Ordeal — Step Seven of the Product Management Monomyth

I can still remember the morning like it happened yesterday. I was sitting on the couch putting on my shoes getting ready to head out to work when my wife came up to talk to me. She must have seen the pain and ordeal I was going through because the only thing she told me was to quit. I clearly was not happy and going into work day in and day out was not helping. She said she would support me if I wanted to just quit, walk away from the job and look for a new workplace.

So when did this happen, I hear you asking. Was it while I was working on a new feature for a product? Was I going through an incredibly rough set of trials with my product? Difficulties with stakeholders, the team, what could be weighing me down so much my wife was wanting me to quit my job and walk away?

The answer, we had just launched a huge new feature for our product. You would have thought launching the product would have been the end of the journey. We should be back at the status quo waiting for our next adventure. But sometimes, what we think is the end of our journey is just the start of more ordeals we need to go through.

This is much like King Midas, who after going through his trials, was given a gift for his adventure. However, give he chose, of turning everything he touched into gold, ended up not being the end of the journey he was expecting. In many of the legends, this gift leads to not being able to feed himself to even turning his daughter to solid gold.

Not Always Rainbows and Unicorns

Now I do not want to make it sound like every product feature journey you travel on is going to end in ruin, with you wanting to quit your job. I have had many successful product launches with no problems at all. What I am hoping to convey to you is sometimes you need to be ready for more ordeals, even after the launch of your product.

It is easy to think if you have done all of the work, talked with all of the stakeholders and demo every step along the way you going to launch without any issues. However, once a product goes out into production there is no telling what will happen.

In the product launch I mentioned above, there were many assumptions we had made with our stakeholders that proved to be incorrect. When customers were actually able to purchase the product they did so in a manner no one had expected. Causing myself and my team many sleepless weeks trying to fix everything. Unfortunately, in this case, we could not turn off the product and fix everything turn it back on again. We had to leave the product on, fix the issues and manual fixes the fires the system had caused. It was the perfect storm for a frustrating couple of weeks.

What I have learned from this, and other launches that have not gone as expected is to make time your friend. If you know when a project is expected to be released, see what you can do to wrap everything up at least one sprint before it is supposed to launch. This buffer will give you time to help harden your feature and if you can arrange it have some customers try it before it goes live. The other way to make time your friend is to plan some extra time after a major launch for any bugs customers may find. Having the time set aside beforehand will help you be ready in case something happens. If not happens, great. I am sure you will always have something for your team to work on.

Find a Friend to Talk To

After talking with my wife, I drove to work and told my boss he needed to take me to lunch. When I got hired at this company, my boss told me if there was ever a day I did not feel like coming to work and everything seemed awful to let him know and we would go to lunch. These lunches have always been great. Most of the time it is just me venting. To his credit, he is a great listener and in the end, I always feel like someone understands and is wanting to help me.

My suggestion is to see if you can find someone in your organization who can do the same for you. It is great to get away from the ordeal, even if it is just for lunch. Having someone like this in your organization is great. The more I have worked in this industry the more I have realized how much we need to help one another out.

Remember, just because you have launched your product this does not mean it is the end of your journey. It could just be the start of your next set of ordeals but given some time management and social help you can get past this set of issues too.

Originally published at https://briancchristensen.com on July 31, 2021.