The art of Curling to manage your projects

A simple, yet easy to remember analogy around managing projects and products.

It’s common for people to create sports analogies to describe business tasks but I believe I’ve found one of the most fitting sport analogies for the art of Product Management:?Curling. Yes, Curling… the sport nobody really knows or cares about (no offense intended to the Olympians who train to compete for their entire lives). The Product Management analogy is extremely simple; but provides an easy-to-understand mental image for managing products and projects.

If you’re not familiar with Curling, here are some highlights from the sport that you recognize as “the thing that vaguely reminds you of cruise ship shuffleboard but on ice”:

How does this sport relate to a project? Pretty easy actually: the large stone is the Project. It slowly lumbers down the ice to a destination point with the hope is that it lands on the intended target (or “house”). It’s the combination of precision, estimation, plenty of skill and a decent amount of luck. What you will also notice is after the initial throw “sweepers” will rapidly brush in front of the stone to help its path along. This looks odd, but it serves a critical purpose to achieving the result.

So why do they brush the ice in curling? The simple answer is that it’s to reduce?friction. When a player sweeps quickly, it helps to heat and lightly melt the ice, leaving a film of water that reduces friction on the stone. If a team wants the stone to travel further, they sweep more. Conversely, if they want it to travel a shorter distance, they sweep less. Crucially, every ice sheet is different, meaning that curlers must learn how to read their surroundings to decide how they will play their shots.

The concept of removing friction is critical to a project. Getting ahead of your design, development or testing team and removing impediments before they are struck is the sign of a great product or project manager… with the mastery of the function being the ability to remove the friction before anyone knows that it’s even there.

In addition, every project is unique and no matter how many books and programs are written, there just isn’t a “one size fits all” approach. The fundamentals will stay the same, but the approach to projects must be adaptive to the playing conditions. Once the project is in motion, the project must be constantly groomed and adjusted to remove those friction points that prevent the goal from being reached. The steady progress of the project requires constant upkeep and attention lest it wanders off course.

But perhaps most important? Managing great projects is a team sport. At different moments there are leads who take center stage to deliver incredible results... but without the team the system doesn't work. Someone needs to aim and push the stone. Someone needs to brush to remove the friction to achieve the right result. Alone, nothing happens well. Delivering brilliant products requires teamwork. Always.

Ultimately it’s a function that requires the right combination of those same core elements: precision, estimation, skill… and yes, certainly luck. Bringing them together becomes an orchestrated effort, with the goal of getting that large, lumbering stone (or project) across the finish line.

As a sports analogy? It’s a pretty fitting one… and perhaps a nice visual to keep in mind as you navigate the course of Product and Project Management.