Leader Spotlight: Applying a philosopher’s mindset to product with Michael Thornton

Michael Thornton is Director, Principal Product Manager at Merck & Co., where he helps teams develop the tools to make cutting-edge therapeutics. He began his career in food systems, managing farmers' markets and working as a cheesemonger, before transitioning into tech via a product internship at a fintech startup that was later acquired by MasterCard. After working in tech for several years, Michael earned a PhD in the philosophy of technology from the University of Cambridge, then went on to serve as Head of Product at BIOS Health, a neurotech company pioneering precision therapies.

In this conversation, Michael reflects on what it means to truly understand a product space, how his academic background informs his leadership style, and why he hires for durable skills like empathy, curiosity, and clarity of thought.

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From cheesemonger to product leader

You have a BA in Religious Studies and a PhD in History and Philosophy of Science & Technology. How did you get into product management?

I didn’t know product management was a job that anyone had until, essentially, I had the job. In college, I didn't know what I was going to do, hence the religious studies degree. While I was there, I helped run the local farmers' markets. I figured, well, I don't know what I'm going to do, but sustainable food seems interesting. After graduating, I got a job as a cheesemonger for the summer, and then that fall, my girlfriend and I drove cross-country and stopped when we hit San Francisco.

My first role in California was running several dozen farmers' markets around the Bay Area. It was a valuable early career experience, partly because it was a toxic workplace. I realized it didn’t matter how much you cared about the mission if the people you worked with made your life miserable.

Fleeing the farmers’ markets, I briefly worked as a screenwriter before applying for a product management internship to help pay the bills, a job I got in part because the person interviewing me liked movies and wanted to talk about them. I couldn’t have cared less about the actual work at first; I was transcribing the numbers on the back of gift cards for most of my day. But I really enjoyed the kind, curious people I worked with. Ever since, I’ve prioritized the team I work with over everything else.

While the mission didn’t inspire me, I stayed there for four years — far longer than I made it running farmers’ markets. In that time, I worked my way up the product ladder, learned from a lot of great PMs, and experienced an acquisition when the company was picked up by MasterCard. Eventually, I wanted to do something more meaningful, so my wife and I moved to England and did our graduate work at Cambridge.

How did your time at Cambridge shape your path forward in product?

I combined my undergraduate interest in theology and philosophy with my experience in tech and ended up studying the philosophy of technology. My work explored the intersection of digital ethics and the philosophy of public health, which ultimately enabled me to pivot from fintech to things that felt more interesting and impactful to me.

Following Cambridge, I became the first product hire at a Cambridge startup called BIOS Health, which was building therapies using precision neuromodulation devices. After five years there, including several as head of product, I recently transitioned to Merck. Again, it’s a space that feels very meaningful to me in terms of helping scientists build life-saving therapies.

While perhaps unexpected, I believe that both theology and philosophy have served me well as a product manager. Both fields teach you how to think clearly, act ethically, and communicate persuasively. At the time, I wasn’t thinking about how those fields might help me be a better product manager. I was just following my curiosity. But in hindsight, I’d say those are probably three of the most crucial skills to being effective in the role.

Skills of a ‘durable’ PM

What qualities do you look for when hiring PMs?

I look for what Seth Godin calls “durable skills.” These used to be called soft skills, but I prefer “durable” because they persist throughout a person’s life, and “soft” sounds pejorative. The qualities I’m looking for include curiosity, strong communication skills (both oral and written), a willingness to learn, and the ability to take feedback.

Ideally, I want people who have some ability for self-reflection and a skeptical mind – someone who doesn’t just accept conventional wisdom. I also value empathy, authenticity, logical thinking, and taste. Taste may sound a bit vague, but it overlaps with what people often mean by “product sense.” Does someone have an intuitive sense of what works and what doesn’t? What language is clever versus clunky? What’s an attractive design and what’s not?

A big one for me is facility with complexity. I don’t need someone to have worked in a given domain before, but can they show me somewhere, academically or professionally, that they’ve navigated a complicated landscape? That gives me confidence that they can transfer those skills to a new space.

And finally, cultural fit, but not in the “will they blend in” sense. I mean: what is our current culture, where do we want it to go, and how will this person shape it? In some cases, we want someone who won’t disrupt a great culture. In other cases, the team may be complacent, and we need someone who brings a different energy or perspective. As for what I don’t look for: I don’t prioritize technical, domain, or process expertise. Those are nice to have, but very secondary.

That’s because those things are teachable. It’s hard to teach someone to write. It’s easy to teach someone to make a roadmap. If a candidate isn’t empathetic by the time they get to me, I probably won’t be able to change that. But if they don’t know how a certain database works, I trust they can figure it out — especially if they’ve shown curiosity, a desire to learn, and an openness to feedback. If you have those, the rest tends to follow.

What’s lost when organizations filter for technical credentials over durable skills like empathy and curiosity?

If you're only hiring very accomplished engineers or people with highly technical knowledge, it's like having a toolbox where all your tools are screwdrivers. That’s fine, as long as you need a screwdriver. But there’s a huge diversity of problems out there. Some are technical. Some, in my case, are scientific. Oftentimes, they’re ethical. Sometimes they’re about complex social dynamics.

While the engineer might be better suited for highly technical problems, you can’t tell me they’re better suited than a sociologist for navigating social complexity, or better than the English major at handling difficult communication. Even the much-maligned art history major might be the person who has impeccable taste.

And there’s a practical angle to this, too. If companies want to fight over each other outbidding for extremely shiny MIT graduates, we can moneyball this – and I’m very happy to pick up an Egyptologist for 50 cents on the dollar.

I’ve definitely made the mistake in the opposite direction — hiring someone with deep domain expertise or technical skills that the company believed were critical to what we were trying to accomplish in the next six to twelve months, even though they were a bit lacking on some of those durable skills.

