Reward — Step Eight of the Product Management Monomyth

What story of reward could be better than when Arthur pulled Excalibur from the stone? A sword, buried in an anvil, mystically appears on Christmas Eve. The inscription states that whoever can pull the sword out is the rightful ruler of England. Many of the great and noble knights all try, but none of them are successful. However a lowly squire, in need of a sword for his knight, sees the sword and pulls it out to give to his knight. When the knight recognizes the sword, they take it back and put it back into the anvil, where no one can pull it out again. Now with everyone watching, Arthur once again pulls the sword from the stone and proves his right to be king of England.

As a Product Manager, you may never physically pull a sword from the stone, however, there are will be times where you feel the feature you are working on for your product is just as hard. The thing to remember, there is going to be a time when you are going to launch your new feature and like Arthur of old, the success will be legendary.

You never know what is going to be the feature of legends

I worked for a company one time that came up with a rather large initiative. The goal was to set up a new distribution method for our products in foreign markets. All of the preliminary analysis came back showing we were going to have a multimillion-dollar increase quarter over quarter once this was in place. Everyone was excited and work began on the initiative right away.

After a few months of working on the project, the teams began to get very frustrated. Many of the initial requirements changed and the foreign markets we were working with became more and more difficult to elicit help from. This was compounded by the fact that the company was hoping to have the project done by a specific date to start realizing the financial gains. As dates were missed, more and more pressure was placed on everyone because we were not receiving any of the money we had been expecting.

As this was going on the company looked for any other ideas we could come up with to help with finances. One of my product teams was asked to work out a promotional bonus application we could launch rather quickly. With just a little work, my team created this promotion and got it launched ahead of schedule. The forecast for the promotion had shown we would have some short-term gains, although ultimately we were not expecting to make much from the promotion.

When the promotion launched it was amazing. Our customers were so excited by it that we exceeded our expectations 40 times over. Now the promotion we had expected to just give us a short-term boost outperformed what we had predicted the first initiative to give us. It was so successful, we ran the same bonus six months later and saw the same record numbers we had the first time we ran the bonus.

So whatever happened to the first initiative? We were finally able to get it completed and to this date, it has not hit any of the projected goals we ever thought it was going to make for us when we initially started on the project. Sometimes you never know which feature will be the winner and which one is going to barely move the needle. I am sure no one thought a squire could ever be king of England, you just need to keep your eyes open for any possibility.

Who gets the reward

Like many Product Managers, I did not start my career as a Product Manager, it has just been something I have grown into through the years. I initially started my career in Sports Medicine, working as a collegiate Athletic Trainer. It was there I learned one of the most important lessons about winning and losing, especially at a team level. The key thing to look for is the use of the term “We” and “I.”

In sports, you have your good and bad games, and the biggest indicator of how great an athlete is is by listening to them in their post-game interview. If the team lost the game, a great athlete will use lots of “I” statements. As in:

• I just could not find my shot
• I was having a hard time getting to the QB
• This loss is going to give me something to look at and help me improve and I hope to get better from this

If the statements ever are anything like I was doing great, everyone else around me just needs to do better, this does not count as a great athlete in my book.

On the flip side, when the team wins, I am always listening for those “We” statements:

• We did a great job running the ball tonight
• We were just on fire with the 3s
• We have a great team here and I am glad to just be part of this group

The even better thing a great athlete will do is call out other teammates on how great they were and always try to downplay anything they did.

As a Product Manager, I think we need to take a little bit of this mentality in our playbook. Anytime we have success we need to always point back to the team and how “We” worked well to get this done. On the flip side, anytime something goes wrong, the Product Manager should be the one up there who says “I” messed up and will get this fixed for you.

Originally published at https://briancchristensen.com on August 7, 2021.