Hummingbirds vs. Elephants
Product Managers are hummingbirds. Engineers are elephants.
I had to learn this one the hard way. Part of why I’m writing this is so that you don’t have to.
I read an article by Isaac Asimov once where he did some back of the envelope math and figured out that most animals have a maximum life expectancy of about 1 billion heartbeats. There’s even a research project to collect data on this (http://robdunnlab.com/projects/beats-per-life/). As an aside, humans are huge outliers on this spectrum. We get over twice this number of heartbeats, but that’s due to indoor plumbing and antibiotics, but I digress.
Different animals experience time differently. Product Managers and Engineers are different animals. Time flows differently for these two roles.
What’s this mean on a practical level? It means that if you take a video of an elephant and speed it up so that the heart rate of the elephant in the video is equivalent to the heart rate of say a mouse, the pack of elephants will scurry around on screen and look so very similar to a pack of mice flitting here and there dashing and eating. Different animals have different internal clocks.
Remember this when working with engineers. You’re like a hummingbird. You’re flying back and forth between stakeholder meetings, planning sessions, customer calls, status meetings with management, oh, and standups with engineers. Engineers are like elephants. They’re slowly moving big heavy loads. They look like they’re plodding away. You’re flying around wondering what’s taking them so long.
When I say “slow”, it only looks slow to you. Engineers are spending time doing deep thinking. They’re working on a complex problem and trying to think about all the implications and how it’s going to work given the constraints of the current code. It takes them time to load all this information into their heads. It’s not easy.
Then, you get hit with a customer fire. You fly over to your pack of elephants and chirp: “Drop everything! We need to fix this now!” It takes time for the pack to set down their load. It takes time to reorient to the problem at hand. They have to pick up this new problem. Your heart rate is at 600 bpm. Theirs is at 30 bpm. They’re moving as fast as they know how and yet they’re moving at 1/20th of what you think they should be. Unless you appreciate the different perspectives of time, you’ll cause whiplash, burnout & resentment.
You wonder why they aren’t able to react as fast as you. But then you realize that one elephant can move more than a thousand hummingbirds. Both roles are needed. Without the elephants, nothing would ever get moved. Without the hummingbirds, you’d have an elephant coordinating the work.
This isn’t to suggest you never redirect or that you shield them from every interrupt. It’s only to show that interruptions & redirections have a cost and that you are careful and deliberate when introducing them.
Trevor Bruner took a long, winding career path to Product Management. His previous careers include Nuclear Submarine Officer, Offshore Oil Well Driller, College Instructor, and Financial Advisor. He’s the first to tell you he didn’t know what he was getting into when he started in Product Management. He wants you to learn from his mistakes.
You can read his book Quick Start Guide to Product Management: What I Wish I New When Starting in Product Management or follow him here.
