I was a water polo player before I was a product manager. I played water polo for 20 years and learned many important lessons. Some of the most important lessons only acquired real meaning a few years after I had stopped playing, when I was able to observe and be part of teams in an organisational role.
Water polo is a competitive team sport played in a pool, where players pass and shoot a ball to score goals against the opposing team's net while swimming and treading water.
After so many years doing something you actually start to unconsciously see and feel the World through different lenses. If I'm about to make an important decision at work, it almost feels like my brain takes me back to when I was about to shoot a decisive penalty. It's difficult to put this into words, but I think it's worth giving it a "shot"! Please bear with me as, like in most analogies, the ones in this article are imperfect, although I believe they can be helpful when considering how high-performance product teams work best to win.
Like a water polo player or any player in a team sport, every individual in a Product team must play with their teammates for their team to win.
The Competition
In water polo, several opposing teams compete against each other to win a competition. Like in water polo, in the world of product development, there is always some kind of competition (even if this is not immediately apparent at your team's product scope level).
Whether it's direct competition from another product like the one between Coca-Cola and Pepsi that offers similar products for the same market.
Whether it's indirect competition like when Netflix competes with movie theatres offering different products to fulfil similar needs.
Whether it's internal competition as your team replaces or AB tests an earlier version of your product against a newer one.
Or any other scenario in which your product competes for the user's money, attention or time, like when TikTok or YouTube compete for the time you could spend with family and friends or when a new Apple iPhone competes for the money you could use on education.
At the team level, it's a competition of ability, motivation, insights, resilience, cooperation, rewards, priorities, time management, adaptability, experience against other humans in other companies (or bots like the ones who created this article's images).
No matter whether you are creating something entirely new that didn't exist before (Zero-to-One) or improving, iterating on, or scaling something that already exists (One-to-N), no matter how disruptive, big or small, product development teams and their products are always competing.
The Game, the Team and the Players
