In all the Product Management literature, have you ever read a book, blog, or tweet addressing how to succeed when your product fails? Somehow, folks have a hard time separating the success/failure of the product manager and the success/failure of their product. Much like when we criticize someone's actions; we're not to take it personally. Somehow our actions are supposed to be isolated from "ourselves".

I'd like to know how many product managers have been responsible for failed products? Are there any that would admit to it?

In this economic war, my friends are dropping like flies. Everyone claims it's not their fault. Well whose fault is it?  Regardless of whose fault it is, failure happens. The professional Product Manager should expect failure to occur sometime in their career. When it does, what should they do?

I believe there are three "best-practices" that professional product managers should put into place and use as guiding principles throughout their careers. Joshua Macht from Harvard Business Publishers published a great post titled "Survival of the Slimmest?". In this post he proposes what I want to call the first principle of failure.

Fail cheap and fail often. In product management, the longer you wait to fail, the more costly it becomes. Don't wait to validate product concepts until the product release. You can fail much sooner by failing during a problem statement validation step. Guess what, at that point it doesn't cost much to fix.  Constant experimentation has to become a routine part of the product manager's life.

Failure should be our prime directive, we should seek failure not avoid it. The second principle comes from Gill Corkindale's post "Resilience: How to Build a Personal Strategy for Survival"."

Be Resilient. Gill suggests 10 steps to resilience. Implement them all. Make a check list and check it off. Make sure that as a product manager your actively taking these steps every day.  If you do then your resilient, if not ...

• Develop supportive and caring relationships at home, among friends and colleagues. Accept help and support and help others when they need it. Product Managers must maintain a social media network.
• Remember that some crises are beyond your control. You can't change events but you can change the way you interpret and react to them. Try to accept this and look ahead. Think of events as bugs on the windshield. By themselves they can be dealt with. But events add up, and it's the accumulative effects of poor visibility, low tire pressure, worn brakes, ... all lead to accents. As we skimp on Product Management activities we start the cycle that leads toward crises.
• Accept that change is part of life and that you will have to adapt to changing circumstances. Prepare for constant change. Seek out change resisters. If you can't remove them, then find ways to reduce the impact of the resistor, and the probability of encountering the resistor.
• Set some realistic goals and take regular small steps towards achieving them. Ask yourself, "What's the one thing I can accomplish today?" rather than focusing on the overarching goal. Remember small steps allow the Product Manager  to fail cheap.
• Be decisive. Do as much as you can rather than avoiding problems and hoping they will go away. Indecision kills the Product Management team, and is normally systemic of poor processes. Good decision making in the heart of uncertainty comes about through understanding trends and turning fact based decisions into intuitive estimates of the future. Small steps are the key.
• Try to understand your own experiences of dealing with loss, hardship or emotional problems. Appreciate what you have learned from these events. The Product Manager must keep a professional journal. This has been a life raft for me and countless of others. Do it. Make sure you're logging lessons learned.
• Develop a positive view about yourself and be confident in your strengths and abilities. I find that a history and trend analysis of key performance indicators is the medicine for this one. Monitor your performance. It'll make you feel better, and those around you.
• Try to take a longer-term perspective and don't blow the significance of the event out of proportion. The product manager can't do this unless they know the significance or impact of the event in context of other events.  Product Management tracing tools are a powerful tool for maintaining a balanced long-term perspective.
• Stay hopeful and optimistic. Visualize what you want, rather than worrying about what you fear. Fear destroys the product manager; refer to the blog post, Fear Tax. Correct balances of practices make this possible.
• Look after yourself - your health, fitness and need for relaxation and peace. This will give you the strength and balance to deal with difficult situations. I know the Product Manager thinks they're the exception. I have not found evidence to back this up; yet most product managers ignore this step.

In my principles, the first was to make seeking failure part of the process, the second was how to lessen failure's impact on you personally, and the third principle is focused on eliminating execution or activity failure through education. Rosabeth Moss Kanter posted "The Best Investment Advice You'll Ever Get".

Invest in your own career How many product managers can clearly articulate the value of product management? If you can't, what makes you think the person determining headcount can? Understanding product management's value, and increasing that value is required to maintain your competitive advantage in the workforce. Lifelong learning and information capitalization is essential. There a many disciplines within the innovation value chain where education doesn't have a direct impact on the value of the chain. Product Management isn't one of them.  When a Product Manager invests in education, they are truly buying stock in the innovation value chain they direct. The time others spend looking for the perfect stock to invest in should be spent by the Product Manager looking for the perfect learning opportunity.

But, failure will happen. When it does, Marshall Goldsmith identifies Four Ways to Bounce Back From Setbacks.  It's a good post that provides a little confidence during uncertain times. Its easy enough to put this information in context of the life of a Product Manager.

The Product Management Community knows the value of failure.
They also know how to address failure.
Meaningful steps toward steering the activities within the innovation value chain to avoid general failure can be taken.
Product Management must effectively keep the path straight.

The good news is that those who wish to help Product Mangers address failure within the innovation value chain can play a constructive - perhaps decisive - role in keeping that path unobstructed.