Product Data Teams 101
On January 29, 1886, Carl Benz applied for a patent for a “vehicle powered by a gas engine.” This document essentially became the birth certificate of the car. It took 7 years for the first car, the Duryea Motor wagon, to appear in the US in 1893.
Only 30 years later, the United States was the world’s largest car manufacturer by far, with an annual production of 3.6 million, Canada a far second with only 135 thousand a year.
However, the automobile industry hit a crisis just around this time. In the 1920s, the car looked like a fad that was on the decline. Most Americans already owned a car, and so sales numbers declined.
But one man decided to change that: Alfred Sloan. Sloan became CEO of General Motors (GM) in 1923 and promptly went to work on a turnaround. The automobile industry so far optimized for this marvelous machine, the car. It knew exactly how to make cars fast and well, optimized for every single “how” inside the problem of making a car.
Sloan introduced a mindset shift: He refocused the efforts from the “how” towards the “what.” He changed the critical question from:
- How…. do we make great, affordable cars?
- What… should we make? What should we sell?
Sloan, finally asking the right questions, came up with a clear answer: We cannot sell…
