The Common Links between Product Managers and Athletes — Customer Obsession
I recently did an interview on my path to product management and I was asked how my professional basketball career has helped me in my new career in product. It inspired me to share how a career in sports is indeed relevant in product, how those experiences can be framed, and delve into the specifics of that process. In the first post of this series, I discussed why problem-seeking and problem-solving skills are a must for product managers and how athletes already use methodologies PMs use in honing their game.
In a continuation of this series, we’ll dive into what I believe is the second, arguably the most important quality product managers need to have: customer obsession. For product managers, depending on the product these customers and/or users of your product may be internal and/or external, so it’s important to keep every user in mind. But with athletes, who our customers are may not be as clear. And honestly, having someone pay us for our services when our bodies and abilities are the product kind of sounds a little raunchy. But it’s the reality.
No disrespect to my sex workers out there but frankly, we’re in the same business. As professional athletes, our bodies are our business and our employers, fans, and sponsors are our customers because these are the entities that pay us. Just keeping it a buck. The great thing is, that experience makes us uniquely suited for product management careers.
So, then how are athletes supposed to approach customer obsession when our customers are essentially our employers? Are we supposed to sit here and obsess if a team will offer us a contract or not? No. But one of the answers is the same way we PMs do when it comes to building great products: the customer is the market. Who decided that every SaaS product from dev tools to your favorite Google apps had to have a freemium model? It wasn’t the CEO or me. The market did or aka, the individuals who wouldn’t use it or pay for it otherwise had it not had a free version. No one will use a product if they have to pay for it first; the SaaS market has spoken and these are (one group of) the people we PMs have to keep in mind when developing Saas.
The best way to assess our market as athletes is staying in the loop of what players are getting contracts and what their skill sets are. This is a great way to determine which way the game itself is going and what the market (our teams/employers) is calling for. One way to demonstrate this is with the NBA. In the ’90s, even the early 2000s the league as a whole was different. Big men like Shaquille O'Neal and Tim Duncan were dominating forces; even later on players like Dwight Howard were team staples. The market (the teams and opposing teams to defend them) called for big men who could dominate in the paint, who had a big presence who could rebound, play defense, and score from the inside.
If you watch the NBA now, the market isn’t calling for those same skill sets from their big men. In fact, it’s considered a risk if a team’s big man cannot stretch the floor and can shoot 3s from the outside at an exceptional clip. Big men became more versatile and showed they could do more than post up in the paint. Dirk Nowitzki pioneered this movement because he was a great shooter for a seven-footer, and he’s a champion. Teams (the market) started clamoring for more big men who could shoot.
Thus as a big man, if you had any hopes of getting into the NBA, it would behoove you to delight your (potential) customers (the teams who would be paying you) and develop a shooting touch. Otherwise, you would be a fish out of water and not achieve product-market-fit.
Ask yourself: is your product or skills as a player good enough to where there is a large market for you to play? We only need 1 paying customer to achieve that in professional sports unlike with most digital products but that would be a very small market. Nothing is stopping that team from going out to get a better product (player) with more skills if your skills underperform or you change the market.
This is how we have year after year worked to delight our customers as athletes. It’s our business, literally. It’s our duty to stay in the market and delight our customers or we don’t survive. Product managers operate under this same notion: it’s our duty, a responsibility to delight our customers and make sure we are solving the right problems so they keep using our products and/or pay for them. Everything else is absolute.
