Why Every Product Manager Should Study Poker
By: Remco Magielse
Tags: Product, Poker, Product Development, Technology, Product Management

Why Every Product Manager Should Study Poker

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Developing and launching products is like playing poker. Poker players need to be able to judge a hand, read the table, know their opponents, and gather the right data to decide how to play their hand. Product Managers should be able to assess their product(s), understand the market, their competition and determine a strategy to approach their market with the product. The skills and strategies you learn in Poker, may actually help you to re-think the way you manage products.

Introduction

During the peak of the Poker hype (at least it was a hype in The Netherlands) I also played poker (Texas Hold 'Em). Mainly online. Because I wanted to grow my skills I’ve read several books about theory and strategy within Poker. Later in my career when I switched to Product Management I started to see parallels between playing poker and managing products. In poker and product management you have to make the best decision with the limited available information you have. At the same time you try to gather more information as you develop your product and study the market.

As a product manager you have to make the best decision with limited available information

In this article I’ll look at a few strategies behind playing poker, and how those can be translated to Product Management.

Judge your hand

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One of the first decisions to make in a poker game is to decide whether you want to play the hand you are dealt. ‘AA’* a.k.a. pocket rockets is the best possible hand to start with. However, the chance to be dealt this hand is small (4.5%). If you would only play this hand you would lose money due to the blinds system that forces you to put money into the game at every round. 'AA' you can play at any time. But there are also cards that you can be dealt that are super strong, yet not the best. You should also learn that you need to play those cards. KK, QQ, AK are among those that are strong and you will win with most of the time.

What can Product Managers learn from poker players about judging your hand?

The same logic applies to developing products. You don’t need to have the best product in order to be successful in a market. But you have to understand the potential of a product:

in which markets is this a good product

what is the potential for future growth of this product

You don’t need to deliver the best product in order to be successful.

There are various methods available for product managers in order to judge products and features. One common method used in software development is to the Moscow method. Features are qualified as “must-have”, “should-have”, “could-have” and “won’t-have”. Although that methodology easily results in a battle of different features, endless discussions, it is an easy to understand way of judging a product and its features.

Back to our poker-analogy. If you would focus only on the “must-have” features and setting that as your baseline you would only play AA. You can also turn the reasoning around: what is the minimum hand you want to play? Does the product lack any features that make it unusable, or does it actually does a decent enough job in most domains? If that is the case, it may be worthwhile to release or launch the product anyway, as it already delivers value to part of your users. Remember that even an above-average hand like JTs can win a hand in a round of poker.