Every now and then, as product or project managers, we find ourselves drowning in tasks. It’s like we’re steering a ship solo, even when there is a great team behind us. Probably, it’s like how athletes must feel, pushing themselves to their limits, often alone in their pursuit. So, there’s one sport that captures this essence perfectly: racing. Succeeding in product and project management takes the same attributes as racing.
Picture this: you’re in a racing car, maybe a sleek GT touring car or a nimble single-seater. The thrill kicks in. Now, imagine you’re not on your usual commute but on a race track. Ahead of you stretches about 5 kilometers of twists, turns, and challenges, surrounded by sand and grass. Adrenaline surges. It’s qualifying day, your mission: to ace a single lap and secure a top spot for tomorrow’s race. Your team is counting on you. Doubt and fear creep in.
You might be wondering at this point, what does car racing have to do with product or project management?
Keeping a product irresistible or a project on course demands effort. Product managers must ensure their product shines, customers are delighted, and unnecessary features stay out of sight. For project managers, it’s a constant battle to hit milestones, keep the team focused, and manage the budget wisely. Balancing long-term goals with day-to-day details is what makes managing products and projects akin to racing.
Let’s delve into what it takes to steer a product, drawing parallels with racing.
Strategic focus
Let’s go back to our quali-day. As soon as you start warming up your tires and become familiar with the race track, you look ahead and carefully assess each turn. Your objective is to find the best racing line and maybe find points off the line with more grip so that you can outperform your competitors. During this crucial initial phase, you are in scouting mode, without pushing.
Similarly, a product manager usually needs to address the so-called business context. This includes the competitive landscape, technological trends, and, most importantly, customer needs and jobs to be done. So, product managers need to know what they are up against before even starting to draft new product features.
In the same way, mapping stakeholders and creating the business case are not activities that a project manager can postpone to the execution phase of a project. Most of these activities need to take place during the initiation phase.
Dealing with Uncertainty
Differently from other sports, for a racing driver, there are a lot of things that might go wrong during a race weekend. Car problems, unpredictable weather, unexpected accidents, wrong pit-stop strategy, and so on. Formula 1 history is full of events where unpredictability played a great role in determining the outcome of a race. Usually, racing teams have at least a plan B at every race, so should product and project teams have.
Regardless of how well a product manager knows the market and the product, choosing which customer segment to target or deciding what feature to prioritize higher sometimes requires lots of assumptions and approximations. But the team cannot wait until the stars align. It is important to move towards product-market fit without wasting too many resources. Having a single option to pursue without looking at other possibilities is a recipe for failure. Analyzing a few hypotheses, choosing the most reasonable one, validating it in front of different customer segments, and moving to the next hypothesis is a better way to move forward by learning. Similarly, in cases where product-market fit is not yet reached, strict long-term roadmaps and business plans do not help. Story mapping is a better way to sketch the way forward in conditions of uncertainty.
The same goes for a project manager. Once plans are made, there is no guarantee that things will unfold exactly as planned. Some uncertainty can be foreseen, some other cannot. Most likely, there will be unplanned events that will impact the outcome. It is important to be flexible from the outset and foresee different possible outcomes.
Consistency
In racing, driving quickly in a consistent way can make the difference between winning or losing, even without the fastest car. To be consistent, a driver must execute each maneuver with pinpoint accuracy, hitting apexes and braking points with split-second timing, and do it over and over again without letting the tires degrade too quickly. Usually, the most experienced drivers are the ones that can pull almost the same lap time at every lap. They become like a clock.
Likewise, a product manager must meticulously plan product releases, carefully assess customer feedback, and ensure timely delivery to meet market demand. Similarly, a project manager needs to meet milestones and deliveries on time and budget over and over again. With experience and practice, despite everything that can go wrong, products and project managers become better and better at being consistent. In fact, the difference between a junior and a senior manager is probably most in the consistency side of things. Experienced product and project managers have hands-on experience with established management frameworks, can deal with team issues better, and smooth things out better. The benefit for stakeholders is that outcomes become more predictable.
Simplification
There is a line that every road racing driver knows. Even an amateur kart driver should know it. It is the “racing line”. All things equal, the racing line is the optimal line to race a lap. Usually, rookie drivers use the racing line to learn a new track, and pro drivers use it as a baseline to experiment with new lines and bring the car to the limit. Since the racing line is the line to be faster, it is usually quite smooth. When you see it, you get it.
Similarly, in product management, keeping products simple brings many advantages. Especially in the early phases. It allows bringing only the core features in front of the customer. Keeping a product simple reduces development effort and keeps users engaged. So, simplification is the racing line for product success.
The “racing line” analogy has also to do with project management, where projects with simple organizations have better communication between team members and result in higher chances of success. Other suggestions to promote simplicity in projects are keeping communication rigorous but free from jargon, letting status update meetings stick to the agenda, reducing work that does not align with the project strategy, and so on.
One last lap
Even though this post does not suggest to turn up to the office in a helmet, succeeding in product and project management seems to take similar qualities as racing. So, when chaos looms, remember the words of Formula 1 world champion Mario Andretti: “If everything seems under control, you are just not going fast enough“.