Product crisis management

How to manage a crisis as a Product Manager!

Nightmare on the ‘Bugs’ street

In the tech product industry, bugs crop up at the most opportune times. The ugliest scenario is when you’re ready to ship a feature and the resulting deployment has opened a pandora’s box of system stability issues and bugs. Intercom is chock-full of customer issues/complaints and there aren’t enough hands on deck to solve them.

In such a case, it makes sense to keep a calm mind and prioritize, prioritize and prioritize.

Request your engineers to fix the most critical issues which if not fixed, will bring the entire product down. Other issues (though they might seem major) can have workarounds present and many others can wait in the queue depending on their engagement level, number of customers impacted, frequency of occurrence, quick-wins etc. Basically, own the bug triage process!

Faux collaboration

Every tech company/startup wants to be portrayed as an extremely collaborative machine. But sometimes, it tends to become a consensus driven sluggish beast instead of a nimble panther.

We’ve had discussions dragged on for days because team members won’t agree on a way forward. In other words, there’s analysis-paralysis where decision making process is too drawn out, which is a major crisis in itself.

In these cases, I’ve learnt to break fast and succeed sooner. We tend to make an executive decision when collaboration stretches for far too long, and we move on. If the decision produces a faulty result, we try another approach instead of placing blame, and this process goes on until we have a desirable outcome.

Jeff Bezos explains it the best here :

Faulty feature recalls

When a feature is shipped which is either not loved by the users, or which affects the user’s productivity in a formidable way. There have been cases where we’ve shipped well-thought out features and assumed customers would love them since we’ve done our customer/market research.

But customers might not respond well to certain features or we may’ve failed to take into account certain critical edge cases and at times, users may want the old functionality back.

In such extreme cases when a feature has garnered negative reaction, own the failure and accept that you’ve read your audience wrong. I’ve realized it plays out well if you sincerely apologize to the customers for the feature fail, recall the feature, restore the old functionality / deploy a hot-fix and learn a lesson in the entire process.

Let me know in the comments below what are some of the other crisis scenarios that have gnawed at you as a Product Manager.