Lessons from a Pro: Insights from Joni Cooper

This week, I interviewed Joni Cooper. Joni is a Product lead on the Technology & Impact Team at Schmidt Futures and previously was a PM for both pymetrics and the US Digital Service’s Healthcare team.

12 Apr

⚠️ Key Takeaways

💡How Joni thinks: rapid context-switching requires keeping it simple; mission has to be at the core of a project; PMing skills can be honed way before a PM position

🛫 Journey to the space: operations & PM at the US Digital Service → PM at AI-based career and talent platform → Product lead on Schmidt Futures’ Technology & Impact team, mentoring others to grow as PMs

😁 What excites Joni: new wave of interest at the intersection of product and social impact; how emerging tech can used for impact; more opportunities in impact available to technologists earlier on in their careers

👋🏽 Quick Intro!

The emergence of social impact in product thinking is both exciting and motivating. However, due to its newness, there are only a few individuals with expertise and experience in this area. Joni Cooper is one of these select few. She has had the privilege of driving innovation at the US Digital Service during its early days, leading an engineering team as a PM at pymetrics at a young age, and currently serving as a leader within the Technology & Impact Team at Schmidt Futures (SF). Recently, she was featured in a Product School article called “Product Management for Social Impact”, where she shared her perspective and a few frameworks on the subject.

She identified product as her desired medium early on because of her belief in product as a lever for change, a common theme we see in SIP’s guests. With experience starting with operations and PM at the USDS to leading an engineering team as a PM at a fast-paced SI startup, Joni Cooper knows what it takes to drive impact in product. Now she is using her vast knowledge and experiences to mentor younger PMs and enable other teams at SF to increase their impact.

Her experience in educating product managers at this intersection has given Joni unique insight into what skills are crucial, and that makes the insights uncovered in this article all the more impactful. Joni received her BS from Northwestern where she studied Political Science and International Studies.

🎙️ The Full Story

💡 How has Joni’s experiences affected the way she thinks about and approaches problems?

Keep it simple

Joni has not only experienced rapid context switching herself, and is now tasked with mentoring younger PMs to do the same.

In order to be proficient, Joni falls back on a mantra: “What is the problem you are trying to solve, and who are the users? That’s always where I start the conversation.”

Joni has seen the most friction in a new project coming from not knowing where to start. That’s where skilled PMs can really provide value. For her, as simple as it sounds, this mantra works.

Mission at the core

A common thread between Joni’s successes has been keeping the “mission at the core” of what she does. Although this can seem obvious with projects in social impact, it is a skill that requires honing.

Joni explains, “so many people use and throw around the word impact, but that can mean many different things. Contextualizing what you mean by impact and making sure you have the right mechanisms to track and measure it [comes first].”

PMing starts before the title

When Joni took on her first PM role at the USDS, she quickly realized that she had already developed some of the skills that would make her successful in this field.

She had been “applying the mindset already in an operations capacity — learning about stakeholder managements, how to communicate with executives, and working with different audiences like engineers and policy folks.”

This start was crucial to her successful product career, and understanding why it was useful can help us replicate that for ourselves. A common theme for Joni prior to her officially becoming a PM was working in high impact environments. Her operations role at the USDS, specifically in a chief of staff capacity, gave her the opportunity to work on product skills well before she started her product career.

🛫 Joni’s journey

Joni first found product from “admiring product managers [she worked with] from afar.” Their work, as she remembers, was strategic, operational, and partnerships-oriented. After making a couple good impressions, she was picked to be a PM in Healthcare in the USDS.

She recalls: “what enabled me to have a turning point [to break into product] was existing in an organization that truly believed in product as a lever for change.” It was a “big deal” at the time for a team in government to be advocating for the hiring of product managers and the discipline overall. Though some folks in government were already playing PM roles, they were doing so without the formal title as the concept of product management was still “nascent and not as familiar.”

She sought out her next opportunity at pymetrics, an AI-based job matching and career development platform. Joni is most energized when she puts herself in different environments with radically different learning opportunities. In the startup world, she saw an opportunity to “wear lots of hats,” and to navigate leading product in a resource-constrained environment.

She has now come back to NY to serve on the Technology & Impact team at Schmidt Futures. She describes role as, “empowering teams at Schmidt Futures, our grantees, and other partners to leverage tech in a way that furthers societal impact.”

She articulated her goals in her role in an especially memorable way.

“Support is one point in time. The most powerful efforts are those that sustain that impact over achieving external figures.” She calls this “capacity building; empowering others to affect change and build the skill sets needed to sustain that impact.”

What I find most impactful about Joni’s journey is how effectively she’s able to articulate and utilize the learning from each of her previous roles.

“Each experience taught me something different about product management. In government, I learned how to understand my impact on the end user. In a startup, I gained the ability to iterate quickly and work in a resource constrained environment. At Schmidt Futures, I’m learning how to empower others to flex their product muscles.”

😁 What is Joni most excited about in the next year? Next decade?

Next year

After posting her article with the Product School, the reception was way more and way more positive than she had anticipated.

That recognition makes Joni confident that this is the ideal time for “community building…so that people can come together to solve and better get to know one another and this product and social impact ecosystem.”

Joni is also keenly observing “to what degree emerging technology naturally integrate into impact-oriented causes.” She says it is clear which technologies will be good for humanity, and which ones might take some effort to get there.

Next decade

When she was attending university, Joni remembers that there was practically “no impact organizer that recruited out of university.” She was able to navigate that lack of opportunity, but exposure earlier on in one’s career can make a huge difference later on. Thankfully, she sees that it is changing. She is excited by how many more opportunities there are for younger people to get exposed to opportunities in social impact early on in their careers. It is this progression that can lay the groundwork for real change going forward.

‼️ Learn More

If you are interested in product management for social impact or would like to learn more about Joni Cooper, please reach out to Joni on LinkedIn. For those interested in her article published by the Product School, you can read more about it here.

A huge thank you to Joni Cooper for contributing to our community! I am always trying to make this content more useful and impactful. If you have any thoughts or suggestions, I would love to know!