Patrol Boats and Carriers

Issue 213: Playing Battleship at work

Growing up, I wasn’t a huge fan of board games, particularly ones that felt never-ending like baseball games. However, I enjoyed swift and tactical. My favorite was Battleship—the classic game where players strategically position their naval ships on a hidden grid. Without seeing your opponent’s board, you take turns calling out coordinates to fire, aiming to hit and sink all your opponent’s ships, resulting in victory.

Each ship type consumes various spaces on the board. The Patrol Boat takes up two spaces while the massive Carrier consumes five. Patrol Boats and Carriers is a metaphor I’ve been mulling over regarding our professional craft. Assuming you’re running a company or working at one, the operational mechanics are similar to that of a naval fleet. Let’s look at the attributes of the Patrol Boats and Carriers, apply them to work, and understand when to employ each type.

Patrol Boats

Patrol Boats are fast and can turn on a dime. They are primarily used for coastal defense, surveillance, anti-smuggling operations, search and rescue, and engaging smaller threats. Patrol Boats optimize for shorter missions requiring rapidity and a smaller crew to operate them. Its superpower is to turn on a dime, iterate quickly, and move fast with little overhead.

What Patrol Boats are not optimized for is scale. Though they can move quickly and operate at shore, they are fueled for the short distance and can’t sustain long without more resources.

When to use the Patrol Boat metaphor:

• Unexplored areas that require additional discovery

• Unfunded 0-to-1 projects where you’re making a bet on an opportunity

• Ad hoc projects that are less than a sprint

Carriers

Carriers are massive and serve as a floating command hub for naval fleets. These large-scale ships carry massive firepower and hold other units: helicopters, aircraft, ships, security teams, and more. They carry dozens of aircraft and have extensive capabilities for launching, recovering, and maintaining them. One would assume Carriers are slow but can go a top speed of 30 knots (about 34 MPH)—fast for moving in the ocean.

The advantage of the Carrier is also its disadvantage, which is the massive scale that takes a humongous crew to navigate it. Even turning the ship takes a lot of effort and alignment to get it in the right direction.

When to use the Carrier metaphor:

• When work needs to be coordinated across multiple teams

• Major implications in security, reliability, and legal

• Infrastructure and platform teams

Putting the metaphor to work

The surface-level thought of this metaphor is, “Startups are Patrol Boats, Enterprise software are Carriers.” Though true, applying the metaphor this way doesn’t give you much depth of thought. Instead, view this metaphor contextually applied to your daily work: projects, teams, and companies.

Harnessing the range of both gives you a wider range of execution. The founder who raised a Series A may need a Carrier to scale their SSO/SAML to win larger customers. In another case, the same founder may deploy a Patrol Boat of a growth team to explore if there is an opportunity in the self-serve funnel.

I’ve been at companies of 15,000 people and less than 100. The value I gained from both ranges was not existing at those companies, it was observing how various teams worked to achieve their outcomes. Study the crews and how they get work done. I learned a lot studying giant legal teams conduct their work as much as the solo general council at an early startup.

Patrol Boats and Carriers are tactics, not a manner of existence. How you get work done is operating a fleet. You are playing Battleship at work.