What World War 2 Can Teach You About Product Management
Leading product at a fast growing company (DataCamp) and being interested in history, I often find that the stories of World War 2 provide me with useful insights for my daily problems. Today, I wanted to focus on how the Western Allies’ better product management led to their victory.
At the outbreak of WW2, Nazi Germany seemed to have the winning hand: a rising empire, military victories at Blitzkrieg speed, superior weaponry, and Europe at its knees. Five years later, they had nothing. Germany was a crippled country with no resources left.
Shipping and Logistics Are Everything — How Germany’s Scope Creep and Inability to Scale Accelerated the Allied Victory
During World War 2 Nazi Germany propagandized the “Wunderwaffe” or “Miracle Weapon” that could tip the scales of war to the benefit of Germany.
Believing more advanced technology would yield a higher return on investment (a thesis that probably sounds familiar if you hang out in today’s start-up and scale-up scene), Germany started developing advanced weaponry, ranging from the first rocket powered airplane to aircraft carriers and nuclear bombs.
However, they did not ship. And in the occasions they did, it took a lot more time than expected.
The first rocket-propelled plane (the Messerschmitt Me 163) came out at a time that the Allies already had total dominance of the airspace, and the aircraft carriers and nuclear bombs never even made it “to production”. A similar fate was reserved for the Horten Ho 229, one of the first stealth bombers ever to be developed.
In product managerial lexicon, Nazi Germany had “Scope Creep”: projects that grow into infinite complexity, that undergo iteration over iteration, that eat up resources, to eventually die or launch too late at a time when your competitors have already divided the pie.
If, as a product manager, you don’t ship your product or product feature quickly enough, it does not matter. The other side will win.
But what if your competitor’s “Miracle project” does make it to the end stage? Time to panic?
“Amateurs think tactics. Generals think strategy. Winners think logistics.”
The German Tiger I and II tanks are an example of a “Wunderwaffe” that did make it to the battlefield. They were far superior to their enemy counterparts, and toe to toe the Allies stood no chance. However, they were a logistic disaster. The Tiger tanks were hard to produce, costly in resources, and unreliable on the battlefield (a consequence of Scope Creep).
At the other side, the Allies war machine was build for scale. Instead of focussing on “Miracle projects”, they focused on logistics. Their tanks were practical and able to be produced quickly, cheaply and en masse. During the time Germany produced 2000 Tiger tanks, the Americans manufactured 40,000 M4 Sherman tanks.
Eventually, the Nazi Germany’s failure to scale caught up with them. While they kept inventing new and superior technologies, the Allies realized that a focus on logistics and productivity was far more important than individual asset strength.
At DataCamp, individuals and businesses pay a monthly fee to have access to our course library of interactive online courses. The game is to have as many high-quality courses as possible in the library, and certainly more than our competitors.
So, to win our competitive war, we need to build the infrastructure that supports content creation of interactive courses at scale. Therefore, we have, for example, a team of 3 engineers that solely focuses on making our authoring tool easier and more productive to use.
Similarly, when creating new learning interfaces, we think about the entire “production line”: what will be the fastest way to build content, how can we scale it rapidly across the technologies we offer, what features will require too much maintenance resources, etc.
We know that to win, our focus needs to be on making it scale.
The Product Manager’s Lesson of History
At the end of the day, as a product manager, sophisticated but hard-to-maintain and unscalable technology matters little. Part of your job as a product manager is to recognize when a pattern of Scope Creep emerges. Ideally, before it is too late and your competitors out-scale you.
Once you have product-market fit, logistics and building the tools to support capacity (“make it scale”) are what matter. It is not always the coolest or biggest weapons/features that win, but the most effective. As a product manager, you need to bring that message to your team.
And don’t worry when you see your next competitor launch their “Miracle project”. Winners think logistics ;-)
