How Failure Feeds Success
Overcoming adversity and the lessons learned therein are the true mark of respect for product managers.
Product Management
Failure lays the foundation for instinct.
Resilience is the ability to bounce back and adjust when faced with adversity. Grit is used to drive through adversity to achieve goals. Agility is the ability to respond to unpredictable events and figure out the best course of action to move forward.
You interview two candidates with an equal number of years of experience as product managers. One is open about the many ups and downs in their experience, and the other promotes only their successes. Which candidate can you rank for resilience, grit, and agility?
PMs should lean into the messy part of their experiences. This is where lessons are learned that build intuition or instinct for the future. A seasoned product manager will know that no epic/sprint/project runs without some bumps along the way. The key is to foresee the risks, mitigate what you can, and brace yourself and your team for the rest.
Experience with what goes wrong helps to give PMs an instinctual agile reaction to catch the problem in midstream and work to resolve it. This could be catching when customer satisfaction starts to waver, encouraging engineers to ‘do the needful’ despite pushback, or double-checking the QA assessment because something didn’t quite sit right.
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Failure gives meaning to constraint.
A terminated feature or project increases your ability to discern the factors that contributed to that decision.
When a project is canceled, briefly explore the why. You gain valuable knowledge on the effect of budget, resources, technology, and knowledge/skill constraints. Tune into the business and customer rationale for why the project started and why it ultimately was closed. Being able to understand and unpack the needs of various stakeholders and have the agility to move on to the next project are skills that help a good PM keep a clear focus in line with business or customer-driven objectives.
Examples of constraints:
- Less experienced developer needs to deliver high-impact feature within a single sprint — learning to apply a waterfall checklist to ensure tighter progress checks and delivery.
- The design phase for the project that goes haywire — learning to scope check the open-ended design deliverables to benefit restrictions on time and materials.
- When a quick decision is needed — learn to reset expectations when a resource-heavy workshop is a response to a minor slack request.
Failure highlights the missing piece.
Was the product strategy sound and in line with customer needs? Was there appropriate documentation and access to SMEs to identify the knowns and unknowns of the project? Did a resource shuffle result in lost workflow or process steps that led to issues downstream? Were sales in such a hurry to close that a checkpoint was rushed — or worse, skipped?
Whether your team has time to focus on root cause analysis or not, failure gives teams the opportunity to capture, in retrospect, what went wrong and what should be in place for the next time around. Of course, this depends on a level of psychological safety with the team, the transparency of roles & responsibilities, and a willingness to be held accountable and to improve.
Be excited when things go wrong. Once the smoke clears, failure gives rise to exponential learning and the ability to add one more notch to your belt to show what you have become through your experience. As a PM, we uniquely need to be calm in the storm for both our stakeholders' trust and to ensure, through grit and tenacity, the project or sprint runs its due course.
It's all in your mindset.
For Product and Tech Leaders looking for a boost, check out Lynne Levy’s Inspired Product Leader.
