Olympic Business

The Olympics are on TV and I’ve been watching sporadically during the evenings. The athleticism, stamina, strength, flexibility, and quality of the competitors is amazing. They’re fun to watch and they make their performances look easy - deceptively so. This, despite the world records which are falling in droves.

Now what on earth could any of this have to do with business in general or product management in particular? Simple. The effort and practice put in by the athletes over the years is the key. The repetition. The mechanics. The consistency.

Striving for perfection, not by dreaming up elegantly complex routines or wearing the trendiest uniforms, but by drilling their minds and bodies to act and react almost instinctively. Again and again, with great precision, upon each repetition they refine their motor skills, their strength, their agility, their stamina, their mental toughness to ever greater degrees.

In short, Olympic athletes work tremendously hard on the value chain of their individual performance characteristics to align them perfectly and consistently. In doing so, they maximize their odds of success in order to become the best athletes the world has seen.

As a product manager, you will have a value chain of performance components you must strive to align consistently and well. Driving a business or product line to success requires performing fundamental business skills and activities over and over with precision. Like the Olympians, doing so maximizes your odds of success.

If you believe that writing the best business plan, crafting the most elegant strategy, or dreaming up a great value prop are all that are required to succeed as a product manager, you will fail miserably. Despite watching Olympians make their complex activities look armchair easy, nearly everyone knows that 4 years or more of diligent, concentrated, and difficult effort have been invested to obtain the results we watch on television.

Unfortunately, too many product managers believe they can generate great success with their lines without engaging in the hard, time consuming work needed to make less-than-sexy value chain activities line up and function well. Building cool strategy decks, grand business plans, or mind share grabbing value propositions is sexy and fun. But at the end of the day, no matter how great those things are, they won’t be sufficient to overcome poor customer research, flawed pricing, inefficient manufacturing operations, or inadequate sales support and training any more than sleek uniforms or great sound bites will translate into Olympic gold.

To be a successful product manager, you have to behave like an Olympic athlete in training, day in and day out. Take care of the fundamentals. Develop reliably consistent performance across your value chain and you can achieve greatness. It may not be fun every day, but the result will be worth it!