What R2D2 can teach us about Product

Lessons from a droid

At Palantir, I was in an internal, cross-functional team, aptly named R2D2. In Star Wars, R2D2 is wheeling (gliding?) around in the background, making cute noises and quietly saving the day. Where would Luke Skywalker be without the droid who held the Death Star plans?

Our team leader, Kurt Schwarz, called us “effective idealists”. Twenty droids who were focused on making a positive impact on the world, while still being pragmatic enough to know what it takes to achieve that impact. My current product, a climate tech start-up with large bank investors, means this phrase has been on my mind a lot. It’s made me realise how much of how I approach product has been impacted by this non-product team. 

Operational Excellence

An effective idealist, needs to prioritise ruthlessly, and make the most of the time they have available. So does a product manager. This is where techniques like Getting Things Done, by David Allen, come into play. I won’t bore you by explaining the whole method, there are plenty of articles on productivity methods written by better writers than me! However, the key principles of “get everything out of your head into an inbox, process regularly and maintain different lists” made my working life so much easier. No more waking up at 4am with thoughts of emails I forgot to send, everything I had to do was already written as a next small step in my inbox. As a team, we invested in typing speed, in keyboard shortcuts and email filters. How do you think R2 was able to store such huge files? He stored information efficiently in his brain (hard drive). 

Operational excellence allows you to win trust early on. Just like R2 when he disabled the autopilot on the Naboo starfighter for child Anakin. When starting on new projects, you win trust by taking excellent notes, or making sure that meetings end with clear next steps and owners. Once you have that trust you get much more information on what is and isn’t working and can start figuring out where to jump in. A product manager succeeds or fails based on the context they have access to. What has been tried before? What features are who’s baby? What holes are there in the data? Get a few quick wins and you’ll have more access to this information.

Low Ego 

How many times have you gasped in offence when someone has called you a project manager? “Erm, I think you’ll find I’m a product manager.” My current CTO does this to vex me, and it works. Product is a blurry job at the best of times. But its principles remain the same: put the user at the heart of everything, understand the problem before you jump to the solution, and be strategic with the business outcomes. This means you can be in a fascinating workshop with C-suite one day, and crying over a Jira ticket the next. R2D2 saved everyone 24 times in 11 movies, in different ways each time (ah to be a convenient plot device). Ultimately, the best product managers are the same, they are problem solvers. They see a problem for the business, or a user, and they decide it’s worth solving and solve it by whatever means are most appropriate. Sometimes, this is by building a kick-ass feature or product. Sometimes, it means realising you can’t build anything because your team is drowning in support tickets and you need to build a better way of dealing with that. So that’s what you do. 

Several years ago, a technical product team I worked on managed support by getting their software developer users to raise tickets based on the service that wasn’t working. Just because the users were developers didn’t mean they knew the ins and outs of the architecture. I took a product approach. I understood the problem from the user perspective, analysed the data we had, and created a new process based on which services tied to which user facing problems. As a result we reduced the support load on the team by over 60% and slashed the amount of time users waited to have their bugs resolved. Not a product management job, but by using a product mindset I unlocked us to go and build some really cool things for users. 

High feedback, high trust team

The power of the R2D2 team was the ability of lots of different people to pull their knowledge from around the business and learn from each other. We could do this because it was safe to fail. When people messed up they shouted about it loudly, and made sure no one else did the same. We even went so far as having a TIFU slack hashtag (today I f***ed up). Major leaders in the business weren’t afraid to ask for feedback and tell you openly about their failures. One thing I’ve made sure to take forward are After Action Reviews (AARs), personal write ups of what went well and what went poorly for big initiatives, I publish it and all the feedback I have received to the rest of the product practice. Those that know me well can then tell me if my self-reflections have gone a bit AWOL. R2D2 was upgraded a few times, you should be beeping and squealing for upgrades as well. 

High amounts of feedback and open failure needs to be balanced with high agency. No one tells R2 to do a lot of his feats. He just does it. Help and support is there if you need it, but no one is going to do it for you. It’s ultimately your job to solve your problem once you’ve been given the advice you need. As a product manager, you should be empowered to own an outcome, this comes with a scary amount of accountability. Once you’ve gotten feedback from colleagues or from your users that something isn’t working, it’s on you to go fix it! It’s this mindset that explains why Palantir is a founders factory. Pratap, another ex-droid, has a list if you are interested. 

The mission matters 

A product manager is on the hook for outcomes. Does what you're building achieve the impact in the world you want it to achieve? It’s a motivating thing to think about! You’ll notice despite R2’s friendship with Anakin, he ultimately stayed true to the rebel mission. Achieving big things often means a whole lot of compromise, but don’t compromise the core impact you care about. For example, in the last climate change start-up I worked at, we wanted to own everything. We wanted to be a place businesses could measure, transition plan, and offset their carbon footprints. But, we were a team of less than 20, our in-house expertise was tailored to the offset market, and measurement was becoming more complex with the introduction of scope 3 emissions (think supply chain, investments etc.). So we took the decision that as much as we wanted to own the journey, we would focus on the offsetting market. We chose to rely upon measurement providers and experts to validate transition plans and then pair people with the best possible offsets for them. Since then, the business has been able to hone in on that niche, branching into biodiversity offsets and originating high quality projects. It’s had a bigger impact on the planet by focusing on one area well than by trying to do everything poorly. R2 never tried to wield a lightsaber. 

Conclusion

Be like an R2D2. Be operationally excellent. Be an effective idealist. Care about what you are achieving in the world and compromise on everything you need to achieve it, except your core aim.

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