Dion Almaer

Software, Development, Products

Management

The Pursuit of Taller Hills: Lessons from Football and Product Management

Management is a story of hill climbing. I started to reflect on this more while thinking about football management, a task that fits into more finite game theory.

With a Ted Lasso season running, and Manchester City winning a third English Premier League title on the trot, I hope you won’t mind a discussion of the best league in the world. It has triggered thoughts on how timelines and risk aversion ties to management.

The English Football Pyramid

The premier league has 20 teams, and this season a record 12 managers have been given the sack. The stakes are particularly high due to the workings of the hierarchy of leagues in the english soccer pyramid, as shown above.

ASIDE: The term soccer was in fact invented by the Brits! It came from associated football vs. rugby football. I’m not just being a yank!

The Premier League is known for its fierce competition at the top of the table. However, there’s more at stake than just the coveted top spot. The top four positions in the league standings grant entry into the prestigious and lucrative European Champions League. Additionally, teams that finish fifth through seventh may qualify for the Europa League or Europa Conference, depending on various factors such as winning the FA Cup or previous Champions League winners. While there are numerous edge cases, many top places in the league are highly sought after, making for intense competition throughout the season.

Then you have the bottom three positions. If that’s where your season ends, you are doomed to go down a division, known as the Championship. Financially, your lose out on all that the premier league offers (TV rights et al), and it’s such a sudden drop that you get an parachute payment to help soften the blow. This leaves a small middle of the division that doesn’t have to sweat too much. Things were in fact so tight this year that teams in positions of 12 to 20 were all fearing a drop. Hence the firings.

Compare this to franchise leagues such as the NBA, MLS, MLB, or NFL. If you have a bad season you get to regroup for the following year and, in fact, you may even have incentives to do worse if it means getting better draft picks!

↑↑↑ This is Graham Potter. He only lasted 9 months at Chelsea before becoming one of the 12 to go. He was heralded when he left Brighton and Hove Albion, where he had built an amazing system. The recruitment was fantastic, and he had a flywheel that would follow this pattern: bring in new players for ~cheap => bake them into the system => other teams buy them for !cheap => repeat. I can’t tell you how often they would sell a great player for great money, and you would fear that the team would struggle… yet it seemed to somehow get better as someone would stand to be counted.

He joined a Chelsea operation where they had spent hundreds of millions of dollars, with long contracts (to get around the fair play rules), but weren’t playing like a team at all. No system to be seen here.

Picture yourself in Graham’s position. The clock starts ticking on day one, and you need to climb your first hill. There is pressure to show results quickly, and you need to find which players work well together, and under which system. 4-4-2? 3-5-2? What are the patterns of play? Do you use a low block? It goes on and on. So much money has been spent on the squad, and the individual players have quality, so expectations are sky high.

↑↑↑ This is Alex Ferguson, the best manager in the history of the premier league (or is it now Pep Guardiola? 🤔). His first few seasons weren’t great, but times were different and the Manchester United owners stuck with him and his system.

He could take time to explore the hills. How can he get the most from his squad? How can he recruit to fill the gaps and mould the squad to the system he wanted?

Without this time, todays managers are stuck having to quickly pick a hill and run as fast as they can to the top, with a huge probability that it is a very local maxima.

Another topic that every new manager will have is: do you go against the traditional style of play of the club you join? change it to your style? or create one that maps to the players?

↑↑↑ This is David Ginola, who personified the traditional swashbuckling style of play of Tottenham Hotspur. Despite the team not having won any silverware for several decades, the fans have still been able to enjoy exciting, entertaining end-to-end matches.

The last three managers to join Spurs have not followed tradition, and instead employed a much more defensive base. When the team sees success with this change, the fans will grumble but hold their tongue, but as soon as it isn’t working… look out.

Ok, enough of this footy talk, how does this apply to management in tech?

Just as I fear for how little time football managers get to find the biggest impact, I often fear the same in corporate life. You often see a ~2 year re-org cycle, especially when there are trade offs around focus.

