How to Deliver Bad News Effectively

The other day I took my wife out to dinner. We had heard good reviews about a local pizza place near our house and thought we would try it out. After being seated, our server quickly took our order, delivered our drinks, and then disappeared for an hour and a half. The restaurant was not very full, there we empty tables all around us, we just never saw our server again until they brought us our food. At this point the server let us know the kitchen was short-staffed and this was the reason for the delay in getting our food. When I asked why they had not let us know sooner, the server confessed they had been scared about delivering the bad news to us.

As we were leaving the restaurant, I reflected back on my interactions with my stakeholders and wondered how many of them I had left sitting waiting for their product updates, questioning if they were ever going to get that feature they had been promised.

There is always going to be bad news to deliver

It does not matter if you are working at a local pizza joint or developing software to be used internationally, there are going to be some bad times. Whether it is your not enough cooks showing up to work or coding getting delayed. In either case, there is going to be someone left sitting there. Wondering if and when they are going to be getting the goods they are expecting.

Since there is always going to be some bad news to deliver, it is important to know some key things to do when delivering the bad news:

Inform the stakeholders early

Although a restaurant does not want to turn away paying customers, the sooner we had known about the short-staffed kitchen the better. Then we would have been the ones to decide if we were willing to stay and wait or not. How many times have you gone out to eat to be told there is a long wait time? You can then decide if you want to stay or go find somewhere else to eat.

As a Product Manager, it is up to us to help the stakeholders know about any issues with the development work and the sooner we can do the better. Recently, my team received a request to build a new tax rate system for one of our markets. The problem was the new tax rate was scheduled to start at the beginning of the year, and most of my team had already taken off for holiday vacation.

I quickly scheduled a call with market leaders to let them know the concerns I had with their request. I completely empathized with them because they were in the same situation I was in. Where I had to build the system with a short turnaround time they had to change all of their marketing material with little to no time as well. So we were both stuck in a tight spot trying to figure out how to get this completed.

Follow up regularly

In fairness, my wife was the one who pointed out it had been a long time since we had seen our server. I had thought we were having a good conversation, but maybe she was just hungrier than I was, and that is why she noticed first. Had the restaurant informed us early about the time delay in getting our food, and we still decided to eat there, they still should have checked in with us frequently. If they had come by our table every 15–20 minutes and let us know where our pizza was, it would have helped our mood greatly.

Another product launch my team had did not go as well as hoped. We had been working directly with the client for six months on a massive rewrite of the system and had a go-live date of April 12th. Two days before the launch, as we were resting everything for what I felt was the hundredth time, we found an issue. Only half of the new software was going to work. The other half was dead and we could not get it to function correctly.

I called the client and let them know the bad news and that we were going to need to postpone our launch date. They were initially very frustrated, however, we worked out weekly check-in phone calls so we could talk about the progress of where we were. By setting these check-in phone calls, we were able to help calm the nerves of the client and gave us the time to figure out what the issue was holding us back from our initial launch.

Offer alternative solutions to the issue

The new restaurant we were trying out also served other items besides pizza as well. After they had told us about the wait in getting a pizza they could have mentioned some of the other items they sell and the wait times for those. Again this would have placed the decision with me and my wife, although they would have been giving us alternates to solving the issue.

In my previous example of building out the new tax rate system, we did the same thing for the stakeholders. After talking with them about the bad news of not being able to deliver the system to them on time, we brainstormed several different options to help. These ranged from being all over the place, but we were still giving them different options we could do even if we could not build it the exact way they wanted it done the first way.

Bad news is always going to come up regardless of where you are working. The key is to not hide from it, or worse hide from giving it to the people who need to know about the situation. It has been my experience anytime I have bad news about any of the products I am working on, the sooner I can get it out in front of everyone, the easier it is for a solution to be found, or for an understanding to be had by everyone.

Originally published at https://briancchristensen.com on December 23, 2021.