Product teams and the New Hollywood
Editor’s Note: The 92nd Academy Awards are this weekend. Our Senior Manager, Product, Dara Renton, brings together her love for filmmaking, filmmakers, and product-driven digital delivery in this post. Let us know what you think in the comment section, below!
You may remember the minor dust-up last fall that arose out of Martin Scorsese’s New York Times op-ed “I Said Marvel Movies Aren’t Cinema. Let Me Explain.” Don’t worry, I won’t debate the film-worthiness of the Marvel Cinematic Universe here, there are plenty of places people can do that online, but I am going to reflect on Scorsese’s piece, what it means to be an auteur, and how that relates to product management and digital government.
Movie products in the Golden Age of Hollywood
The Golden Age of Hollywood was a time in early film history when films were created based on a fairly defined set of procedures and rules. The film product was studio-driven and creatively, it was defined in a boardroom.
As Scorsese aptly puts it,
“[Movies were] vetted, modified, revetted and remodified until they’re ready for consumption.”
The process was formulaic. The director in this model was closer to that of project manager, leading the execution and day-to-day of filming and production work, managing it on a schedule and on a budget. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
The arrival of the auteur
Then along came the age of the auteur, and New Hollywood, including the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, Ingmar Bergman and Alfred Hitchcock.
Auteur directors took the authorial and creative role away from the studio, wielding personal influence and artistic control over films. Auteur directors were effectively the film’s ‘author’ (en français dit auteur).
Auteur directors were artists with a particular message to convey and skillfully crafted films guided by an overarching vision. We’ve all heard the phrase “artistic control” in relation to film making, and understand it to be synonymous with autonomy and empowerment.
Auteurs authored their films and executed their film’s vision with meticulous attention to detail, inspiring a collaborative process involving cast and crew.
This autonomous approach to creative production stood in contrast to Hollywood’s golden age when films were produced “to spec” following conventional procedures and rules without much of a need to recalibrate along the way.
New Hollywood and digital government
Personally, I think product teams are the New Hollywood for digital delivery.
While auteur theory is known for the singular vision of the director, films such as The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, and Bonnie and Clyde demonstrate that a singular vision is often a product of close artistic collaboration.
These founding films of the New Hollywood era exemplify the type of product team collaboration necessary for modern digital delivery.
Each of these films was heavily shaped through collaboration. During the making of In the Heat of the Night, Sidney Poitier, Norman Jewison and Rod Steiger collaborated on dialogue, charting a new path for Poitier’s iconic role. And Bonnie and Clyde’s vision was shaped when screenwriters Benton and Newman engaged legendary director Truffaut, building a vision that ultimately shaped the final production directed by Arthur Penn.
While product team members are not artists in quite the same way, they author and then relentlessly represent a vision. That vision isn’t laid out in a boardroom or by a committee who infrequently interface with the team, that vision is created by the team, and a product manager brings it to ‘set’ everyday, asking that organizational processes, user experience design choices, and architectural patterns flow from the vision. The vision becomes the team’s mission.
The famous venture capitalist John Doerr once said,
“We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.”
A mission-driven empowered team led by a skillful product manager is a central tenet of Ontario’s Digital Service Standard.
I like to think of digital government as a progression similar to the one from the Golden Age of Hollywood to New Hollywood. Where artists or product managers, designers, engineers, devops, lean and content experts, are empowered and autonomous and armed with a vision of their own making.
This on-the-ground creative collaboration is what makes successful products.
So Sunday night, I’ll be watching the Oscars and looking for product leadership inspiration from filmmakers who get rewarded for pursuing their vision through creative team collaboration.
Inspired to learn more?
If filmmakers and filmmaking inspire you I highly recommend the Director’s Cut podcast where directors interview directors probing the deep details of their creative processes and decision making. As a product leader, it’s inspiring to hear directors talk about stakeholder management techniques, how new and emerging technology influence filmmaking or how directors bring vision to their teams.
And if product and product leadership inspire you, then you can’t go wrong with The Product Experience or Masters of Scale.
