathy at my end over analyzing each of those question stubs gets it all down to:

The real worry is when the answers to these questions above hint at an incomplete / flawed learning process leaving lot of gaps in their understanding overall which is sad.

“And when product management can be understood by reading a book, one can’t build a mastery over it until one puts it into regular practice, gets down to facing ground realities over how most of those theoretical concepts actually don’t work on the face of it, would need some bit of mending, fine tuning, optimizing based on the situations before they could be called productive”.

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Praxeology & Ontology

We’ve all heard it time and again as to how being more closer to the real world can help one think and change one’s approach to becoming more practical and it has been proven to us right from school, isn’t it?

“To build a praxeological approach towards learning one has to make the content over a course / texts to be more ontological”.

Let’s take that one step at a time.

Now! Firstly, to the definition of “PRAXEOLOGY”.

“Praxeology is the theory of human action, based on the notion that humans engage in purposeful behavior, contrary to reflexive behavior and other unintentional behavior”.

Let’s try and build a deeper understanding of it now.

Praxeology could be any / all of these as applied to various situations: -

Here’s a pictorial representation of how that orientation in thinking about the rigorousness required, the value addition, the purpose (Why?) & the dynamism required could get one to change his whole approach of learning from something that could be termed “passiveness” to break into “pragmatism”.

And, when one talks of learning, one can’t ignore the close correlation to the course content / syllabus which brings us to another term that is “ONTOLOGY”.

“Ontology is the categorization of concepts / entities and how they share the properties and coexist at a fundamental level which in itself could be infinite given a scope & time”.

💡PRO TIP: The very reason why some subjects are perceived as pretty dry is because the learners fail to understand the properties & correlation at a basic level that persist between entities that go in to defining the concepts of a domain, which is to say – they overlook the ontology part.

Even an attempt to understand ontology of any branch of science / domain / subdomain deeply can’t be thought of as possible without it being broken down to these aspects: -

Observe the figure closely.

Notice how those four demarcated sections in the figure look incomplete at their respective far ends. That’s symbolic of how those entities could all be infinite in their own way. Also, as a learner the very fact that you say you’ve learnt something ought to mean that you find yourself at that quadruple intersection of all these 4 aspects as shown above.

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Application to Product Courses

Now, with all that understanding of concepts spun around effective learning methods, its time to dive into its application to the courses curated for product management.

Going back to the image featured at top of this article, we saw how aspirants majorly carried a few questions that seemed to be pretty basic and yet very common as well.

Let’s consider one such question that talks about how one has enrolled for a product management course but still seems to carry this doubt and wants to know whether a “scrum master certification” is mandatory to becoming a PM.

One of the primary reasons someone gets these type questions of self-doubt is when one doesn’t understand the domain thoroughly or is unclear about the number of possibilities and options that behold him and obviously not being able to clearly choose one particular path over the lot of it.

Also, not discounting the fact how that person mentioned had joined a course where one of the basic needs of it ought to have been helping build clarity to aspirants over removing such mental blocks and preparing them better for their futures.

“Courses ought to be designed factoring in the praxeological nature of humans in making it pragmatic allowing people to easily correlate and they ought to consider the ontological aspect as well so as to spell out the entities and build an understanding of how they all come together towards and explaining it as a concept”.

When an experienced product person understands this the best, there ought to be no denying the inclusion of this over any course / mentorship who is training aspirants towards becoming future PMs.

“There is no single clear path towards becoming a PM & no clear advantage that any prior experiences could carry over one taking up that role in product and the reason behind that is the multivariate & multifaceted nature of the job itself”.

So, product sense, product thinking, analytics, strategy, dynamics of product growth et. al. isn’t supposed to be learnt as definitions but it is their understanding & the practical application of those that ought to be the pivotal focus of any PM course.

Also, courses have to root this fact into all the aspirants that “there’s a noticeable gap between what you read in class / theory as opposed to what you may have to deal with in practice over regular jobs and workflow”. So, the focus ought to be on preparing aspirants for a continuous upskilling, learning process & making them more aware about these pragmatic angles thus removing the vulnerability to as a large extent as plausible.

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Conclusion

With an enormous interest in product management especially over the last 2 years, we have seen how the space itself seem to have evolved on its head with tons of courses being curated & offered (even the best B-schools across the world are into playing this game now).

But, if you are an aspirant who’s planning on that next big switch to a role in product from whatever it is that you’re doing currently, you’d better get to understand this straight. Courses and even the ones that are ontologically superior (especially ones that pin on a certification) may be a great way to gain knowledge but you’re still obviously going to be missing out largely on the praxeological bit - the pragmatic aspect of it all. So, choose wisely & choose this path only if you are up for a prolonged & continuous learning curve.

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