Apollo 11 Through the Eyes of a Product Manager

Inspiration

On the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, a summer visit* to Kennedy Space Center inspired this PM to consider the enormity and complexity of NASA's moon missions through the lens of product management. Specifically the ideas/frameworks/tools that are part of his bread and butter. So here are some Apollo-inspired thoughts on: Requirements, Trade-Offs & Prioritization, Users Stories, Metrics, and Project Management...

The Lunar Module ascent stage climbs to rendezvous with the awaiting Command Service Module. A careful look will reveal several of the LM's space trumpets. These were used both to frighten the native moon dwellers, and to broadcast updates from the unfortunately scheduled Tour de France, which was ending right at the moment of mankind's greatest technological achievement. Image: NASA

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1. Requirements

Imagine a powerful stakeholder in your organization calls an all-hands meeting to address the team about strategy, and a time-sensitive goal such as this emerges:

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth."

That was the Stakeholder-In-Chief himself, John F. Kennedy addressing (listen for yourself, from 3m) a joint session of Congress in 1961, when the United States was seriously stressing about Soviet achievements in space.

So Mr. or Ms. PM, you have 8 1/2 years to deliver. How will you start breaking things down? How will you even begin to think about how to break things down, putting together a team, and establishing a process? By the way, neither your company nor the human race at large ever did anything this complex before, so looking at precedents or a competitive analysis will only get you so far.

Soviet Propaganda Poster: "Our triumph in space is the hymn to Soviet country!" Image: Flashbak.com

2. Trade-Offs / Prioritization

In order to deeply design and plan, a big preliminary decision was needed regarding Mission Mode. Meaning, how exactly are we going to break away from earth's insecure, clingy gravity with enough force to keep going to the moon, carrying enough fuel to get us there and back, with enough life-support gadgets and supplies to keep our guys alive? As with the other tens of thousands of problems that needed to be solved, there were several solutions considered. Imagine the research, debates, the cost-benefit analyses, political- and ego-driven arguments, and the methodology needed to make this fateful decision. Cost, feasibility, safety, and mission-operational skill were among the criteria when evaluating the candidates, which follow below.

John Houbolt , advocate of the LOR approach, holding court. Houbolt's design persevered because he did not listen to the haters, go John! Also... nice penmanship! Image: Wikipedia

1. Direct Ascent: A rocket even bigger than the eventually-built Saturn V would carry a vehicle to fly directly to the moon, serve as the return vehicle, leaving part of itself on the surface, having finished its job of providing a soft landing.
2. Lunar Surface Rendezvous: Two spacecraft would be launched. One, supplying fuel, would be flown by remote control to the moon where it would await the manned unit. The crew would essentially "gas up" their vehicle before departing.
3. Earth Orbit Rendezvous (EOR): Multiple rockets (up to 15 in some plans!!) would carry parts of the inter-orbit vehicle, moon lander, return vehicle, and fuel; the parts would be assembled in earth orbit
4. Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR): This was the winning mission mode, wherein a single powerful rocket lifts a modular spacecraft into earth orbit where it would be reconfigured for the trip to the moon, land there, takeoff, cruise back to earth and splash down.

How are you making investment decisions about your space program?

3. User Stories

Some teams try to use the consistent packaging of user stories (or, say, Design Thinking 'hills') to break up work in a value-driven, rather than feature-driven way. Like so:

• As flight director, I want constant access to all mission statuses, so that I can best ensure the safety of the crew and the success of the mission (3` Story Points)
• As an Apollo astronaut, I want to land on the moon and return safely to earth, in order to be awesome (1800 Story Points)
• As an Apollo astronaut conducting extravehicular activity (EVA), I want a spacesuit that will protect me from cosmic rays, heat, cold, and decompression, so that I will survive (13 Story Points)
• As command-service module pilot in a lonely orbital vigil, I want to be able to stream humorous and informative content from Netflix or Hulu to my telemetry console, so that I won't crack from boredom and isolation (N/A)
• As a powerful country, I want to build up my deterrence via technological prowess, in order to strike fear in the heart of my enemy. (N/A)
• As a president, I want to send an American to the moon, in order to add a national achievement to my legacy. (N/A)

Create your own space travel related user stories using the user/goal/reason-benefit structure!

