Comms and Product

The most important distinction between working in the government and working in the tech industry is that the former is biased toward consensus and the latter is biased toward action. Both models are actually appropriate for their respective domain. The government has a different obligation with respect to risk and participation in decision-making than does private industry. While this is pretty self-evident, it can be very difficult for someone from one tradition to adapt to the other. And both could learn something useful from considering the other’s approach.

The biggest similarity between government and the tech industry is less obvious. It is that the function of Comms in a place like the White House is most closely related to the function of Product Management in a traditional tech company. These functions appear wildly different but understanding that they play an analogous role was a big lesson for me.

In my time in tech, Comms was often viewed, incorrectly, as synonymous with PR and it played a strategic, but less central, role in the product development process. This was especially true in the beforetime when the tech industry eschewed (to their detriment) the virtue of brand marketing, believing that “The Product is the best brand advertisement.” Comms was also less central when tech journalism was less developed and the companies had to answer fewer hard questions.

But in the White House, Comms controls a number of key functions. By analogy, traditional tech product management contains three disciplines: project management, product design and product strategy. And this is roughly maps to the roles of traditional White House Comms. They control the schedule; Comms folks love to produce a content calendar and a tick-tock. They control the nature of the rollout; whether it is a written statement, a Rose Garden announcement, a speech on a trip or something more “creative” (which historically meant some weird digital idea.) And, when done well, you have a senior advisor in a Comms role who drives an overall strategy in terms of audience, impact and goals.

Within these disciplines, both in tech and government, it is unusual to find someone who is equally talented at all three. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I am weakest at both product design and rollout ideas. You need a real creative tastemaker to do those functions well. And with both product strategy and overall comms strategy, there is a tension in creating a good framework which articulates goals and yet is flexible enough to adapt to new information. In particular, Comms in the White House is hard to do on a long timeline because of the day-to-day eventizing of the President’s schedule and the imposition of real-world demands.

Now you might think that the various policy functions in the White House control the nature of the policy and this is somewhat true. But often, both the decision to work on a given policy and especially to determine how it is discussed publicly is a Comms-led choice. In this way, the policy functions in a White House are more analogous to the engineering function in tech. You can tell this is true because the policy folks are often the ones being asked “So when will that be done?”