Pendulum vs Switchbacks

One common example is: when do you centralize a function vs. when do you group functions in a business unit? If you are in a function that feels the pendulum you are always waiting for the change. When don’t wrong, you feel like you are oscillating between two very known states without any learning.

When done better, it is more like climbing a spiral case, or switchbacks as swyx would say. This is where you take the strengths of each approach and bake them into the learnings.

Let’s take Developer Relations. When I rejoined Google in 2015, there was a centralized function. All tech writers reported through a functional tech writing chain. The same was true for developer advocacy, developer platform engineers, developer programs, partnerships, and more. Time was spent into solidifying what it mean to be great at these roles. On the flip side, if you thought of yourself more a part of the domain that you worked on, you weren’t as attached to the product and engineering world there. Consider yourself an Android expert as a Developer Advocate? Now you are in a hierarchy of DAs. How do the Android DAs, DPEs, Tech Writers, PgMs all coordinate? There was a special role to try to help bring things together. It was a tough role!

One of the first things I did was to switchback, and have one Android DevRel team, and eventually it went back into the Android product area itself to attach and integrate even closer with the teams there.

When joining a team as a new leader or manager, you have to make some decisions. After taking some time (hopefully!) listening the team, you will be working out what changes are needed. If you feel a rush to show impact, you may rush up that first local optima hill.

Through my own errors, I have learned to:

  • Listen to the natural feel for how orgs work at the company
  • Listen to the core problems your teams are facing, and think about potential solutions
  • Make some calls on what change solves real problems.

I am loathe to go against the grain of the company unless a) things are really broken with the approach, and b) I have a strong conviction that it’s time to actually create a new default for the company. I don’t want to flip flop, nor do I want to make changes that are surface level just because I am used to them.

If I was going into Spurs, I would very much lean into creating a Spursy team (hopefully breaking the mould of the losing!). When Manchester City got radically new management at the start of the 2000’s (and have allegedly done a fair amount of cheating I may add!) it was the perfect time to make a big change and create a new identity. The club needs to buy into this, and needs to allow the hunt for a better global maxima by giving the new leadership time.

The new manager bounce

Well, lcfc’s managerial bounce lasted 5 minutes.

One of the other reasons for the flurry of sackings is the myth of the “new manager bounce”. The theory is that the players will have some hope, and maybe will fight for their places more with someone new in charge. If the old manager had run out of ideas and left the team with no confidence, and the incoming manager has a series of fresh ideas, this can work! It doesn’t seem to be the case in practice.

Maybe the same happens in the office. I don’t know about you, but I feel like most of the reorgs I have seen are too frequent, and don’t occur when the ideas are dry. In fact, whenever you have a reorg you spend a lot of time revisiting items such as the strategy, the plan, and how you work. You require time to do the forming of the new way, and it takes time to get into your new stride. At times, a reorg has happened seemingly RIGHT when things were starting to click and execution was cooking with gas.

Too often real life feels like the CEO and the three envelopes joke.

Be thoughtful as a new leader, or a boss to a new leader, and make sure that everyone has the time to make sure they aren’t climbing the wrong hill.

/fin

From Go to the Number Slide Puzzle

Leave a Comment


I have managed teams in various stages of growth.

At times there is hyper growth, where a dump track pulls up to you with money and head count and you are charged with running like the wind to grow the team to capture an opportunity.

At others you have stagnant growth (or even worse: negative), where you need to take a breath and tackle a problem with the crew that you have. Sometimes this happens in dire situations, but that isn’t always the case. It often happens after an influx of talent where you realize that you all just need a breath. It takes time to ingest new members and maintain the evolving culture. It can all sounds great and easy to have a large influx, but it is far from it. When you are adding team members like this, it is a lil like playing Go. Ideally you have a strategy and some time in between each move. If you were playing speed Go where you had to lay down the peaces one after the other a couple mistakes can compound and you end up with a bad Tetris game:

My ideal growth state is being able to play it slower with organic growth. This gives you time to play the board and let it settle. Every new player that you add to the game changes the entire team and you need that time. If you get the right flow state you are able to keep a strong culture and give the appropriate time to new recruits to get up to speed. A friend joined a unicorn and left a few months over to come to Google citing the fact that he was on a new team with an awful codebase and everyone was new at the company.

