Every Lesson Plan You've Written Was Product Management. You Just Called It Teaching.

I kept a folder of lesson plans from my first year teaching. Dog-eared printouts with highlighter marks and coffee stains. I found them last year whilst clearing out a box I'd been dragging between houses for over a decade.

I opened one. Year 8 Japanese. Food and Cuisine.

And I saw something I'd never seen before.

It wasn't a lesson plan. It was a product roadmap.

The vocabulary problem

When I left teaching and entered tech, I spent months feeling like a fraud. Everyone around me spoke a language I didn't know. Sprint planning. User stories. Agile ceremonies. North star metrics. Retrospectives.

I nodded along in meetings, Googled everything after, and slowly built a vocabulary that made me sound like I belonged.

It took me a humiliating amount of time to realise I already knew all of it. I'd been doing every single one of those things in the classroom. For years. I just used different words.

The translation

Here's what I mean. Take a standard lesson plan and relabel the sections.

Your learning objective is a product goal. Specific, measurable, time-bound. "By the end of this lesson, students will be able to say their favourite country's cuisine." That's a north star metric with a definition of done.

Your prior knowledge check is user research. You're figuring out what your users already know so you can meet them where they are. Product managers call this discovery. You called it the warm-up.

Your scaffolded activities are a sprint plan. You've sequenced tasks from simple to complex, building capability progressively. You've thought about dependencies. You've estimated timing. You've built in checkpoints.

Your differentiation plan is user segmentation. You're designing for multiple user types simultaneously. Students reading at Year 4 level. Students who need movement breaks. Students who finished in ten minutes and need extension. Product teams hire entire departments to do what you did in your head before the bell rang.

Your assessment is product analytics. Formative assessment during the lesson is real-time data. The exit ticket is your conversion metric. The end-of-unit test is your quarterly review.

And your reflection at the bottom of the plan, the bit you filled in at 4pm whilst eating a muesli bar? That's a retrospective. What worked. What didn't. What to change next time.

The scale nobody talks about

Here's the part that still gets me.

A product manager at a tech company might own one product roadmap per quarter. Maybe two if they're senior and across multiple features.

A teacher writes five lesson plans a day. Five roadmaps. For five different audiences. With five different sets of constraints. Every single day.

And they do it for thirty users simultaneously, in real time, with no analytics dashboard, no A/B testing infrastructure, and no engineering team to build the thing. They design it, build it, ship it, test it, and iterate on it. Alone. Before lunch.

When someone tells me teachers don't have "relevant experience," I genuinely don't know what to say. The experience is extraordinary. The problem was never the skills. It was the vocabulary.

Why this matters

If you're a teacher reading this and feeling that Sunday night dread, the one where you love the kids but you're drowning in the system, I want you to hear this clearly.

You are not starting from zero. You are not "just a teacher." You have been building a skillset that the market desperately wants. You've been doing product management, project management, user research, stakeholder alignment, and real-time data analysis every day of your career.

The gap between where you are and where you want to be is not a skills gap. It's a translation gap. And translation is something you can learn in weeks, not years.

You don't need another degree. You don't need to learn to code. You don't need to start over.

You need to see what you've already built.

Go find an old lesson plan. Read it with fresh eyes. And tell me it's not a product roadmap.

I dare you.