BOOK REVIEWS
Product Lessons from Rocket Scientists
A review for Think Like a Rocket Scientist By Ozan Varol
Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life — By Ozan Varol
Get it here on Amazon.
As a member of the Women In Product Toronto book club, I suggested this title for a light, fun, summer read. While I enjoyed the stories about space and learned new things from this book, I found I had some issues with the structural components of the book.
Synopsis
Did you know that there’s no official title for a rocket scientist at NASA? Overtime, the term has come to describe someone who’s so smart that they’re able to do the impossible — launch a rocket into space. Ozan Varol worked on the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA and he is now a successful lawyer, speaker and blogger. With his book “Think Like a Rocket Scientist”, we get a behind-the-scenes look at how anyone can learn to use rocket science problem-solving strategies to overcome challenges in their own professional and personal life.
Why I chose this book
Space and space exploration is something I find incredibly fascinating, so right away, I was intrigued by the title of the book. This book has also appeared on many popular to-read lists, including Inc.com’s “6 Business Books You Need to Read This Year, According to Bill Gates, Satya Nadella, and Adam Grant”. Seriously, check out all the accolades on Amazon. I figured if Bill Gates thinks it’s worth reading, it must be worth at least a glance?
Lessons for Product Managers
Use First Principles to Deal with Uncertainty
First principles is the idea of breaking something down to its core and questioning every aspect and assumption about the problem to try to solve it. It’s an incredibly useful problem-solving tool used by scientists of all disciplines from molecular biology to — you guessed it — rocket science.
One of my favourite examples from the book was about Elon Musk and the building of SpaceX using first principles thinking. Rather than paying millions of dollars for cheap Russian rockets, Musk decided to revisit the underlying principles of space flight, and he reviewed and reconstructed the supply chain to build rocket ships more economically. This idea of breaking tasks down to their most basic level, and questioning if they’re necessary to the initial problem is something a product person should do everyday. Sometimes, it’s easy to do things as they’ve always been done, but I think our job as product managers is to be the person to ask why and take out any unnecessary fluff.
Embrace Flip-Flopping to Find Your Product-Market Fit
Being a flip-flopper is normally seen as a bad thing because it gives the impression that you’re inconsistent and always changing your mind, especially in a domain like politics. But in rocket science, as well as in product, we should be open to changing our minds, especially with new information. In fact, not being a flip-flopper can mean crash landing a $125 million Mars satellite. The journey from Earth to Mars, just like building a product to find the elusive product-market fit, is not a simple straight line. By continuously iterating on the Build-Measure-Learn cycle, and taking the new information to adjust our product features, roadmap, and strategy accordingly, we will also make better suited products to customers’ needs.
Conduct Pre-Mortems to Identify Issues Prior to Product Launch
In an Agile setting, retrospectives tend to happen at the end of a sprint or a product cycle to look at what went right and what went wrong. However, it’s often more important to catch something bad while it’s happening than to review what happened after the fact. Varol talks about using the concept of a pre-mortem, an exercise done during a product cycle to diagnose potential problems. In it, the team gets together, pretends the product is dead, and brainstorms various causes that led to the failure. It’s a great tool for weeding out hidden, potential issues during a product cycle while also providing a safe space for teammates to speak out about things on their mind.
My Review
While I enjoyed many of the lessons provided by Varol, I think this book had a lot of problems as well. Unless you are a hard-core science lover, I’m not sure if this book is for you. Here is a breakdown of how I would rate the book — keep in mind every book starts with 5 stars.
-1⭐ for too much repetition — Varol extensively teases the principles is to be discussed in the beginning of each chapter, and then goes into the actual principle, before polishing up the theories once more at the end. This is a great communication style for PowerPoint presentations to live audiences, not so much for a 300 page book.
-0.5⭐for lack of photos/diagrams — A picture is worth 1000 words, and this book would be much shorter and easier to understand with pictures! There were a lot of advanced scientific concepts discussed, like the different landing mechanisms for Mars rovers or how the Hubble space telescope works (or doesn’t), that the targeted general audience would have trouble understanding. Heck, I have a master’s degree in engineering, and even I had a bit of a hard time keeping up with some of the concepts.
-0.5 ⭐for preachy writing — This is a personal preference but I found Varol tends to make broad, sweeping, subjective statements about situations without evidence.
Pro-tip: If you are short on time, you can quickly scan the section headers and intros for the key takeaways.
3/5 ⭐
About me: I am an engineer-turned-product manager in Toronto, and I really like to read.
I am currently looking for a new product role. If you are interested in learning more about me and what I am looking for, check out my Reverse Job Application.
Did you also read this book? Leave a comment or drop me a line here to let me hear your thoughts.
