How To Handle High Pressure in Product Management: A Practical Guide
I’ve had some dark days as a Product Manager. Here are a few tricks I’ve learned to help with the toughest days.
Simplify
You can’t pull a rabbit out of your hat, work miracles and have the perfect information available out of nowhere. All you can ever do is make the best decision in light of available information.
If you need new information, work out what you can and can’t reasonably acquire.
If you need higher quality information, again, work out what you can and can’t reasonably acquire.
Be clear on where you stand so you can communicate the landscape of information you’re using to decide, then make the decision.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant
We make decisions despite insufficient data, tight deadlines and complicated market/tech landscapes. If you feel like the walls are closing and you’ve got nowhere to turn, it may be because there actually aren’t any good options.
It’s not all on you.
Get it out of your head, lay it out transparently to other key stakeholders and escalate if you need to. Your job is to move people to the right outcome, not make decisions in isolation.
4 steps to steer emotion into logic
Product management is mobilising diverse, complicated human beings to deliver features to diverse, complicated human beings.
It’s not unusual to feel frustration, anger, and fear along the way.
Step 1 is to notice and write down which emotion you’re feeling (harder than it sounds, this takes effort)
Step 2 is to break it down into layers, ask yourself ‘why do I feel this way?’, then do this 4 subsequent times (you may need to do some soul searching)
Step 3 is to write an honest, self-reflective final summary of what happened and why you feel the emotion
Step 4 is to write actions or next steps to move you forward
As you walk through the steps you’ll find your answers are sometimes difficult and messy, this is fine, just keep going. The more layers you work through the more you’ll begin to make sense of it.
This should slowly walk you from emotion to the logical next steps and by the end, you should have noticed the emotion dissipate.
Bonus content — Fear and anger give bad advice by Matthew Mochary.
“If you need to eat shit, don’t nibble”
Not only a hilarious quote from The hard thing about hard things by Ben Horowitz but great advice for product managers.
If you’re in a tough situation and you need to make changes, communicate a difficult message or cut your losses on a product — don’t drag it out once you’ve decided it’s the right approach, get it done.
If it’s done, you can focus on moving forward instead of dwelling and letting the pressure drag you down.
Pivoting in light of new information is a key aspect of product management. Even if it means throwing away lots of work, this is part of the craft and as important as handling high-performing products.
Take pride in decisively handling what could be perceived as bad news. Product management isn’t all great results, delight and success stories. The right decisions aren’t always happy ones, it’s the nature of the beast and almost definitely not your fault.
Take time to remember what you’ve achieved
You’ve come so far.
You’ve achieved so much and overcome so many personal and professional challenges.
You’re not the sum total of this day, week or month. You’re everything you’ve learned, fought for, experienced and developed into over years and years.
When you’re in the midst of a crisis, or dark times it’s so easy to forget this.
This too will pass. You will come out the other side stronger.
If it truly is insurmountable and neverending, the world is a lot bigger than the company you’re currently employed by, there are new opportunities and growth opportunities just around the corner.
Know your boundaries and be prepared to cut ties, Read How to keep someone with you forever and be wary of the signals.
