At some point in my PhD, I stopped asking "does this intervention work?" and started asking "what does it mean to live well?" Those are very different questions. The first one is answerable with a control group and a p-value. The second one requires you to have an opinion about human beings.
I didn't realize until years later that product strategy runs on the same rails. Most product work asks "does this feature work?" — does it convert, retain, activate? Those are real questions. But the better question, the one that separates companies that build something lasting from companies that just ship things, is: what does it mean for a person to actually be better off after using this?
That's not a metrics question. It's a philosophy question. And spending years thinking hard about human flourishing turned out to be surprisingly good preparation for it.
The framework that followed me out of academia
Most of my research touched on self-determination theory — the idea that people flourish when three core needs are met: autonomy (the sense that your actions are your own), competence (the sense that you're getting better at things that matter), and relatedness (the sense that you're genuinely connected to others).
These aren't soft concepts. They're the difference between a product someone uses because they have to and one they'd genuinely miss. Frame that through a product lens and you get a useful diagnostic: does this thing make people feel more capable, more in control, more connected? Or does it create dependency, confusion, and isolation dressed up as engagement?
Engagement metrics don't tell you if you made someone's life better. They tell you if you made someone come back.
Those are not the same thing. I've seen products optimize hard for the second while quietly destroying the first. The research background made me allergic to confusing them.
What judgment actually is
The other thing a PhD teaches you — if you're paying attention — is how to sit with a question that doesn't have a clean answer. You read fifty papers that all point in slightly different directions. You hold the tension. You develop an opinion that you're prepared to defend and equally prepared to abandon.
That's what good product judgment looks like in practice. It's not having the right answer faster than everyone else. It's being comfortable with incomplete information long enough to ask better questions — and knowing when you have enough to act.
Most of the bad product decisions I've seen came from collapsing that tension too early. Someone gets uncomfortable with ambiguity and calls it a decision. The research trained me to notice when I was doing that, and to stay in the question a little longer.
The honest part
I went back to school, at least in part, because I was struggling. Anxiety and depression had been with me for most of my adult life, and I'd reached a point where managing them wasn't enough — I wanted to understand them. What does it actually mean to be well? What conditions make that sustainable versus corrosive?
Those questions were personal before they were academic. And they still are. But they also turned out to be the most useful questions I've ever taken into a room. Every team I've worked with has been full of people trying to figure out how to do good work and still feel like themselves. Understanding something about how human beings actually function — not how we wish they did — has made me better at building things with them and for them.
The PhD wasn't a detour. It was, in retrospect, the most direct path I could have taken.