Successfully leading teams through failure as a Product Manager 🔥

Sundar Pichai – CEO of Alphabet, the parent company of Google and Waymo – recently shared his thoughts on how to reward people in this podcast episode. He goes on to highlight that, as a company scales, it becomes more conservative. Less risk taking, less innovation, less tolerance for failure. More secure bets. His antidote: reward effort, not outcomes.

The next sentence is striking: “And [rewarding efforts] is very hard to do in an organization.” That is why I love this guy. He acknowledges that this is tricky. And it is. When I saw the headlines over the internet and social media, which celebrated Sundar for his counter-intuitive approach, I had a feeling of cynicism in me right away. All performance review ratings at Google are labeled with the word ‘impact’ in them, and most Googlers are expected to find themselves rated at ‘Significant Impact’, or ‘SI’.

Welcome to launch-launch land!

As PMs, we were brought up to believe we are worthy if we launch things. New features, new products, new services. And this is absolutely god, and true, and necessary. If you have a PM who defines themselves by saying this isn’t a relevant part of their role, they are kidding themselves (shy of very niche roles, such as PMs helping other PMs etc.). In general, we are here to make things move forward, and a big measure of this is when features reach the users, and this is generally called a ‘launch moment’. But there is a wrinkle in here. What is I just launch stuff. Nothing useful, just stuff. And a lot of it. Wouldn’t that be a guarantee for success? There is a risk of that. But it isn’t as big as people make it out to be.

Launching useless stuff with show, and the reviews you got to go through to get funding and collect other peoples opinions on the matter should provide some sort of guidance if the hypotheses one is making are likely correct. And then there is the nature of how we roll stuff out. We can do a prototype, UX Research, we can survey folks, we can duct-tape it until we have more clarity that what we build is actually going to work.

Once we have line of sight that what we are building is resonating with users, we swap the narrative from ‘launching’ to ‘landing’. I.e. it isn’t good enough to have something up int eh air which might requires constant attention and effort to keep it there. Once a feature ‘lands’ with users, it is considered ‘safe’ in terms of meeting the users need in a viable way.

But there is still the scenario in which things simply don’t work

Let me first describe what I am talking about, and then identify some mitigation strategies and behavioral patterns which I saw work in my experience.

There are moments where, despite all our best efforts, things simply don’t work out. I found the documentary ‘General Magic‘ a revelation in this context. General Magic is the company started by many folks who worked on the original Apple Macintosh team. What a success that was. Clearly those were the brightest of the bright. Clearly what they touch must be a success. But it wasn’t. And it wasn’t anyone’s fault, also.

As Product Manager, we are ultimately responsible for navigating the project we decide to own. Sometimes we can own it haphazardly, and get away with it. But better even: we own it and make clear to what degree we own it. Owning a critical project as main PM lead, something we might even have started, is elevating the perceived accountability for the effort, and outcome of the whole thing. And here is where it is tricky. Not every risk, even potentially catastrophic ones, can be spotted upfront. The expectation that because we are the PM we would see the iceberg before it hits, and know how to steer clear of it, is sometimes just not realistic. So what do we do when the ship takes water and we might head for a colossal disaster?

1) Stay calm

Staying calm is the most undervalued PM trait of all. When things go crazy, to stay calm and try and get a sense for the level of urgency is a skill I constantly work on. Why? Well, to understand when to cry ‘wolf’ can make a massive difference. I remember when I was junior in my career, and everything looked like a real threat, and my manager was so calm. It bothered me a little, but eventually I saw that what he did was to understand the level of significance of the risk. That guided his responses more than the risk itself.

2) Take accountability

Saying ‘this is my fault’ can be one of the hardest lines of a life. But in some scenarios it is the only line left which will enable the team to come together as one in face of difficulty. When I worked on a big project and the results were delayed, the team went the extra mile. They worked hard, and pushed themselves, but the results still did not meet the viability threshold. Things kept failing, and customers could not use the feature. I did not manage to get the team to come together as one at that moment. Because I looked to ‘reverse engineer’ the path to failure. Instead, taking accountability enables others to relive themselves of the burden of failure. They can breath, and say: This wasn’t my fault! Now I am free to look forward instead of backward. This is a true act of leadership.

3) Be vulnerable

Being vulnerable is often confused with being weak. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In my mind being vulnerable is the shortest way to being authentic while not loosing leadership credibility. A good way to actually be vulnerable tactically is labeling. Just saying what the thing is you are feeling. instead of being upset and acting it (speaking with an elevated voice, for example), label it. Say to your team: “I am so frustrated about this right now.” Try and say it calmly, and you will see that you actually breed empathy. Being vulnerable and exposing your feelings is a key aspect of leadership in Today’s modern organizations.

4) Be Principled

For you to be credible in face of failure you need to fall back on solid principles. When you hit a roadblock which is catastrophic, it is key to be able to articulate the state of the world in context of principles which people can believe in. For example, when my feature failed, the right thing to say could have been: “Our brand name is recognized for product excellence. While we sank so much time into this feature, at this moment it is simply not ready to meet the bar of this excellence which our customers expect from us. I want to work with all of you to figure out a path to this excellence for this feature, which could include not launching it for another while.” Now this would have been a great leadership line.

5) Ask yourself how you would like to be led

A simple mind-hack is to wonder how you would like to be led in a situation like this. And most often we don’t have to look far to find good role models. In my time as a PM there were so many folks around me who I admired for their leadership potential. Looking at their behavior, and using it like a ‘real time case study’ is a great way to learn from them. sit down, jot down notes about what you can observe, articulate why it is good, and what you would like to mimic.

6) Ask often: What did I fail at Today?

I found this somewhere in a post on the web, so this isn’t my idea, but I started doing this and found it incredibly effective in helping me get comfortable with failure in general. Every day, on my walk back from work, I ask myself: What have I failed at today? It provides an opportunity for reflection, but most importantly it normalized reflection on a difficult space: the space of our own shortcomings. Nothing happened at fist, but after 3-4 times I found I felt less bad when thinking through the failures, what led to them, what I could have dine differently. It has become part of my daily routine since.

Failures are not something we like to have, but they are part of our day to day life as PMs. Dealing with them more effectively, and avoiding a situation where we can’t back out of anymore is key to longevity of our career.

Take Action 🎬

📅 Book a private coaching session with me to grow your PM career. I will share my 15+ years of experience as a Product Manager, all my learning and pitfalls, with actionable tips and concrete lessons to model after.

📚 This is the ‘trust bible’ for business leaders, where Stephen M. R. Covey has built a framework on how to create, restore, and grow trust in teams and organizations. The Speed of Trust, is widely recognized as a landmark work in how leaders help drive success int heir businesses.

📚 A book which helped me is Dale Carnegie’s classic How to win friends and influence people. It truly changed me to my core, helped me build more meaningful relationships with others, inside and outside of work. It also helped me see how to become more humble as a person, something which had tremendously positive effects on my life and opened me up to learn a lot more.

📚 To learn the foundations of Product Management, I recommend reading INSPIRED by Marty Cagan. Marty has been leading the Silicon Valley Product Group for over two decades. His work is foundational for Tech Product Managers – a must read.

📚 The book How to Talk to Anyone helped me build trust with individuals quickly when I needed to. It is a bit of a ‘guide to sure fire icebreakers’, applicable in any situation. Trust is the number one path to more objective information, especially so when the odds are stacked against you.

📚 To learn about the growth mindset, read Mindset, by Carol Dweck. The book is a foundational shift in how we perceive the development of motivation, and skills. It provides practical approaches you can apply every day with your team to increase their performance.