At times you get a large infestation of talent through an acquisition. This comes with great opportunity, a proven team that works well together. It also comes with potential culture clashes and expectations that need to be shaped. When done right the combined force is obviously more than the sum of the parts and you end up with a win win, but we all know that pulling off acquisitions is hard work on everyones behalf.

Back to stagnant growth. At this point you are waiting at the Go board for so long that you need to play the age old number slide puzzle. Moving around parts as changes happen to maximize the health of the entire team. Even when you know where you want to get too, getting there can be really hard. Unlike the numbers in the slider, humans have minds, feelings, and careers to concern themselves with. You can’t just move them around and expect everyone to be happy to go with all the moves. Instead, you need to paint the vision of how the world will be when it lines up that way and be really careful that you don’t mess anything up for people along the way. You have to go slower than you would sometimes like. You need to nudge.

Do you party with your cousin orgs more that your siblings?

Leave a Comment


I remember when it hit me. I had back to back meetings with two teams, and they were polar opposite experiences. In the first meeting, you would be hard pressed to know who belonged to which team. Everyone was problem solving and coming together for the customers.

Then we rolled into the next meeting, one that was silted and the air was filled with the pungent smell of CYA. Fingers were pointed, everyone was guarded with what they said, and the ball barely moved an inch. It was awful.

The stark contrast meant that I couldn’t help but compare. What was the root problem that was stopping the teams from working well together in the second example?

It could be many things of course:

  • Personality clashes between the teams
  • No clarity of ownership and purpose
  • Incentives being misaligned.

But it didn’t fit neatly into any of those buckets. Then I stepped up a level from thinking about the individuals and their personalities, and instead looked at the groups. And there it was. One of the groups was a close peer, with both of us reporting to the same immediate boss. The other was more removed, all part of the same family, but further up the tree.

This got me thinking about families.

I have witnessed interesting behavior where siblings can go at each other like cats and dogs, but when cousins are around everyone has a blast. With cousins there aren’t the same concerns with pecking order in the family, and instead you are left with super-friends… in that they are family, they will be around your whole life, and that you get the overall crazy of your particular family group. It also doesn’t hurt that generally when you gather with cousins it is to celebrate and chances are you end up with presents. You don’t have to live with them and all their warts, as you do with your siblings.

There are many occasions where I have witnessed someone react to behavior from someone else and I know that they would have reacted totally differently if the other party was someone else. It hasn’t been uncommon for me to say to someone “what would you have done if I had said that to you?” Once a bit is flipped, we often look for things to prove why we flipped that bit and we get frustrated, whereas with someone we like we are willing to deal with more and give them the benefit of the doubt.

All of these people, and family, dynamics can be seen in the corporate world. As you try to build a healthy company you need to watch over these dynamics and step in when appropriate. This doesn’t mean that every relationship should be happy happy joy joy. Not only is that not realistic, but it isn’t even ideal. It is good for us to push each other. It is good for us to have friction. The key isn’t to freak out at that, but rather find ways to process the friction. You don’t have to be best friends with every person or org out there, but you do need to work well together. That often comes down to trust.

The Poison

There are situations where I didn’t trust other orgs, and that was always a poisonous situation. This is where “politics” come out and you try to protect your team. In the short term this can keep the team moving and productive, but in the long run it is destined to break down as the natural structures don’t make any sense.

As someone responsible for some part of an organization, your job is to build trust over time throughout your organization. This includes working with your peers. Andy Grove calls this out explicitly when he defines the output of management as:

“A manager’s output is not her individual work, but instead the output of her organization plus that of the neighboring organizations under her influence”

This responsibility is important. We are all ultimately one family, and there is plenty to go around, so don’t be insular, but help with empathy.

With this in mind, I will try to treat everyone like a cousin, even at the org level 🙂

The right thing to do, is the right thing to do.