A Closer Look at the Product Management and Athletics Relationship — The Problem Seeker, Problem Solver
Calling all my lifelong athletes, this is for you! I recently did an interview on my path to product management and was asked how athletes can frame their experiences in preparation for careers in product management. It inspired me to further delve into some of the specifics of that process. Pro-athletes are uniquely equipped for careers in product, but it’s important to get there and understand just how their athletic experience is relevant and valuable. This is part 1 of the athletes links to product where I’ll give high level overviews of the similarities across each industry.
After 10+ years of basketball and shifting to an industry less familiar, I had to reimagine the ways I interacted with basketball and think about it from a product manager's perspective when trying to get hired. What I realized was that the parallels are countless between sports and product, but they weren’t always apparent to me. For example, some of the skills that are often sought after for PMs include:
- Working cross-functional
- Customer obsession
- Communication
- Business acumen
- Problem seeker + problem solver
All of which was, honestly a staple in my athletic process. Athletes already have all the skills they need! Let’s start with the problem seeker, problem-solver in this post because this skill, in my opinion, is the most important for product management along with a customer obsession.
What other career path rewards you for seeking problems to solve? Building great products is all about covering all your bases and having a problem mindset first, not the solution. Therefore, actively seeking out potential pitfalls and shortcomings in your product is essential. The most essential part of the job as a product manager (arguably) is to identify problems with your product and experiment with solutions to fix them. How can this be framed from an athlete's experience? Let’s begin!
Remember athletes, we (yes, I’m still an athlete) are products ourselves. Our skills, abilities, and capabilities are a product that is managed and has been in development for many, many years. We have to perform, just as with any product. Therefore, if we are not performing, it is our responsibility to identify why and develop solutions to fix it. A great example of this and how we also use metrics to identify problems in our athletic product is as follows:
You’ve been in a shooting slump. Over the last 5 games your shooting percentage has plummeted 8% (this is your metric).
For athletes, this is a common occurrence (in basketball). What we may not realize athletes is the steps you would take to get your shooting back on track are the same methods you would take in your career in product. What does that look like? Well, you’d probably go back and look at the games and see the shots you’ve taken and try to identify some problem areas. Not much different than what happens when troubleshooting digital products. Product managers also can look at “game film” in the form of session recordings and/or look at the funnel to see where the product is underperforming.
PMs also identify problems by analyzing where users may be spending a lot of time on a page which can indicate confusion or lack of clarity in the product, for example. Problems also come directly to you in the form of customer complaints or online criticisms (Twitter, Reddit). If so, determine if this is shared among other customers as well on a larger scale.
Ok, great, you’ve gone back to the film and you have identified the problem. Yay! You noticed that:
more than half of your shots in these last 5 games have been “contested” jump shots, roughly 20% more than previously.
Identifying a (potential) problem is paramount but as product managers and athletes, we have to solve this problem as well. The key to note here is we are not expected to know the answers to how to fix it, instead, we have to be able to experiment quickly with potential solutions. Experimentation in product management can come in many different forms and often requires cross-collaboration with design teams and engineers:
- A/B testing (multivariate testing)
- Wizard of Oz prototyping
- Usability testing
- User interviews and surveys
- Focus groups
For athletes, experimentation to fix that problem (an increased percentage of “contested” shots) could be being more patient on screens to allow better picks to get you open. It also may involve your coaches or teammates (cross-functional) to run some different offensive systems to get you more open looks, or a combination of a few solutions. Both of which are hypotheses that need to be tested.
How do we know our proposed solutions will work? The truth is, you don’t know and you won’t know until you can see if your percentage starts to improve over a period of time or whatever success criteria you establish. It could turn out that even though you’re shooting more contested shots over this slump, getting you better looks didn’t make that big a difference because over the next 5 games with this new offensive system your percentage remained relatively the same.
Confused yet? Don’t be discouraged. The ambiguity is very common in product management and is why experimentation is key before finalizing changes. What we may believe to be a solution is in fact not moving the needle at the rate we had hoped. And many times what we believe to be the problem, in fact, isn’t. Help! What do we do?! You go back to the game film and realize another problem: your shooting form has changed; your elbow is not tucked and is slightly open on your release. You test different shooting drills with more verbal cues to get a better, consistent shooting angle and see if that helps the percentage. It's a back and forth, a well-documented back and forth. As PMs, we don’t make uninformed guesses on what the problem is nor what a solution could be. We allow the data (metrics, feedback, the market) to inform us.
This whole process of a (systematic) nip and tuck is tried and true, for athletes and product managers. You cannot implement and spend engineering time and effort on solutions that don’t fix the problem. And as an athlete, you don’t adopt nor implement new drills and a new shooting form to your game unless you know it actually works as well. Metrics make that possible because we can then see if the solutions we are experimenting with are providing us the results we seek before something is released to production, or added to your game. Pro-athletes and product managers are masters of their process in the pursuit of perfection, armed with the knowledge that perfection is never obtained, but they proceed nonetheless, accepting full responsibility for the outcomes good or bad.
Be confident the next time you’re challenged on the relevancy of sports in product management because you already have all the skills you need.
