Civil War General Ulysses S. Grant on Modern Product Development
Far and away one of my favorite things to do in the world is learn. Aside from being immensely valuable both personally and professionally, learning is just fun for me. Typically, the less I know about something, the more interested I am in learning about it. Sometimes this creates a bit of interest whiplash as I jump from one topic to another, but every once in a while something sticks and it gets added to The List of Things I’m Obsessive About (and subsequently, to things like Medium bios) and I go deep on it. This was exactly what happened with the American Civil War.
A few years ago, I got trapped in a pre-thread-Twitter Twitter thread by Ta-Nehisi Coates about Ulysses Grant which made me realize how little I knew about the American Civil War. This was especially disappointing considering I minored in History in college and wrote an undergrad thesis on insurgent behavior in civil wars. A few weeks after those tweets, I picked up my first biography on Grant which kicked off a fascination with the Civil War. Now, several years later, I have more books about the Civil War than I do on anything else by far (by the way, my wife is pumped about this) and I have dreams of being in the 2060s remake of Ken Burns: The Civil War with a huge beard surrounded by dusty tomes and maps.
It could be because he was my entry point, but Grant has always stood out to me as the figure, and easily the most interesting character, of the war. He was the consummate underdog. Grant went from being somebody who left the Army in relative disgrace in the 1850s to becoming the first Lieutenant General since George Washington by 1864. A West Point graduate, he didn’t strictly adhere to the tactics he studied there and was willing to adapt to changes in technology and circumstances throughout the war. In a time of strong rivalries between the branches, he coordinated and successfully led joint Army-Navy attacks. Though tough and unflinching when he needed to be, he was also very sensitive. Grant didn’t complain (a rarity for Union generals) and just got down to the work at hand.
While he lived 120 years before people were called Product Managers, I’m pretty confident that Grant would have been a great one.
“We must decide.”
Anybody who has ever worked with me knows that I’m a fan of quotes on post-its taped to my monitor. It’s not surprising, then, that there have been Ulysses Grant quotes on my desk for the last few years. There’s one I had up on my old desk for a while that hasn’t made the transition to my new one yet, but it’s easily the Grant quote I (poorly) paraphrase more than any other:
“We must decide. If I am wrong, we shall soon find out and can do the other thing. But not to decide wastes both time and money and may ruin everything.”
There are a lot of folks deciding product strategy today that would benefit from heeding Grant’s words. To me, this feels like the essence of what the Lean movement has been saying all along. This is basically “Build-Measure-Learn” in a format that’s tougher to put into fun diagrams. Ultimately, teams will benefit from being decisive — even if it’s the wrong choice — because it will give them a basis from which to make the next decisions. Maybe most importantly, it’s an antidote for analysis paralysis.
Grant stood out from other generals throughout the Civil War because of his willingness to make a decision and move forward. Some critics of Grant argue that his focus on taking the offensive made him ignore what his opposition was doing, in some cases, to his detriment. While the criticism is valid, I think mirroring his aggression is the right move in the decidedly less life-or-death world of product management. If more product teams would just do and spend less time creating Plans for the Plan about The Plan, they would accomplish more and spend less time worried about bogeymen that stop them from progressing.
Union strategy before and after 1864
This isn’t to say that having a strategy isn’t important — it absolutely is. Without a strategy, there’s no guide for the smaller day-to-day decisions that get made (and are ultimately responsible for execution). The lack of a cohesive strategy hamstrung the Union war effort for several crucial years early in the war. Lincoln was proposing one thing, McClellan was doing another, and the Western armies were doing their own thing. Though in this case the problem was too many different strategies happening at once, issues can also arise in the opposite scenario. When one central group begins to try to plan for every potential problem and externality that may arise down the line, it’s just as easy to get stuck in the mud. In a lot of cases, those six-months-from-now-problems are things that generally need to be dealt with, but there’s enough that will change between now and then that they’re not worth worrying about.
Once Grant was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant General and given control over all armies, Lincoln finally had a general that shared his strategy. Both men agreed that coordinated movements between all the armies and attacking Confederate armies, rather than holding Confederate cities, was vital. Having agreed on the what, the genius of Lincoln and Grant was letting their subordinates decide on the how. Just as we’re advised by the Lean movement, they were letting the people closest to the problem make the decisions. Grant let his generals, primarily William Sherman and Phil Sheridan, decide how to tackle problems in their respective theaters to spectacular results.
While war is obviously higher stakes than product strategy, the lesson is the same — just act, learn, adjust, and worry about six-months-from-now-problems in six months. After all, not deciding might end up ruining everything.
As a total aside, here are some books worth checking out if you’re interested in learning about the Civil War:
