Lessons from a Pro: Insights from Peter Croce

This week I interviewed Peter Croce. Peter is the Product Lead at Probable Futures, a climate-literacy initiative, and has previously PM’d at Postlight and New York Ave.

⚠️ Key Takeaways

💡How Peter thinks: listen and pay attention; translate across disciplines; find product-empowered environments or teach to create them

🛫 Journey to the space: BD at Americorps → PM at digital design agency → PM at digital solutions company → Product Lead at climate-literacy initiative

😁 What excites Peter: the great outdoors; finding fun and fulfilling ways to live consistently with the climate

👋🏽 Quick Intro!

Communicating a vision is an important responsibility of any product manager. In order to establish a shared vision, PMs can employ a variety of tools and visualizations. Dashboards, infographics, presentations, and more can all be effective communicators. As the saying goes, “a picture is worth a 1000 words,” and that holds especially true in climate.

Climate literacy is an understanding of your influence on climate and climate's influence on you and society, according to the NOAA. With the proliferation of platforms like LinkedIn, Substack, and Medium, there are lots of places to find seemingly credible and presumably clear information on climate. An increasingly prominent issue is a lack of clear information. Peter Croce is using his product experience to help build a source of truth to support climate literacy.

Peter is the Product Lead at Probable Futures, a climate literacy initiative making the climate problem understandable and digestible to everyone. His previous experiences working at Americorps on environmental certification and product at Postlight and New York Ave round out almost a decade of experience solving product problems. Peter received his BS and BA from the University of Florida, where he studied Psychology and Criminology.

🎙️ The Full Story

💡 How has Peter’s experiences affected the way he thinks about and approaches problems?

To break into an industry, learn the jargon

Peter started in business development and had to break into product through unconventional means. He was able to take advantage of an internal opportunity to become a PM, but for that reason, he did not go through a formal training program. It was through trial-by-fire when looking for new opportunities that he realized he needed to gain a specific type of knowledge.

“In product, there’s jargon.” It was learning this jargon that helped him effectively communicate all the experience he had to recruiters and potential employers. Podcasts were his poison of choice.

“After I had been in [this] job for a little while, I had the skills but didn’t know what language to use to show I had the skills. When I was ready to go and interview for other jobs in product management, I listened to a whole lot of podcasts to try and absorb all the language.”

As for specific recommendations, Peter listens to 99% Invisible and My Climate Journey. To learn product jargon, he listened to This is Product Management.

Product-empowered vs. product-disempowered

After working in product in varied capacities, Peter has noticed an important characteristic to look for when considering joining or making your own product team: look for product-empowerment.

“Disempowered teams exist in organizations that hand down directives to the PMs. It feels a lot like being told, ‘here’s the solution; go make it.’”

These environments are extremely limiting to the entire cross-functional product team’s ability to make decisions, learn, and adapt to market and customer needs.

“Empowered teams, [on the other hand], are told to go ‘figure out the solution.’”

It is this leeway in which he has experienced the most growth as a PM. Product-disempowered teams are not always bad — they can foster great learning opportunities for new PMs who need lots of direction and guidance. But that same guidance can be achieved in a product-empowered environment just the same as long as there is product leadership i.e. senior PMs who can mentor the junior PMs as they go.

Along with mentoring, more senior PMs can also teach their fellow leaders in other departments about the fruitful benefits of empowering product teams and how to do so.

Often, “disempowered teams exist because leaders don’t know another way,” he said.

🛫 Peter’s journey

Peter started his career in Americorps, where he worked on environmental certification.

Peter found product when he joined an organization that “really needed a product manager, but didn’t know what it was at the time.” His transition to tech was intentional; he saw developing skills in tech to be a way to “get a seat at the table for impact.”

As a PM, Peter worked at New York Ave, a digital marketing agency, before working at Postlight, a digital design and solutions company. It was there that he started working with Probable Futures, first while staffed on it as a project at Postlight, and now as Product Lead.

Peter has experience in both climate and technology, and he notices a common misconception about climate as an industry. As Product Lead at Probable Futures, he’s especially tuned in to this phenomenon.

“Climate is not an industry. It’s going to be a part of everyone’s job in every industry. Not only will there be people working on climate, but the rest will see climate seep into their jobs and indirectly affect their decision making.”

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

Next year

At Probable Futures, they interact with a wide audience. There’s been a surge in interest in understanding climate and the current state of things, especially by “educators and leaders of businesses and other organizations.” Peter says people want “clear information,” and he’s excited by the opportunity to provide clarity through Probable Futures.

Next decade

As challenges posed by the changing climate progress, Peter sees we will have to “find ways to live that are consistent with the climate.” He sees how climate actions have historically been portrayed as restrictive, and also that the post-pandemic world where people make lifestyle choices to live their best lives presents an opportunity: we can choose to live differently, in ways that are more fun and fulfilling, and also more climate-aware.

‼️ Learn More

If you are interested in climate or would like to learn more about Peter Croce, please reach out to Peter on LinkedIn. You can also check out the Probable Futures website and public platform.

A huge thank you to Peter Croce 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!