Truly Celebrating Product Failure — A Formality You Shouldn’t Skip
“It’s important to remember that at least half of our early product concepts and features won’t work out. Come back to this thought every day. Put it on a sticky note where you will see it every time you review the results of a product test. Commitment bias is real, and it’s our job as product leaders to mitigate it.”
I recently posted this on Linkedin.
What’s awesome about Linkedin (at least for me) is not the digital dialog. It’s the offline dialog that ensues. Anyone that knows me knows I love to talk shop about product.
One such recent conversation generated by this post came from a question. “What do we do with failures?”
This question caused me to pause. Of course, there are all the standard answers. Learn from your failure. Run a retrospective. Step back and pivot. Celebrate and move on.
Let’s stop on that last one. Celebrating failure. What exactly does that mean? There are clear processes for learning, running a retrospective, and determining how to pivot. Yet very little is written about celebrating failure.
Teams are human. They want closure. They want acknowledgment. They need time to recharge.
So what’s the best way to celebrate failure. Unfortunately, there isn’t a standard. Over time I have learned how to celebrate failure by failing at the celebration process.
At first, I moved on. I didn’t acknowledge it. Instead, I moved on full steam ahead. This approach always left the team in a bad place. Why wasn’t the work and failure acknowledged they asked.
I learned. Next time, I sent a simple, personalized thank you note to every member of the team. Individually I acknowledged and celebrated the failure. I received a few terse ‘Thanks!’ in response. Not exactly the outcome I wanted.
So I tried a retrospective. At least let’s look at the work at a deep level and what we can learn. Give the team a chance to share. Acknowledge the work and the opportunity we had to learn. At least a limited public acknowledgment and celebration. Still not there.
I won’t speak much about pivots as these come either way unless you go out of business. If you pivot with no closure, it’s similar to moving full steam ahead.
And finally, I made failure a topic worthy of a public celebration with a larger group. Share the successes, learnings, ups, and downs with the team. Provide closure to the team in a public forum. Then talk about what comes next and the great work the team will do. Pivot after.
To my surprise, none of these were sufficient. The right approach is doing all of these in combination. As leaders, our teams often take a bigger hit with failure than we do ourselves. It’s your job to provide acknowledgment, celebration, and closure.
Take some time to think about this. As a leader, you need to keep your team inspired, energetic, and excited. Failures will happen. How you celebrate them will determine how willing your team will be to take the next journey with you.
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