The first thing I say in every course I teach is this: there are no wrong answers.
Not as a platitude. As an operational principle. I mean it specifically: I am not looking for the textbook answer. I am not looking for the answer I would give. I am looking for your answer — defended, coherent, and yours.
I want you to express who you are in the way you think about problems. I want you to break the mould of the box that twelve years of standardized education has tried to put you in.
Why silliness is welcome
I open every semester with three puzzles. Not case studies. Puzzles.
The first puzzle is about a casino. Why do slot machines have the layout they do? What does the decision architecture tell you about how the designer thought about the player?
The second is about a product metric. A dashboard is entirely green. Every KPI is up. The product is failing. How?
The third is a question I don't answer. I just ask it, and we sit with it.
The reason I open with puzzles is simple: I need to break the mental posture that most students walk in with. The posture that says: this is a class, there are right answers, I should find the right answer and produce it quickly so the professor knows I'm smart.
That posture is the enemy of learning.
Silliness is welcome in my classroom because silliness is a signal that someone has stopped performing and started thinking. When a student says something that seems ridiculous, I never dismiss it. I follow it. "Interesting — why do you think that? What would have to be true for that to be right?"
Nine times out of ten, the ridiculous answer contains a genuine insight that the "correct" answer doesn't.
Creativity and chaos
My classroom is loud. I design it that way.
Case discussions are not presentations. They're arguments. I want two students who disagree to actually disagree — to push each other, to find where the disagreement is substantive rather than just terminological, to be willing to say "you're wrong and here's why."
I tell students on day one: you will not be graded for agreeing with me. You will be graded for the quality of your reasoning. I have been shown to be wrong by students in my own courses, and I consider that a success.
The chaos is purposeful. Product management is a discipline practiced under ambiguity and incomplete information, with strong-willed stakeholders pulling in different directions. If I give you a calm, orderly case discussion with a clear right answer, I am not preparing you for the job. I am preparing you for an exam that doesn't reflect the job.
The Nietzsche anchor
Nietzsche wrote: he who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.
I think about this often in the context of education. Most curriculum focuses on the how — the frameworks, the methodologies, the tools. I'm interested in the why first. Why does this matter? Why should you care about product metrics? Why is user research not just a nice-to-have but a survival skill?
When students understand the why — not because I've told them but because they've found it themselves, in the discussion, through the puzzle — the how becomes learnable. Frameworks are just scaffolding. The structure they're scaffolding is the why.
My goal in every course is not to transfer knowledge. It's to create the conditions in which insight becomes possible. Everything else — the curriculum, the cases, the structure — is in service of that.