What Product Teams Can Learn from Formula 1 Pit Stops
Watch about 20 people change 4 tires in 2 seconds:
Mesmerizing.
Now watch a pit stop from 1950 (it's the Indianapolis 500, which that year counted toward the very first Formula 1 world championship):
The announcer marvels: "Just 67 seconds!"
From 67 seconds to 2 seconds. That's 30x faster — though not the same job: the 1950 stop was four crew refuelling the car, and today's cars don't refuel at all.
How did they do it? And what can product teams learn from the most elite operational teams in the world?
While product teams have a lot more variability in most of their work, I've learned key lessons for product teams from studying formula 1 pit stops. These lessons illustrate why sprints help product teams perform at elite levels.
Preparation Beats Execution
A woodsman was once asked, "What would you do if you had just five minutes to chop down a tree?" He answered, "I would spend the first two and a half minutes sharpening my axe." Let us take a few minutes to sharpen our perspective.
- Anonymous Woodsman (not Abraham Lincoln) (source)
Toyota made its system great by working on the system. Spending more time on infrastructure is key. That's what formula 1 pit crews have done exceedingly well. They have the right tools, right training, right communication, etc. Everything has been planned and tweaked. And if someone said "hey, I think I know a way we could do this better," I am sure everyone would take a second to listen.
"Poor preparation is a lousy excuse for a last-minute selfish frenzy. That frenzy distracts us from doing it right the next time."
Also related to preparation, great teams use retrospectives. The best retrospectives are small (only the members of a close team) and many times have only the team, not leaders attending. Why? You have to make it safe to bring up flaws. That is a very difficult environment to create. But done well, will yield meaningful improvement in the team.
Key question: What could you prepare that would give you power during performance time?
Clarity Enables Speed
All team members know their role, what is within their control, and what others depend on them for. No one is standing around wondering what's going on or how they can contribute.
Key question: Can you describe your role? What are you accountable for?
Knowing the goal, knowing the process. These are important to get and stay in a state of flow. The perfect pit stop is fluid compared what most of us experience when we need to change a tire - lots of awkwardness, pausing and wondering, obvious that we don't do this often, etc.
Key question: Where aren't you fluid? What could you do to better get into flow?
This is about a team functioning as a single unit. Support is critical. HR, IT, marketing - all support functions are critical to building great products. If a pm or dev has to take half a day to fix some benefits issue or has a computer issue that IT can't get to because they are backlogged, that impacts the team.
Eliminate What Doesn't Matter
"Fewer things, done better" was our mantra at LinkedIn. Easy to say and very hard to do. One key ingredient of great pit stops is only doing a few things. Limit what you're doing to increase speed and accomplish the goal (get back out on the track). They used to refuel, but no longer do. Removing that step was a major piece of getting to the 2-second pit stops of today.
Key question: What can you stop doing?
In 1950 the announcer says "Just 67 seconds!" Amazing to think that the best times today are more than 30 times faster. 30x improvement over time may seem crazy, but here's what Mark Zuckerberg said about the best engineers.
"Someone who is exceptional in their role is not just a little better than someone who is pretty good. They are 100 times better." (NY Times)
Marc Andreessen pointed out something similar:
"The gap between what a highly productive person can do and what an average person can do is getting bigger and bigger. Five great programmers can completely outperform 1,000 mediocre programmers." (HBR)
While something may seem great today, there are major breakthroughs to be made. In 20 years, we will look back on how many product teams function today and laugh at the clunkiness of it all. The best product teams today are already making exponential gains in terms of efficiency and effectiveness.
This is why growth mindset is key. If we are fixed in our thoughts about what we can do, we may stop at a 67-second pit stop and think we are great. Don't stop improving.
Key question: Is there something you're already doing well that you could improve more?
Want to geek out on pit stop mechanics? Watch this full breakdown.