How athletics prepared me for Product Management
When I graduated from College half a decade ago with a degree in Electrical Engineering, I still had another three weeks of school affiliated activities to participate in. This was because on my second day of orientation I met a Dutch heavyweight rower who convinced me and my 6’10” frame to walk on to the team. I did, and over the next 4 years that and Engineering occupied every waking (and sleeping moment).
I didn’t find the same level of intellectual and emotional engagement until I started working in Product and because of the engagement I have (like many of my peers) found the role to be all consuming. To that end, I try to think of some of my lessons that I learned from juggling a cardio based sport with a rigorous education track.
Low hanging Fruit:
It’s a Marathon and Not a sprint.
Similar to a sport, there is always something you can be doing as a Product Manager. In college I could always be studying, I could always be working out, I could always be stretching more, and I could always be sleeping better, eating better or drinking more water (and less on weekends).
Product is no different. You can always be looking at more data or working closer to refine your roadmap. There’s an endless stream of emails in your inbox and endless asks from stakeholders and customers to find for additional research.
When I was a rower in college, I learned to notice that little choices could make my life drastically better. Participating in up to 40 hours a week of training, some days you’re up for intense workouts and others you need to just spin a bike and review your class notes. Yes, there are days you HAVE to get things done like a particularly tough practice followed by a Coding Project, but at the end of the day you have control over how you spend your time and should train in the ways that you think will provide the most long term benefit.
When your inbox is full and there’s a million things you can do at work, remember that you have control over how you spend your time and the things you’re “supposed” to be doing are dictated by you. You’re the product owner and you have to think about the long term. It might be invigorating to put out fires all day, but at the end of the day you have to ask yourself — did I actually advance my product or did I just spin my wheels and am now exhausted and right where I started?
Your product team:
There’s no I in team. Remember you are on a team.
As the product owner it can be very easy to feel like a product’s outcome are not just a professional result, but rather a reflection on you as a person. This is largely because at the end of the day the results of the product fall onto your shoulders.
What is really interesting about Rowing as a sport is that there is a huge mix of competing with your teammates and competing against other teams. As a team, you are actively trying to better yourself together through training and technique to go faster. At the same time, you are competing with other teammates to try and occupy a better seat and be part of the top ranked crew. Because of this it’s very easy to get bogged down in your own personal outputs and you can easily lose sight of the larger outcomes on the team scale.
There was one day my Senior year of school where I was raced out of the top boat. We were on a trip in Florida training for the coming season and when I lost, I chose not to join the team for lunch, went back to my hotel room and cried into a pillow. After 4 years I wasn’t going to race in the Varsity for my senior season and it killed me. All the hours I put into training. The nights I stayed in and the grades that slipped were for naught as I walked from the bus back to the hotel. I remembered feeling like I wanted to quit.
Looking back I can also see that despite my output not being good enough to be in the Varsity, all the hard work I had put in training had an immense outcome on our team speed. Challenging the guys who ended up being in that top boat pushed them to work harder and train more and at the end of the year we had a faster team for it. I stayed with the sport and ended up having a really productive season in the Second Boat where I was able to play a leadership role — something I hadn’t had before in the sport.
I’m not going to tell you that when you make a mistake or misunderstand a stakeholder that everything will be okay. You may release a great feature or cause something to break and you’ll have to make the best of either situation. Keep in mind that the mistake or the success isn’t necessarily a reflection on you at your core. I was just not as fast as other people on the team and so I didn’t make the top boat. If something happens that seems like an obstacle, try to see it as an opportunity to establish better communication culture and make the team that you support better. Because at the end of the day its not about the things you do. Its about the outcomes you drive.
Have long term vision:
You have to think about what’s on the horizon. Not just the tickets in your backlog but what you want for the product and for yourself.
I walked on to the rowing team similar to how you get into product. I know very few people who graduated into a product role and many who grinded to get into it and even harder to keep it. Because of this, having a personal investment in your success is worthwhile so that you can grow on a long term basis.
As a rower I would do careful research about the best post practice nutrition or best training programs to do. I would watch hours of film and learn about proper recovery because I knew that I wanted to be the best not just now in sport, but develop positive health practice for the rest of my life.
Investing in yourself is the same. The more time you spend thinking critically about your work and seeking out ways to improve the better PM you’ll be in the long run.
Its very easy to seek out personal development. As a rower I could go in and do a yoga class after a workout or watch race footage for the sake of it. Its easy to put in that kind of work, but it isn’t always the most fruitful. When you’re in a yoga pose, thinking critically about why a stretch feels good and what parts of your body goes into that can teach you about your physiology and how your body works. Looking at an Olympians face and posture and sitting in a chair with that positioning — how does that make you feel? What muscles are being engaged and how can that help your rowing stroke?
I have watched the Lightweight Men’s 4- race from the London Olympics so many times that I can see the stroke seat of the Danish boat in my minds eye even as I write this article now. The way his jaw is loose and he looks so poised. His body is completely vertical as he moves his arms around a fixed point taking the catch with his body still perfectly centered in the boat.
As a part time rowing coach, I still think about how much I learned from studying this man and his movements. How much it affected me as a rower and helped me visualize what I needed to do in order to make the Varsity in my Sophomore Spring — just 18 months after walking into the sport.
To that end, take a look at the people around you. How do your peers communicate with their stakeholders and engineers? What does your boss give you feedback on — and why might they be asking you those questions? Asking yourself questions like this might go a lot farther than you think.
Eitan Rothman is a Product Manager at Macy’s Inc. Eitan works part time at Columbia University as a Heavyweight Rowing Coach and enjoys playing video games while working on his own coding projects.
