Happy Tuesday to 1091 conscious product leaders! Join this 🔥 community of humans who want to put their time and energy into building more conscious products (and careers).

But first…a word from this edition’s sponsor:

PMDojo

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(Applications close on Dec 28th).

Responding Better After Failure

Mistakes will happen. For product managers learning in public, understanding how to fail better is a crucial skill.

Being a product manager is a bizarre profession — there’s no formal degree you can acquire first which means most of your learning is done on the job, in a hands-on way, and very much in the scariest format learning can be acquired in…

In public.

Being an exceptional product manager isn’t about avoiding failure — it’s about harnessing it to grow.

The legendary Tony Fadell says this in his book, “Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making”:

“To do great things, to really learn, you can’t shout suggestions from the rooftop then move on while someone else does the work. You have to get your hands dirty. You have to care about every step, lovingly craft every detail. You have to be there when it falls apart so you can put it back together.”

So, how can you keep yourself together when you’re in the weeds, sleeves rolled up, all-in on what you’re building…and you fall apart?

I did a deep dive into multiple domains to gather the best insights I could find and share with you, in addition to drawing on my own experiences as a product manager, athlete, business owner, and someone who has dealt with a whole lot of failures first-hand — building startups that failed, products that weren’t widely adopted, being benched after making bad plays, and dealing with debilitating health issues and injuries to name a few.

What Psychology Can Teach Us

A lot of the stigma around making mistakes comes from the thinking that failure is bad and that we should all strive for perfection. But perfection is an illusion. If we are human, we are not perfect and can never be, despite what society imparts on us.

There’s also a difference between striving for perfection to improve and “being perfect”.

Rather than thinking about how to be perfect, if we frame this to think about the ways in which we want to grow, specifically, and who we want to serve with our skills and abilities, it can take a lot of the weight off of making mistakes.

It’s about becoming vs. being.

We all know that growth requires some degree of struggle —we’ve been pounded with “no pain, no gain”, “leave your blood, sweat and tears on the floor”, and “win at all costs” mentalities since as far back as I can remember (I was born in the 80s). But it doesn’t have to be framed like this. I prefer to think of it as:

1. Get really specific about what your North Star is and long-term desired outcomes (not just in the traditional way in writing down what you want to achieve, but who you want to be and how you want to feel and the impact you would like to have had).

2. In what ways can you find the sweet spot right now, where you are growing in a strategic and focused way and making specific types of mistakes to learn? (Versus trying to do everything all at the same time and feeling overwhelmed not just by what’s on your plate but also the sheer number of mistakes you are bound to make if the leap you are trying to make is too great).

If you were to jump into a strength training routine and try to bench press an exorbitant amount of weight right off the bat with no warm-up, coaching, or previous training, that’s a recipe for injury.

Think about your career in the same way.

“How can I progress and learn from my incremental mistakes intelligently?”

What Sports Can Teach Us

In sports, an athlete’s ability to quickly bounce back after a mistake is a massive competitive advantage.

When I was playing hockey, I was fortunate enough to play with a handful of the women’s Olympic team members at McGill University in Montreal. I learned something from them that stuck when it comes to flushing mistakes to move on quickly — after a bad shift, have a physical cue that you train to help you “let go” of the mistake you made so that you stop ruminating and make your next shift a great one. For me, this was firmly tapping my stick against the bench as soon as I got off the ice.

For a linebacker, this might be pulling some grass and squeezing it and releasing it as a trigger to “let go”. For an elite CrossFit athlete, this might be journaling after an event to write down what didn’t go well, what they learned, and what they would do differently next time. For a baseball player, this might be a conscious cue to shift attention to playing good defence when they remove their batting glove after a bad at-bat.

Find something that works for you and use it as your cue to “let the mistake go”.

What Other Product Managers Can Teach Us

Inspired by Andrea Saez and Ricardo Blanch and many other aspiring and current product managers who have highlighted the fact that there is a severe lack of product failure stories that people speak about publicly, I recently posed the question, “What are some of the ways you’ve learned to respond better after making a mistake as a product manager?” on LinkedIn and by far the top response was…

OWN IT.

Downplaying mistakes can not only erode trust — pretending they didn’t happen also means you miss out on learning. Both of these things can dramatically hinder your career and the ultimate impact you can have on the world.

When you work with an interconnected team and your greatest strength as a product manager is not only in bringing solid product skills to the table, but also in your ability to build great relationships, owning your mistakes personally and publicly can dramatically help to build trust with your team members.

Here are some of the responses I got:

See more responses

Making Mistakes With Conscious Support

There are some schools of thought that encourage being thrown into the fire because it results in the best learning outcomes — it forces you to adapt or risk failing in gargantuan ways in order to survive.

This was my early product management experience. Being thrown into the fire in my career has helped me grow exponentially — but it also came at a huge personal cost. My mental, physical, and emotional health suffered greatly.

I now have much thicker skin, but I believe there’s a happy medium. Just like you wouldn’t throw an amateur cyclist directly into the Tour de France, working with a coach, joining a bootcamp program, or a Slack Group with others going through similar experiences or who have gone through them before can help you to set up appropriate guardrails, establish incremental objectives, and create a safe space to test limits with a more holistic approach in a supportive environment.

What are some of the ways you’ve responded to mistakes and failure?

Let me know!

P.S. Here are some product mistake stories we can all learn from:

• Product failure stories: How I messed up a release

• Autopsy: Stories From Over 200 Failed Startups

• Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

• General Magic Documentary

• Coded Bias Documentary

• Downfall: The Case Against Boeing Documentary

• Coming Back From The Brink: 5 Product Stories of Failure and Success

• I Got Most of the Sales Department Angry With Me Overnight

Soulwork 💜

What I Learned Meditating for 15 Hours A Day for 6 Months by Cory Mascara

1 Actionable Career Planning Tip 🧭

If you see job postings that make you feel excited, write down the specific phrases that make you feel the most positive energy. Keep a list of these things so that when you are actively looking for your next role you can search specifically for roles that have these qualities and that let you grow in these specific ways.

What’s Next For Stream of Consciousness ✨

1. I’ll be taking a break for the holidays - this will be the last edition before Jan 2023.

2. In the new year, I’ll be transitioning Stream of Consciousness to be sent out on Saturdays instead of Tuesdays going forward. Why? I receive replies to a lot of the editions I send out and this is one piece of feedback I received so I’m going to adapt!

3. I’m switching newsletter platforms during the holiday break so the design and format of the next edition might look slightly different - stay tuned!

4. Building this newsletter has been the most fun, coolest, and best learning experience I could have asked for - I’d love any candid feedback you have that I can use to make it better and more valuable to you while I’m regrouping - please send your thoughts to me directly or answer these quick questions for a chance to win a free copy of The Product Manger’s Career Guide.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great Tuesday (and rest of 2022)!

-Lisa ✨

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