Why chefs and soldiers make the best product managers
Five years ago, Wilson Keenan, CEO of Clover Health, got his first job in product management. Before that, he was a cook. Cooking was not Wilson’s only work experience, but for Jim Peterson — the person who hired him — it was a unique one. In fact, Peterson believed in a philosophy when hiring him: chefs and soldiers make the best product managers.
Jim Peterson says: “Both the army and professional kitchens are environments where you cannot spend your time in indecision. You always have to be active. When Wilson told me he had worked in that job (cooking) for a year, I thought he could be a useful person; if he weren’t, he would have had to get out of that work immediately.”
Of course, the power to decide quickly is not the only trait a product manager needs that chefs or military people have. Below we will see a list Peterson refers to whenever he wants to choose someone for the product function:
- The ability to lead without authority
- Accepting blame inside the organization and avoiding praise
- Strong, correct decisions with incomplete information
- Readiness for valuation
- Intentional about how to make up for mistakes and get through crises
- Optimal performance under maximum pressure
Of course we should note that not everyone is necessarily a head chef or in the military; but this list can serve as the skills needed to hire a successful product manager. In this exclusive interview, Jim Peterson — who was previously in the Air Force — will explain how he thinks about forming product teams. He also explains the strategy for reaching goals in his business according to a military approach.
Successful product managers earn the team’s leadership through respect and consistency.
Product management is a very hard job in which, in reality, no one works for you. The engineering team does not report to you, and they are not forced to listen to you. But you still have to be their leader.
If you are a restaurant cook or in a kitchen, you are usually one of many people who constantly hand work to one another to reach a completely orderly result. In the army, too, there is a strict hierarchy; even so, there is a lot of work that has to be done as a group. In these conditions, there are people who have more respect among others, and others follow them. They become a leader on their own.
Peterson says: “Having a charismatic, well-spoken personality is important, but it is not enough on its own. Learning to be a good leader is possible, because it is entirely about earning respect and credibility among others.”
That is why product managers who have technical ability are a priority. Because the engineering team feels they speak the same language, understand the challenges, and act accordingly. These product managers do not need to have been, so to speak, programmers before. They only need to try to use the right terms and understand what projects need technically.
He says: “You have to try so that members of the engineering team respect the work and do not see it only as a duty or a vision for the company. You have to try to make them understand that the value of the work they do is very high, and that creating a product from nothing has enormous value that requires the effort and creativity of every individual.”
“A strand of spaghetti bends when you push it, but when you pull it, it resists and works. Being a leader is the same. If you want to keep putting pressure on team members, you will not get a particular result, but if you try to bring them along by giving them motivation and a goal, it will have a significant effect.”
The most important thing every product manager must do is earn the trust of (engineering) team members. You have to be able to define a vision or a small goal for the product, while all members may not agree with you or even understand it; but they accept it only because they trust you. The best way to build this trust is a consistent track record of correct decisions without drama.
Successful product managers make thanklessness a habit
Peterson says: “When you are in basic training (in the army) and someone messes up, the whole unit has to do push-ups. This teaches them that you are a team and that your failure and success are collective. You learn that when you mess up, it is not only you. It also affects the others.”
Successful product managers know they are not going to receive personal praise, and they have no problem with that. Knowing this is itself a skill. They never personally tear someone else down. They know that as soon as they point a finger at a member of the engineering team, they are finished. He says: small mess-ups by the engineering team should be every product manager’s greatest fear, and this always happens.
Peterson says: “No matter how much it is said, I still see product managers who are very harsh and put too much pressure on themselves and the engineering team. They never last in this role. On more than a few occasions, when I was managing a product, members of the engineering team would come to me and say, ‘I can’t work with so-and-so.’ And I would fire that product manager because they were no longer workable.”
Based on all his experience, he says he can now separate the best product managers from the rest.
“I can recognize mid-level people. They always want to express themselves. They try to make sure you know what they are focused on right now, and that you also understand the importance of their work. A good product manager knows that if your team is bad, you are bad. If your team is good, you are good. The worst thing you can do as a product manager is blame members of your own team. If you do that, you are dead, because after that they will no longer have your back.”
When everything is going well, you want a product manager who stands aside and attributes that success to others’ work — which, of course, not everyone can do.
If you have a craving to be validated, this job is not for you.
The best way to understand this is to pay attention to the pronouns that person uses. Whether in an interview, a candidate for a product-manager role uses the pronoun “I” a lot, or uses collective pronouns more, such as “we” and my team or our team. In an interview I start counting how many times they say each thing. I have been in interviews where someone says “I” 50 times: “I did this, I did that.” Interestingly, all of them had come from large companies to interview, and it is unlikely they could have done all of this work alone.
Especially in a newly founded company, you want your product managers to be servant leaders. Have they had a track record of serving the engineering team, the design team, or their other product-manager colleagues? What did that collaboration look like?
“These are small things. When you order pizza for the team, who takes the first slice? Do they wait for others to take their pieces first? Do they show up to meetings not just on time but early? That shows respect for other people’s time.” Understanding some of these things may be hard during an interview, but knowing them is useful for raising the chance of success.
Successful product managers move fast without knowing all the facts
Military service trains you in making fast decisions with little and incomplete information. This is the basis of one of Peterson’s favorite sayings: “Most of the time you are right; don’t doubt it.” That is what product managers should be as well.
For that reason, the Air Force created the OODA loop: short for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. Meaning observe, orient, decide, and act. The main point is that every time the loop finishes, it starts again from the beginning and uses the new information that the last action used. For years this method has been used to train pilots to make fast decisions in highly pressurized conditions.
