Why being a product person makes me less suspicious of an upcoming COVID vaccine

We’ve been hearing a lot lately about the speedy development of the COVID vaccine. Great news, right? Well, there are a lot of people who are worried that by getting this vaccine, they’ll be turned into the “guinea pigs” of the pharmaceutical industry. The common argument is that “A vaccine that has been developed this fast can’t be tested well enough.” But as a product person, I completely disagree.

In my career as a product manager—and in my work as a consultant and coach—I’ve had the opportunity to observe several product initiatives that have unfolded in a pretty similar way: there’s no time to lose and we have external pressure to succeed (if we don’t, we’ll run out of funding, money, or lose important customers).

If companies or teams find themselves in this situation, if there is a massive commitment to tackle the given problem AND if there is the possibility to be flexible on the investment side of the equation, solutions might unfold at a pace that is much faster than what everybody anticipated. This is possible because everyone has a shared understanding of the problem.

In the COVID vaccine case, that's exactly what has happened. The problem to tackle is clear: “Find a vaccine that makes people immune to the virus.” Or the second best option is : ”Find a vaccine that helps to make the infection less harmful.” The vaccine itself should not harm the vaccinated people, it should be possible to produce it in large quantities, and it needs to be possible to ship it and store it in a reasonable way at a reasonable price.

And as the usual process takes years, mainly because of parallel vaccine development (which should sound pretty familiar to all the PMs who are working on several product initiatives in parallel—in other words, all of us)), waiting for funding, waiting for the team to be formed, waiting for a testing group to form, etc., the pandemic version of the process can be sped up dramatically by throwing money at the problem. The companies winning this race for the vaccine will earn a lot of money and therefore it makes sense to invest a lot.

Two versions of a product development  timeline. The one on top is the “business-as-usual timeline while the  one on the bottom is the condensed, high-funding, shared goal, laser-focused timeline.

And if the same circumstances are given for any product company (a lot to lose and much to gain → sense of urgency, commitment to a shared goal, and the willingness to invest in a solution to the given problem), they will start to be laser focused, will unite all forces in one direction, and won’t let commonplace problems slow them down. For example, when it comes to staffing the team, nobody will sit there and wait for HR to find the perfect full-time candidates. They’ll look for quick and creative solutions like working with talented freelancers.

One way to look at project planning: Invest, Quality, Time, and Scope are the most relevant planning parameters.

So to cut a long story short: I’m pretty confident that this is exactly what has happened in these pharmaceutical companies. The problem was clear, the scope was more or less fixed, quality expectations were fixed (and even controlled) by external parties, time was flexible (but the goal was to complete it ASAP), and the budget was endless. Think about a product initiative with the same boundaries— it’s a product manager’s dream because you could be as fast and as focused as possible.

For any non product people reading this, I hope that this explanation gives you a little more faith in the vaccine development process. And for the product people, it’s a fun thought experiment to imagine how we might approach a big audacious project under similar constraints.