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Q: I joined a team as a PM, in the middle of a complete overhaul of the onboarding journey. Fast forward six months, we launched the new experience and received positive feedback, but it turns out that the old experience performs better metrics-wise. Now I need to communicate the bad news while making sure that leadership doesn’t lose confidence in me. Any advice on how to approach this?
Feels like you got a raw deal, doesn’t it? Having to take the heat for a project you didn’t initiate — how unfair. Well, that’s part of the gig. No one ever said being a PM was easy. Many of the projects your team works on aren’t going to work out. So it’s important to get good at sharing bad news.
Fun fact: I also led the overhaul of an onboarding journey (for new Airbnb hosts) that also took about six months. And it also ended up being negative on metrics. One learning for me was to be careful investing in large-scale redesigns of a key flow (a topic for another time 😬). This experience also taught me a lot about communicating bad news.
The trick to sharing bad news effectively is to imagine being on the other side of the table. What would you want to know if you were in charge?
If you’re like most people, you’d want to know everything, as soon as possible, plus exactly how to best move forward. So start there. Here how…
Five tips for managing communication about a failed project
- Get ahead it: Make sure the external stakeholders hear the bad news from you first. You don’t want the first time they hear about your project to be “Hey, did you hear that big project Jane came in to lead is tanking?”
- Highlight the good: Rarely is a project a 100% fail. What good came out of this experience? What did you and the team learn? What will you now avoid in the future? Build confidence in yourself and your team that you are learning, and that you’ll avoid these same mistakes.
- Share the context: When sharing the results for the first time, remind leaders why they decided to give this a shot in the first place. Put together a brief deck (or doc) that includes the background on the project, including the initial hypothesis, how it came together, and the positive qualitative feedback. Only then get into the results.
- Have a crystal clear POV on what to do next: It is essential that you provide your leaders with a recommendation for how to proceed. Be the solution to the problem, not just the messenger of it. Should you iterate one more time? Kill it? Shipping it anyway and claw-back the negative impact? You’re in the best position to make a recommendation, and leaders will look to you to inform their decision.
- You and your projects are not the same thing: Although it’s important to be excited and bought into the projects you take on, it’s also important to not build your identity around your projects (both internally, or in the eyes of your leaders). Projects will come and go, some will succeed and some won’t. Create separation between you and your projects. This post may help.
I once took on a project that I knew was doomed to fail. As much as I tried, I couldn’t convince my manager of that fact. So we launched it. I then got to work doing everything I could to help it succeed, working long hours, and getting really stressed. I didn’t want the project to fail. I didn’t want to fail. But it was hopeless. One evening, while commiserating with a colleague over a beer, she offered some great advice: “Let it blow up. Let it fail.”
And so I did. I let the experiment run its course, and it was negative on every metric. Once we ended the experiment, we both saw the results plainly and were finally able to move on. What I took away from this experience was that sometimes there’s no way around something — sometimes you just have to go through it. In your new role, with a failed project on your hands, there’s no way around it. You just have to go through it. Get to it.
That’s it for this week!
Inspiration for the week ahead 🧠
- Read: Why Specific Positive Feedback is So Important (via @auren)
- Scroll: Wealth shown to scale — Spend sixty seconds on this page and try to keep your head from exploding
- Watch: A guy runs running a mile every hour for 26 hours (equaling a marathon), and in between every lap does household chores. Who’s more impressive, him, or this guy? Hard to say.
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Sincerely,
Lenny 👋