In the post, Tim builds a model for personal grown and achievement based on how Elon Musk works. I love how he makes the claim that our brains are hardware and software and it is the software that really matters. You can work on your personal software every day, or you can keep up with the Kardashians.
I highly recommend that you read his post to get a sense of how this model works.
I have been reflecting on this model as a way to better describe product management. It is the best model I have come across yet. So, I thought it was worth a post to talk about how you can use the "Musk Science Model" to elevate your PM game.
Here goes:
The WANT box is the domain of things your company wants to do. I work for a company that builds software for the construction industry. We WANT to make software products that make that industry run more efficiently and effectively. Right now, my company is thinking hard about a commercial trucking app. Think Uber for trucking. We WANT to build something that will better address this underserved market that is still living in 20th century paper processes.
The REALITY box is putting some tight limits around our WANT to build a trucking app. For instance, truckers today are not typically technophiles. Truckers also currently depend on a middle man called a broker to manage their work. Brokers work hard to build little fiefdoms of trucks and construction companies and have a tendency to lock out competitors.
So, our GOAL POOL is to build a system that meets the market where they are today while automating the current broker, trucker, and construction contractor. There are a bunch of ways to attack this market problem. We could have set a unrealistic goal and try to do something really audacious like disintermediating the broker. However, we decided to stay in the GOAL POOL and start by just automating the current manual processes. We are choosing to do a phased approach and tackle a goal that is squarely in the middle of the GOAL POOL by just automating the current processes.
So, from there we created a STRATEGY that is our best guess at what the market is ready for now. For the next 6-8 months, we will head off and start building software and by this time next year, we should have a few pilot customers trying out the new system. We won't learn to much between now and then since we have to wait until real users try it to know how well it works.
Once we are in pilot, we will be in the ACTION->FEEDBACK->ADJUST cycle for 4-6 months. If things go well, we will have a basic phase 1 product that we can build from. If things go bad, we could learn that no one wants a trucking app or that we just built the wrong thing. It is impossible to predict what we will learn at this point. We just know that we will learn something and will need to react to that.
Over the next 18-24 months while we are incubating this concept, a whole range of externalities could happened. In the category of A CHANGING WORLD, we could learn that self driving trucking will completely eliminate the need for this type of system and make it irrelevant. At that point we will have to ADJUST the REALITY box and potentially change our GOAL POOL and STRATEGY.
In the category of A CHANGING YOU, our company could change where we WANT to focus. For instance, we could discover that solving problems for railroads looks a lot more interesting that trucking and we could ADJUST our WANT box and potentially change the GOAL POOL and STRATEGY.
The thing I love about this model is it is about constant thinking, acting, measuring, adjusting and learning. It fundamentally accepts that to do new and strategic things requires acceptance that we know nothing and are still willing to go for it in a context of learning. The model assumes that we will not get it right. Instead, we assume that we will get to the wrong thing fast and then adjust as we learn.
This all seems like common sense, but very few people and companies are comfortable following this open ended and seemingly ambiguous path. I think if more companies followed this succinct model for product management, we would see exponentially more innovation and progress.
TL;DR: Be a brave scientist product manager
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