The OODA loop is also a useful tool for product managers who, according to Peterson, should assume that their data is always incomplete and will never be complete. He says: “For many people it is hard to start something until they feel they have all the information. This information piles up, piles up, piles up, but they never take action. Like pilots, product managers cannot do this. If they do, they will never ship on time.”
Instead, they (product managers) must keep this loop going: review and analyze all the information available to them, decide, and execute. This work requires both endurance, because you have to continue it day after day, and precision for making smart decisions every time.
He says: “I look for product managers who look more to perfecting the process than to improving results. If the result was bad, I want someone to go back in the process and understand what information led to this decision. Maybe this was the best decision we could have made given the data we had. Maybe it is the process of how we decide that can be better.” By asking these questions, good product managers can make continuous progress over time.
Good product managers are prepared more than anything else
In Michelin-starred restaurants, which are considered high-end, there is a concept called “Mise en Place,” which translates roughly to “everything in its place.” This phrase refers to the order and organization of ingredients and tools in a busy kitchen so that when work starts, all staff can work faster and with more coordination. In Peterson’s experience, the best product managers do their own “Mise en Place” before starting work.
He says: “Think about kitchens using hundreds of ingredients every day and combining them with particular order and precision, so that hot, glittering dishes come out of their place every time, for dozens of tables. This level of performance requires very high coordination. The process customers see is only the result of this planning. All the main work is done in the morning before the doors open.”
In a startup, the product manager is the head chef, and the engineering team are the cooks whose notable talent and precision create the final product. In this case, providing the needed resources and preparing paths of productivity for doing the work is essential. A good product manager spends their time and energy on this part of the process.
Just like kitchens, product managers also have to anticipate and smooth the work between people — for example the engineering team and the design team. There is no room for error. If one person falls behind, the whole system, or the kitchen, falls behind. The more you have prepared yourself for these issues, the better you can bring the work out.
You want to create muscle memory for your team
If you and your organization are ready and strong, people know exactly where to go for what they need, who to talk to for their answer, where to get new information, and how to manage issues that come up. This is always the same and it works. How you can improve the muscle memory of the engineering team (your team) depends on your method of operation (cooking) and the methods (spices) you use.
Good product managers perform well under pressure
In a restaurant, cooking should not stop at any price. If a problem has caused processes to fall behind, you have to get back on your path without stopping or slowing down. In the army you may be in a situation where a decision costs people’s lives. You cannot say you cannot or you do not know. As a product manager, you have delivery dates, and the fate of the product or even your company depends on your ability to continue the work no matter what.
In all of these conditions, a leader needs a robotic mind, and it comes into existence if that robotic mind is excited.
If you can separate items and problems, you can examine each one separately. You can gather a group of people in a room and, away from any feeling, prepare a list of existing problems, possible solutions, the tasks you need to reach the intended goal, and the people who are going to manage them. This allows you to accept a crisis situation and manage it by turning it into a list.
Peterson says: “My experiences come from military and basic training. For example, they put you under pressure to make your bed and shine your boots, and after all of that — they tell you to sleep in the bed you made and then shout at you because your bed is messy — and until you understand that all of this is to prepare you for war conditions, it seems stupid.”
As a product manager and now a CEO, this experience has made him calm in stressful conditions. He says: “I can easily stay away from my emotions because I believe these things work against the progress of a product. I will eventually explain to everyone how they performed; but after it is done. During the work, the only focus should be on doing it and finishing it. People see you as a leader and look to you for decisiveness. If you fall short, everything is over.”
Product management as a war room
Recently at the startup Eaze, Peterson has extended everything discussed to the whole company with a special approach. They created a war room and turned the company’s largest conference room into a control center. Around the table, representatives from every internal team — product, engineering, operations, customer support, marketing, and so on — are all needed to solve every problem. On the room’s large screen there is a dashboard that shows the team’s daily goal as an upward curve and how they have tracked it so far (presented as a dotted line in the moment). The goal of the whole day is to stay above that line. If you do that, you “win the day.”
Peterson says: “We started with our long-term goals in terms of growth and operational productivity and where we want to be. We put these goals into monthly goals — like we want to deliver X thousand packages this month. Then we literally modeled day by day based on historical patterns — like more demand on Fridays and Saturdays than Mondays and Tuesdays — to create a minute-by-minute goal.”
The “Win the Day” team forms the war room every day from 9 a.m. to 1 a.m., but its members rotate. Every day a new executive specialist or engineer is there. But regardless of each person’s place on their own teams, the group present in the war room has the authority to decide in the moment. If the delivery rate is below the goal, they can choose levers to raise this metric — such as sending an email or offering a discount to generate demand. If a bug occurs, they can all work at once to fix the problem and reduce its impact.
If we win every day, we win the week. If we win the weeks, we win the month. If we win the months, we win the year too.
Peterson says: “This is a military strategy so that through it you can bring people in communications and execution to maximum speed and capability. It also exposes a wide range of people to this set of skills and makes them become aware faster of how the company works and the operational side of our business.”
Those in the war room can be in contact with their whole team to solve problems and get advice from them. If something prevents us from winning the day, the priority is the work that can help solve it. That way, the “win the day” strategy focuses the whole company around a shared goal. It supports everyone’s activities in some way and focuses them on a particular point.
The war-room concept was born from the traits Peterson believes make product managers excellent. It pulls the team toward the goal rather than putting them under pressure. Setting it up requires a lot of thought, care, and preparation so people can act quickly with muscle memory. It requires good decisions with limited data, and it teaches everyone who sits in the room how to react calmly and precisely to real-time information.
He says: “In the army, they call the team on the front line the tip of the spear; but everyone behind them is like a handle that is essential for supporting them and for their pulling force. This bayonet idea makes everyone feel more connected to our customers and the company’s goals. It is a complete cultural change that makes us move on our own feet more consciously and faster at the same time.”