The importance of failures - why mistakes are key for product excellence

We all like to be right, to do things perfectly, to get the praise. I am super guilty of this and more times than I can remember people around me told me that I have to get comfortable with ”good enough”. That my chase for quality is sometimes my biggest enemy. I always struggled with this concept, because I do not like to set my bar lower than I think it should be. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that it is not about ”good enough”, it is about daring to get out there and making mistakes Doing things, believing in them, and let them fail. Brutally, epically fail.

It might sound strange but I came to realize that mistakes are the key to success and excellence, not its enemy.

This is because mistakes force us to stop and think, analyze and reflect, they attract our attention in a sea of things done right and make us remove the autopilot.

I always remember my mistakes more vividly than my successes, and every single one of them taught me a product lesson that made me better at my job. Here are some examples of mistakes that I made in my career and taught me product lessons:

Focusing on product strategy

Early in my career I focused my heart and soul on shipping things and prioritized them based on impact/effort. The impact was based on what seemed to be important then and there, based on all stakeholders’ inputs. As a result, my team and I delivered a bunch of ”things” that we were really proud of, but simply did not make any difference. For the customers and the business. It was a sad day when I realized it.
It taught me a lesson about the importance of product strategy and always using it to choose what to work on. Without that clear direction, you will never be able to move your product forward, no matter how much you deliver.

Gaining a pulse check on the market

My startup ran out of cash because we spent too much time perfecting a paper-product idea instead of having even a small proof of concept on the market.
The mistake I did is that I thought that demonstrating that we could execute on a business idea was enough to make that idea investable. What I know now is that no idea, no matter how great, is proven until you have at least a customer willing to spend time and/or money with it. It is about execution and market response, you need both to create a successful product.
Since then, I am always thinking about how I can test an idea and get it as fast as possible in front of a customer.

Walking in your customers’ shoes

When you start working on a new feature for your product, you always believe that it is the best you can do for it. But sometimes, not everyone agrees. It happened to me that I was so sure about the positive impact of a new feature that I underestimated the importance of communicating a piece of product news, which created a big reaction from customers.
What I considered ”good news” were instead really bad ones for some customers, I simply missed that because I took an inside-out perspective and did not thoroughly take the time to understand all the users' cases. Answering personally some angry emails and calls taught me the importance of walking in the customers’ shoes. Knowing that the customers will react, can help you prepare a mitigation plan. I, for example, create a system that ”categorizes” which kind of product news we are communicating and define the rollout plan based on that.

Investing in PM onboarding

The role of a PM is a complex one, you have to identify customers' problems and help solve them in a way that works for the business. You might think that is normal to get a thorough onboarding to get context before calling the shots. But in some organizations that I worked for, PMs were also expected to deliver from the very beginning. Which led me to find myself in a kind of impossible seat.
As a consequence, I rolled out products without having a 360 understanding of the business and the consequences of the release. I did that with good intentions but, not knowing better, I also caused some long-tail problems for the business that took some months, and a lot of bad conscience on my side, to be fixed. Failing as a new PM taught me the importance of a full 360 onboarding. Making sure that the first months as a new PM are about learning and not feeling the pressure of calling the shots.

And the list could go on and on.

I always aim for excellence, and at the same time, I always aim for mistakes. One needs the other. American football coach Vince Lombardi summarizes perfectly my idea of always wanting to get better and at the same time embrace mistakes when he said

”we are going to relentlessly chase perfection, knowing full well we will not catch it…In the process we will catch excellence”.

Pic by Daniela Holzer via Unsplash

Help your product teams fail

I collected all the above mistakes during my career and it took me some time to realize what every single one of them taught me. Mistakes are important, but even more critical is to create an environment when teams and individuals feel safe in making mistakes and take the time to reflect on them.

There is no one-size-fits-all, and you might need to think about different approaches depending on the type of organization you have. But if you need some inspiration, these are a couple of practical things that I do, to help the product organization at Hemnet to fail:

Take a step back and watch the failure.

Sometimes the team has an idea, but you know that there is plenty of evidence in the market, or there is nothing really that you think should be tested. Doing a test seems like losing time as you already know how the test will end up. It is in moments like this that you as PM or CPO have to bite your tongue, not act, and let the team test and try. You are not losing time, what you are doing is creating the space for the team to learn. Something they try on their skin will always be more powerful than whatever you say. Take a step back and many deep breaths, and see the team fail and bloom.

Share your own mistakes.

Be a role model and share when you do things wrong. Do not model perfection, lift your imperfections to show people that it is ok. At Hemnet we have a Slack channel called #hemnetfailures where we share everything that doesn’t go according to plan. I share there my big mistakes, but I have a plan to share the small ones as well. This article is also a great example of how successful companies open up for failures.

Praise people who share when they fail.

Encourage to demo and talk about tests and experiments that have gone wrong or things that did not work as expected. And make sure to make it crystal clear that failures it is not only ok but is great. Because it means we dared to go out of our comfort zone.

Create a culture of learnings

To go beyond success and failures, always strive to get to the learnings. Do not say ”great” when someone succeeds and ”it will be better next time” when something goes wrong. In both cases ask the question: ”great, and what did you learn?"

A mistake a day keeps the stagnation away

Make sure that you have a goal to make small mistakes as often as you can and then share them. Do not wait for that epic failure to come, sharing mistakes needs to become a habit and nothing is too small to be highlighted.

This article appeared first on the Mind The Product blog.