Because we perceived expertise as a necessity at the time, we moved forward, not necessarily against my better judgment, but definitely looking past some red or orange flags. Almost immediately, the cultural impact was fairly devastating, and we spent the next 12 months trying to contain the fallout.

Working in very technical and scientific domains (BIOS Health was a neuroscience company, and Merck builds therapies across a wide range of areas), I’ve found that a great way to find PMs is to look internally. If you can find a scientist or an engineer who can write, has good social skills, and is tired of looking through a microscope, there is a pretty good chance you can train them to be a successful PM.

Building the right thing and the right team

Can you talk about your notion of work as a pilgrimage?

Something I think about a lot is this idea from the poet David Whyte that work is a form of pilgrimage. There’s a dual nature to the act of product development — you’re building the product, but you’re also building yourself in the process.

"To seek out beauty in our work is to make a pilgrimage of our labors, to understand that the consummation of work lies not only in what we have done, but who we have become while accomplishing the task."

— David Whyte, “Crossing the Unknown Sea”

That really ties into the philosophy of well-being and choosing what’s worth dedicating your life to. I was probably drawn to the concept because of my background in religious studies and my interest in the notion of pilgrimage. But it’s also one of those ideas that captures your imagination – and as my old PhD supervisor might say, it has the added benefit of quite possibly being true.

In my career, I’ve worked on many experimental products that never saw the light of day because they were at the frontier of science or technology. That could be demoralizing; you pour years into a thing that ultimately vanishes. But that’s only true if you’re focused on the product. Looking at the other half of the idea, I realized I was also being built through my work. So it is not a total loss if the product never sees the light of day because I’m going to see the light of day. That’s been really meaningful to me, especially as someone who’s lived right at the technological and scientific frontier. The two products of work — the thing you make and the person you become — are something I think about a lot when it comes to people management and how I build team culture.

What does it look like when a PM truly understands a problem space?

Practically speaking, I want any PM responsible for an area to be able to stand up to the equivalent of a dissertation viva. You write your dissertation, and then you stand for an oral examination. Professors ask you questions about your work until they are satisfied.

That might sound like a high bar, but it’s actually very doable. When you’re doing a PhD, you’re really nervous about your viva, but then it starts, and you realize you know more than the examiners because you’ve spent five years on this narrow topic, and all they’ve done is read your dissertation.

So in product, that means you should be able to answer any question a reasonably knowledgeable person has about your area. Not every question will have an answer; many won’t. That’s why we build and test. But if there is an answer, I expect the PM to be able to thoughtfully explain it.

It’s about being able to update your mental model as you learn. You see a loose thread, and you follow it. I don’t want someone to just give me a process map or a roadmap. I want to have a real back-and-forth where we tease out what’s happening until we understand it.

Another lesson from the PhD: if your topic is small or esoteric enough, it’s actually not that hard to become one of the world’s experts fairly quickly. It’s similar in product. Sometimes you're working on a narrow product that only your team owns. If you spend a few weeks digging into it thoughtfully, you probably are one of the most knowledgeable people in the world on that topic.

And with true understanding comes the ability to communicate clearly. There’s a curve where you know a little, and you explain it simply. Then you learn more and use a lot of jargon. Then you master it, and you can explain it in one sentence. I’m reminded of that Kurt Vonnegut quote: “Any scientist who couldn’t explain what they do to an 8-year-old is a charlatan.”

You can often tell someone doesn’t understand something when they’re just parroting AI summaries, industry white papers, or conventional wisdom. Understanding is being able to go past that.

Philosophy, ethics, and the limits of AI

Why should anyone hire a philosopher to be a PM?

I’ll tell a story. In the last year of my PhD, I was walking down the street having a panic attack because I suddenly couldn’t remember anything I’d learned in the past several years. Then I felt this weird sense of calm, because I realized a philosophy PhD isn’t about filling a shoebox with knowledge. It’s not like afterward you get to open up the box and see all the facts and tidbits you’ve learned. Rather, a philosophy PhD is about transforming your mind into a precise thinking machine. You come out of it as someone who can think clearly and intuitively act ethically. When an argument is built on false premises or something ethically shady happens, you often don’t have to sit and analyze it – it’s just in your physiology. You feel it right away. That’s the product being built.

Besides teaching you how to think clearly, philosophy requires you to write precisely and persuasively. As a result of my academic work and time in product management, I’ve unintentionally spent my entire adult life learning how to make persuasive arguments. I was talking to a direct report once about how to improve in that area, and they asked me for resources. And I was like, “Honestly, I don’t have a simple answer. Every choice I’ve made since I was 18 has been about learning how to do this.”

Philosophy also encourages curiosity, creativity, and imagination. A common tool is the thought experiment — imagining things that aren’t real but illustrate a point. And it promotes a sense of healthy skepticism. Not the kind of skepticism where you’re pedantically poking holes in what everyone says, but to be a good, creative product manager, you need to be willing to pull apart the fallacies that might be inherent in conventional wisdom.

Those traits — the creativity, the skepticism, the clarity of thought — are what help you move past the obvious explanation, the obvious solution, past the plausible answers to the right answer. Good product managers are able to sort through the morass of plausible answers to find the right answer, and you can only do that with deep understanding.

That’s one of the reasons why AI currently has limitations in product management. AI is a plausible answer machine; it gives you tons and tons of plausible answers immediately. In some ways, it’s tremendously helpful, but in other ways, it complicates the problem because I don’t need a plausible answer. I need the right answer.

Now, you do have to pair those traits with a bias toward action. Philosophers can get lost in thought. But if you find someone who can think like that and also execute, you’ve got the makings of a very effective PM.

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