Professional cricket and product management: 7 parallels
I’m incredibly lucky to have lived my dream. Ever since I was at school, I wanted to play cricket for a living and ended up playing for my boyhood team Gloucestershire CCC up until a few years ago. I competed with and against some of the best players in the world and got to travel to every corner of the globe doing what I loved. It was an incredible environment, full of the highest of highs and the lowest of lows.
Once I hung up my batting pads in 2019, I joined Accurx, because I was really inspired by their vision of improving communication across the NHS.
After working in our amazing user support team, I later moved into product management with six months of training as an Associate Product Manager. During this time, I started running the Record View team. Over the last six months, I’ve noticed huge similarities between my current working life and my former career as a cricketer. So here’s seven ways being a product manager is like being a professional athlete.
7 similarities between professional sport and product management
- Teamwork
Cricket is a team sport played by a group of individuals, which doesn’t have the same team flow you find in a sport like football. As in product management, part of the challenge in leading on the cricket field is to get everyone moving in the same direction. There’s vast differences in skills between batters and bowlers, while in the world of product you have engineers, researchers, designers, and all kinds of other specialists. As a Product Manager — and as a sportsperson — it takes a determined, coordinated effort to make sure everyone is aiming for the same North Star.
In my experience, it’s by having a real clarity in roles within a team that distinguishes a good team from a great one.
This definitely relates to being in a product team, which depends on everyone knowing their roles, enjoying the team spirit and pushing each other to be better. When all that aligns and you’re working with focus towards the same goal, you have a high chance of being a very successful unit.
2. Leadership
Leaders come in all shapes and sizes. While everyone has the ability to lead, it certainly comes more naturally to people than others. In my experience, the best leaders in sport adapt to the individuals on their team as well as the situation they find themselves in. The same is true of product management, where adaptation is crucial, particularly in an environment of constant change and evolution.
Some teams like to be heavily involved in the decision making and understanding the ‘why’. Others don’t need to be as involved in the decision and like to be given a clear goal or potential outcome. In both product management and professional sport, it’s important you not only understand your team as a whole but the individual needs of your team members.
Whatever team you’re leading, you are ultimately the one who has to stand up when things go wrong. At the end of the day, it’s your final decision and you have to hold yourself accountable. When all goes well, the team putting in the work are the ones who take the credit. Sometimes, that can be a challenge but then again, seeing your teammates succeed is something I have loved about sport and as a Product Manager. In each case, it’s important to provide the emotional environment that allows people to thrive and get the most out of themselves.
3. Decision-making
Decision-making — particularly in high-pressure environments — is key to both product management and to being a professional cricketer. On the sporting side, good decision-making gives an athlete much stronger conviction in executing their skills. I often found that allowing individuals to have more control of their own decisions rather than being dictated to increased the chance of a high level of execution.
In product management, the same logic applies. At Accurx, engineers often find it easier and more enjoyable building software when they have more input into the work they are producing. Fundamentally, they are the experts in this field and will naturally provide solutions that I haven’t thought of. Bringing them into the decision-making process removes me as a blocker who they need to continually ask questions of and enables them to do their job better.
4. Fear of failure
Whether you’re on the cricket field or in an office, fear of failure is natural. At Accurx, we’re determined to create software that solves real-life problems and drives company growth. Falling short of that goal therefore feels like a failure, and one we want to avoid.
In sport, there are plenty of fears to hold onto, from not performing and losing your contract to making a mistake on the pitch in front of thousands of people (only for the embarrassment to be shown live on TV!). When I was young, my coach always said ‘don’t be afraid to fail’. It took me a while to understand what he meant by this, but once I did, I started to embrace failures as a chance to learn instead of fearing them.
In my whole cricketing career, there wasn’t one game in which I was completely free of nerves and didn’t have a huge desire to succeed. Thankfully, nerves can be a huge positive because they mean that you care. As I got older and more used to the nerves, I began to embrace them and get excited to have the chance to perform. That’s when I started to crack what it meant to not fear failing.
This is when I grew as a cricketer and was able to produce against some of the best players in the world where I would have initially crumbled. And it’s an attitude I’m always taking into my product management.
5. Pressure
Fearing failure can often cause you to feel pressure. This creates small mistakes you wouldn’t make if you were relaxed such as stuttering during a presentation or poorly executing a skill you could usually do in your sleep.
There were a couple of ways I’d calm myself when feeling pressure on the cricket field. Firstly, I used to juggle (this helped me focus and relax my hands). But unless you want to break office windows and computers, I’d far sooner recommend taking the other tip I picked up into your professional life: controlling your breathing.
Taking long slow controlled breaths helped me feel relaxed. You can find various breathing techniques online and if you practice the one that suits you, I promise you will see the benefits after time.
I find controlled breathing still helps before I do a presentation as it relaxes the mind and also soothes the muscles involved with your voice. This means you can speak slowly and clearly and maintain a calm posture.
6. Learning
Learning is incredibly important at Accurx, which is why one of our values is kaizen (continuous improvement). And it was just as important as a cricketer. It’s hard to overstate how formative it was having the opportunity to learn from teammates and the opposition while performing at such a high level.
You don’t just get trained by the best coaches but pick up tons of useful insights from other players who might be encountering similar challenges.
The chance to learn was always something I enjoyed about travelling as a cricketer. I would go to Australia to face bowlers on faster, bouncy wickets and go to the sub-continent to play on lower dryer wickets, meaning my technique and mindset had to completely change. And I’d always feel like I returned home a more rounded player, who was enjoying that learning process and driven to keep improving.
At Accurx, we have a great product community where I get to learn from some of the best Product Managers out there. It’s brilliant to hear about their past experiences — from successes to failures- and get the chance to apply what I learn to myself. This sharing of learning is such an exciting thing and has such a strong correlation with an athlete’s desire to be the best they can be!
7. Confidence
I want to finish on this as it’s not only applicable to being a successful athlete but to every professional setting imaginable.
Confidence can so often feel like something that hangs on a knife-edge because any given moment can change how you’re feeling about yourself. As a naturally unconfident person, this is both something I’ve found easy at times and something I’ve found incredibly challenging at times.
I remember going through a phase when I was walking out to bat and literally couldn’t remember which way to hold my bat. Needless to say, that’s not a great feeling when you’re walking out in front of a crowd to face one of the best bowlers in the world who bowls at 90mph.
That season, I’d gone through a serious knee injury, lost someone close to me and was a long way from being at my best. I was in need of some help to get back to my normal self. I started working with a psychologist to get better control of my confidence and was lucky to also work with former England rugby player and coach, Paul Hull. From how much he helped me, I can’t recommend enough the importance of speaking and being open and honest with those around you about your feelings.
For me, my partner and my family give me the most confidence in life. When I first struggled, they wouldn’t have known a thing, since I kept it all under the hood — which was a huge mistake. Backing myself is not something that comes natural to me. But as I’ve gotten better at staying in the present and controlling the controllables, I’ve seen myself improve and stop worrying so much about external factors.
Product management can be a tough role and at times isolating. This is just like sport and my biggest advice is to communicate your feelings with those closest to you. Just getting it off your chest is enough to help you move on and realise what needs to be done.
Conclusion
As an athlete, you’re always told how transferable your skills are to the working environment. There are many books discussing this and the benefits, but it’s hard to really appreciate it until you get the chance to be here in the thick of it. I’m very lucky that a company like Accurx believes in me and that I’m now getting to experience life as a Product Manager.
These are just a few of my observations between sport and product management — there’s a good few others I’ve had to miss out. If you want to chat about any of the above, please let me know as I would love to have your opinion. Thanks for reading!