History's most functional outfit, and a "showstopper requirement". Buzz Aldrin rocks the right-handed wristwatch and a very-metal codpiece. Image: NASA

4. Metrics

Yes those. How could the story be complete without the things that folks want to optimize so very badly. In our case, valid metrics can be needle-moved from mission to mission, and should tie back to the highest level goals.

Overall

• Crew survival rate
• Strength of strategic deterrence vis a vis Soviet Union
• Number of consumer products derived from program technology

Launch

• On time percentage
• Level of crew's unimaginable fear during liftoff

Moon Landing

• Fuel remaining for lift-off
• Distance from landing target
• Money saved by prepaying for parking

EVA

• Weight of moon rock collected
• Volume of moon dust collected
• Longevity of unmanned experiments
• Max distance of single kangaroo hop

Performance

• Instrument accuracy
• Comms uptime
• Usage of finite resources e.g., battery, oxygen, water, food

Marketing/PR

• Onsite launch spectators
• Television and radio audience, by launch, landing, and EVA
• Minutes of in-focus and relevant film captured

Post-Mission Quarantine

• Quantity of moon plague and/or space germs permitted to escape into Earth's atmosphere

Which metrics are you tracking for your space mission?

5. Project Management

Listen to this part carefully, as it's almost impossible to wrap your mind around. This whole thing, the Program, the missions, the training, the vehicles, the technology - all of it was the output of a coordinated effort by ~400,000 people across tens of thousands of companies and organizations.

Four. Hundred. Thousand. People.

Tracking them, keeping them aligned and informed, understanding status, dependencies, etc. Where to begin? What tools to use? Awe inspiring.

But that's just the human element. What about the nitty-gritty details like the actual specifications? A fellow at Kennedy Space Center offered another stat which is hard to relate to. He said there were 2 million systems designed, manufactured, instrumented, integrated, installed, tested, monitored, maintained, etc. in Saturn V and its spacecraft payload. Two million systems. You might have heard about the 747 and similar aircraft being a big deal with their 1 million+ parts. Parts. Child's play. My understanding is that Saturn V alone was the largest, most complex and most powerful machine ever built. Readers can opine on what man-made items built in the past 50 years are the successor bearers of those superlatives. Like the Large Hadron Collider for example. Boring.

Saturn V Schematic: The tip of the complexity iceberg. Image: Ryan S. Horowitz

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Clubhouse

In any case, this led to thoughts about how we would do this today, with cloud-based collaborative tools for example. And I imagined what a Kanban board or user directory or Story/Task artifact would look like if populated with NASA/Apollo content. So I went ahead and used Clubhouse, a wonderful and deserves-to-be-better-known Project Management tool powering dev and account tracking at GrocerKey, to model some aspects of the Program and mission 11. A soothing, fun exercise for this PM: to leverage different features and bells and whistles to support the subject matter. (Caveat, I had to use dev tools to cheat with dates and email addresses)

NASA Programs

Let's begin with the different programs run by NASA. We'll put them all in Clubhouse and use the Projects artifact. That's a high-level artifact, conceptually under Organizations and Workspaces. This probably isn't the best modeling but one way to do it.

Team

How about the people? NASA staff and contractors, outside contractors, government officials, any participant or stakeholder with a need to contribute or be informed needs to be set up, given a role, and access to different things. Here's a slice of the NASA Manned Space Flight organization directory:

Kanban Board

This is what things may have looked like on July 21, 1969 during EVA on the lunar surface. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin obviously had ownership of that story, while Michael Collins owned the orbit-and-wait piece. As we can see, the completed work is separated out in reverse chronological order with most recent tasks added to the top and mission stages that remained are still "Planned" and sorted in chronological order. We are using Labels to denote the relevant vehicle/equipment. We're using Filters as part of a Saved Space, showing us only Apollo-relevant stories, and only from our mission, which has been modeled as an Epic - an artifact between Project and Story in the conceptual hierarchy.

A Story

There are a lot of goodies in this screen. Check out the metadata, the users involved, the accurate timestamps, and the transcripted voices coming through as Comments.

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Time to sign off. Please point out mistakes and share your wonder -- about space stuff or product management -- using the PFC Mod. 6 Public Feedback and Commentary Intake Mechanism!

* My daughter's idea, thank you Geffen.