Return Home — Step Nine of the Product Management Monomyth

With the hero’s reward, all that is left is for them to return home. In the realm of literature, there is probably no one who has a return home story quite like Odysseus. After spending ten years fighting in the Trojan War, Odysseus comes up with a plan for ending the war. Yes, Odysseus is often credited with coming up with the Trojan Horse plan that helped the Greeks enter Troy and ultimately ended the war. However, what he is most known for is the next ten years he takes in returning home to his family and Ithica.

The Path home may not always be smooth

As you go through the list of challenges/adventures Odysseus had to go through you may not think his return home is an adventure you would like to have, let alone one you want to have as a Product Manager. However, I think it is important to remember all of the things you have done to get you to this point. Odysseus did not start his return home after going on vacation. He had just spent the last ten years at war, growing, learning and developing to help him on his return home.

In the same sense, you as a Product Manager are not just returning your product home after a quiet getaway. You have just been working on getting a new feature into your product. This has meant time with stakeholders to gather the what and the why of the project. Time working with the team to make sure they understand what needs to be built. Then going through all the testing to make sure the new feature works correctly as well as does not cause any issues with the existing code in your product. Do not forget the launch, when you finally pushed the new feature out to your customers and let them start using it. It may not be the same as fighting in a war for the past ten years, but there are times it might have felt like it.

So, like Odysseus, as you are returning home, there may be some more challenges you must encounter. But this time you will be prepared for them and with the previous work you have done on the feature, you will be able to face any challenges that come your way. Recently, my team and I launched a brand new application to help us take care of our customers in a foreign market. After spending months, gathering requirements, coding, and testing with all parties we felt we had a great product and one everyone was happy with and it worked great the first night we ran it. However, as time went on we found more and more slight imperfections with the feature we launched. It was doing exactly what we had been asked to get it to do, however, some of the consequences were not what we were hoping for.

Luckily, because we had been through the first stages of this journey, our return home on this feature worked out great. We still had three or four more challenges that came up after the initial release, but once those were resolved, the product is working great. It is working better and doing more than we had initially thought it could have done.

So remember, the ride home may not always be the easiest, just as Odysseus, however, the journey you took to get there will prepare you for anything that may come your way.

Originally published at https://briancchristensen.com on August 28, 2021.