Professional vs. Amateur Product League
Every Saturday morning, I look forward to the Farnam Street newsletter. Recently, an older article by Shane Parrish was highlighted speaking to the difference between a professional tennis game vs. an amateur one. If you swap out tennis league with product league, the same can be said.
Tennis League
What differentiates the professional and amateur tennis league is who’s actions determine the outcome of the game.
“Professionals win points whereas amateurs lose them.”
The actions of the winner — their positioning, control, spin — determine who gets the point in the professional league. Hence, the professional league is a winner’s game.
In the amateur league, scores are often won when the looser hits the ball out of court or makes a mistake. Hence, you increase your likelihood of winning in the amateur league by avoiding mistakes and loosing less points.
Product Management (PM) League — 3 differentiators
On the surface, there might not be a lot in common between tennis and the product world. However, if we look at the 3 components below, there is a lot to be said about the similarities between what differentiates the professionals and amateurs from both leagues.
What is rewarded?
Analogous to the brilliant plays that determines who wins in a professional tennis game, the plays in a PM league are the bets and risks that the PM decides to take. From these product decisions, the PM learns and orients the team to make better decisions in the future leading to better results. Hence, who wins in the professional PM league is determined by the calls made by the winner.
The opposite is true in the amateur PM league. Risks are risks of being wrong. Therefore, the safest road is often taken — follow the set processes dictated by other’s in the organization. If something goes wrong, it’s not your mistake. You followed the process and made sure all the boxes were checked. Someone else gave the approvals. So to fix this, instead of making other product bets to achieve better results, the PM advocates to put in more approvals or add more steps broadly to the process.
At the end of the day, you are rewarded for being right in the professional league. In contrast, you are punished for being wrong in the amateur league.
What’s the focus?
In the professional PM league, the focus is on shipping features in order to gather feedback and data to make better decisions. Constantly figuring out how can we serve our customers better.
In the amateur league, the focus in on the opposite. Amateur PM’s roadmaps are driven by guessing what the competitor is going to do next and trying to beat the competitors to releasing that feature. Their mindset is to run a little faster than the other guy being chased by the bear.
Why do you ship?
Ultimately, the PM’s job is to ship features. Nevertheless, even when the goals of PM’s are the same, the motives are different.
For the professionals, they ship in order to collect more data and make more informed decisions. Those organizations give the team time to learn and adapt from feedback in order to grow their product into product-market fit.
In the amateur league, they ship in order to bring a conclusion to the project and protect themselves from making any further mistakes or being proven wrong by data. When they ship their project on time and at cost, they celebrate. The organization closes the projects and sends out the press releases.
Shall we play professional or amateur?
Charles Munger once wrote:
It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent. There must be some wisdom in the folk saying, ‘It’s the strong swimmers who drown.’
Unlike what the names seem to suggest, I like to argue that the professional PM league is not always the desired league depending on the circumstances. The key question here is “what is the likelihood of error and what is the cost of the errors when they happen”.
If the cost of trying to prevent the errors is less than the cost of fixing the errors, maybe the amateur league is the right place to be for that company. For example, when you are dealing with financials, the product might never be able to achieve the best user experience (UX) for compliance or regulatory reasons. The cost of making a mistake could justify the additional processes needed, the UX friction in the product, and ultimately being in the amateur league.
In addition, starting in the amateur league aiming to avoid mistakes in order to train up to make good calls and manage risk is not a bad place to be.
In conclusion, I would love to pose to the product community: Which league do most of us play in?
Does the name professional vs. amateur indicate we should desire to play in one more than the other? Or do we just need to know which league we are in and adjust to thrive in that environment?
