Due to popular demand (1 person sent me a Slack message), this week we will take product management and strategy lessons from Tyler Durden as played by Brad Pitt in 1999’s Fight Club.

WARNING: Plot spoilers below as well as violence, blood and bad language in the video clips.

Adapted from the 1996 novel by Chuck Palahniuk, David Fincher directs Fight Club, a dystopian story laced with dark humour.

It depicts a turn-of-the-century United States where Americans suffer from sleep disorders and depression whilst struggling to find meaning in their lives beyond a pervasive and insipid consumer-celebrity culture. In response, a terrorist group of disaffected young male recruits, inspired by a charismatic, yet mentally unstable, fascist figurehead destroy buildings and violently attack their own society and institutions. Meanwhile corporatations anticipate taking over space exploration…

If any of this is sounding grimly familiar, I would trust your instincts.

But you’re not here for social commentary are you?! Lets get down to some product strategy…

Product-led Marketplace

At the heart of Fight Club story is the eponymous, er… Fight Club - after a few attempts I gave up on the convention of when to (or not to) italicise/capitalise/pluralise the Fight Club(s) in Fight Club.

But, YOU, my dear readers (I hope) are nothing if not perceptive and bestowed with the ability to deal with ambiguity… and some bad grammar!

Tyler and Jack start the first Fight Club in a bar car park, relocating to a bar’s basement as the club grows. Fight Club is a peer-to-peer social network or alternatively a marketplace for those that that want to punch and be punched by one another. Its not explicit in the rules, but it is a male-only organisation. An in-person, violent but non-sexual Grinder?

There are interesting readings of Fight Club on the subject of sexuality (asexuality, homosexuality, etc) as well as the outward misogyny of Tyler and the flexing misogynist/feminist representations and interpretations of Marla, but I digress…

Albeit, informal and somewhat ramshackle Jack and Tyler do provide a place for members to ‘transact’ (to meet and punch each other) as well as embedding clear rules of engagement; the famous rules of Fight Club that have since pervaded memes and pop culture everywhere… “the second rule of..” “OH MY GOD WILL YOU SHUT UP?!”

Like any marketplace product manager, Tyler has to contend with driving engagement and how to activate his customers; typically to stop customers from window shopping and actually buy something! Tyler tackles this with the final rule of Fight Club “if this is your first night at Fight Club, you HAVE TO fight!” This is a lesson straight from the product-led rule book. The best way to sell your product, is not through demos, marketing collateral, but to actually have your customer EXPERIENCE the product.

Fight club demands high engagement from its customers. You cannot window-shop or be a passive observer, perhaps inspired by Hunter S Thompson’s ‘Gonzo’ journalism in which rather than writing in a reportage style, Thompson actively involved himself in the story he was writing about. Equally anarchic, Tyler forces his would-be members to immediately involve and immerse themselves in Fight Club and be part of the action almost as soon as they arrive.

There is an inherent conceit, perhaps a piece of reverse psychology in the first two rules of Fight Club; “Do NOT talk about Fight Club.” Obstensibly a secret society, Fight Club’s existence and growth however, depends upon a viral-like word-of-mouth marketing. In the 90s Tyler couldn’t bid on pay-per-click campaigns for “places to get punched in the face for free”. Therefore nearly all the members have to have broken the first two rules simply by being there. But it seems to work!

Finding overlooked value

When Ed Norton’s narrator character, Jack first meets Tyler Durden, Tyler is a maker and seller of soap. Tyler sells his soap to upscale department stores under the suitably artisanal sounding brand, Paper Street Soap Company.

There’s a twist though as Tyler teaches us that soap is made from fat. Tyler, grimly decides the best fat comes from humans so he sources his raw materials by dumpster-diving in the back of liposuction clinics, “selling rich women their own fat acids back to them.” Where could Gwyneth Paltrow have got the idea from?!

There’s a lesson here though in realising value in products and commodities that others perceive as having low or zero value. Examples include 4Ocean who are virtuously taking plastic refuse collected from our polluted seas, oceans and beaches and recycling this material into jewellery for the fashionably, ethically-minded.

Perhaps more pertinent is Jio, India’s leading mobile and telecoms provider, who realised the future value of mobile phone bandwidths that could not support voice calls, but which could support data. Their competitors had overlooked these bandwidths perceiving them are valueless in a market reliant on supporting voice calls. Jio offered data only plans anticipating the increase in 4G and emerging 5G capabilities which would support high quality VOIP calling, scooping up all the left over seemingly valueless bandwidths.

Similarly Fight Club is “free to all” as bar basements are borrowed as venues from friendly proprietors. Having built his customer community, Tyler then finds other ways to extract value from his club members… remember the adage, “if the product is free, then it’s probable that YOU ARE the product!”

Functional, Social and Emotional Needs

It is made explicit in the Fight Club story how the clubs act not just a functional way for members to let off steam, exert themselves physically and channel their pent-up aggression in a safe-ish environment (how ‘safe’ can being punched in the head/groin be?), but the club also attends to their social and emotional needs.

The club allows its members to have a sense of meaning and community, and to some extent a feeling of secret exclusivity and internal ‘status’ and self-worth. Fight Club is ‘free to all’, yet in its own way exclusive. Jack smugly tells Marla that his new ‘support group’ is for men only. The club seems to attract members who often lack status, agency or direction in their lives. Fight Club is their special, unique thing. Moments in the story show how the act of fighting bonds members in a quasi-spiritual way; men are shown post-fight hugging and crying in a seemingly transcendent state, as other members look on admiring and appreciative.

Designing products so that they address our deeper social and emotional (spiritual?) needs is what often differentiates good functional products from exceptional products and brands that have enduring appeal.

Albeit one of Fight Club’s central themes is that our social and emotional needs should not, or even cannot be fully met by brand logos or shiny pieces of plastic. How inconvenient!

Growth and Franchising

Tyler grows Fight Club and Project Mayhem by opening up new chapters across American cities - franchises if you will, that follow a prescribed formula. This is well trodden path, in commerce. However, in the context of autonomous product teams who act in a culture of ‘low power distance’ it is interesting that despite Tyler’s dictatorial style, that Jack later refers to the franchises or cells of Project Mayhem as “autonomous”.

To gain access to Project Mayhem members have to endure an arduous initiating process. Riffing on the religious (cult-like) overtones of Fight Club, Tyler borrows from Buddhist tradition of actively trying to deter applicants; telling them that they are not suitable or somehow unworthy of admittance.

Generally in product design we seek to reduce friction especially at the acquisition and activation or on-boarding phases. We typically want to get our customer to their first ‘moment of delight’ as quickly as possible with the least possible effort. Tyler demonstrates that for some products that we might need to add friction at certain points of the customer journey. This also might be construed as a critique of our demand for instant gratification, e.g. the Amazon effect, and an endorsement of the focus and discipline required for delayed gratification, which is equally pertinent to product development as our day-to-day lives.

Tyler will ask a great deal of his Project Mayhem members so he wants to be sure he isn’t wasting sales, marketing or operational costs on members who won’t be valuable in the long run. Think about this in relation to lead generation; do you need a high volume of low-commitment leads OR is better to have low volume of high-relevance/highly-engaged prospects… the latter being more akin to Account Based Marketing.

By using Fight Club as a ‘freemiuim offering’ Tyler then allows members to self-select themselves into the highly-engaged environment of Project Mayhem. Equally, members ‘pay’ with their time rather than cash, albeit they seemingly have to give up any other job to commit to Tyler’s demands…

Culture Change and Personal Brand

One of the central themes of Fight Club is that of culture and identity.

SPOILER ALERT (the boat sinks): Jack invents his alter-ego of Tyler to help him bolster his self-esteem. Tyler is a liberating force in Jack’s life. As Tyler, Jack is able to act un-fettered to achieve his personal goals. An extreme of personal branding you might think! For all of his ethical issues, it is indisputable that Tyler is a leader.

In product management, so-called ‘soft skills’ (some prefer ‘real skills’) of collaboration and persuasion are increasingly valued. What good is an idea if you can’t galvanise a team or organisation to build and deliver it to customers. Or persuade customers to use your product!

Similarly the ability to inspire culture change in an organisation can be incredibly valuable. It is oft said that product management, isn’t so much a set of skills as a ‘culture’. Tyler affects a a culture change of sorts in his followers, who he urges to transform their lives, lamenting that they are “working jobs we hate to buy shit we don’t need.”

Tyler does this frighteningly well, as fascists and cult leaders tend to, perversely persuading members to give up their emotional slavery to their corporate masters where they are paid to perform mindless, repetitive tasks… and instead to perform mindless repetitive tasks unpaid, with Tyler now as their master.

Although less extreme, it is clear that part of the success of ‘FAANG’ (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google) and other product-led organisations is their ability to develop new and innovative ways of working, frameworks and collaboration cultures, e.g. Google’s Design Sprints, Amazon’s Press Release-style product specifications. The culture of organisations is their differentiator in many cases.

Commercialisation

The final piece in the puzzle for many product managers is how to commercialise or monetise their products. As indicated, Tyler’s Fight Club is a sort of freemium offering leading to the ‘premium’ Project Mayhem, a subscription membership service of sorts. Members have to cover their own minimal costs of clothing and $300 of burial money, but unlike many other cult leaders (or founder-CEOs) Tyler doesn’t seem interested in financially enriching himself from his followers.

Tyler has boot-strapped his organisation which is seemingly a not-for-profit, or at least money is not its primary aim. Project Mayhem’s offices are an abandoned building, Fight Club takes place in the borrowed spaces of other businesses, who may or may not profit from the additional passing trade; its not entirely clear if Fight Club participants are intoxicated or not.

However, Fight Club does experience a funding event, which is referred to as ‘corporate sponsorship’. Jack, on the brink of being fired from his job contrives to blackmail his boss allowing him to keep his salary and travel perks without the need to actual turn up or do anything. This money is used to free up Jack’s time and fund the activities of Project Mayhem.

The lesson here is that there are often more options than you might think for how to commercialise or monetise your product. You may not even have to yet. While blackmail shouldn’t be your first option, its important to take a step back and think about who are or could be the beneficiaries of your product?