Recognizing failure and knowing when to move on

Sometimes, we just want to push harder, but that’s not always the answer. It's important to recognize failure and know when to move on.

After 14 years of business, I sold my company to a friend last year. That business helped me through some financial droughts. It was a full-time gig for several years, and it kept puttering along as a part-time endeavour in the years after. It was never anything huge; it was not a glowing success story by any means. It just was. I probably should have sold or folded it at least five years earlier, but rather than admit ‘failure,’ I held onto it, always thinking success was around the corner.

Sometimes, we just want to push harder, but that’s not always the answer. It's important to recognize failure and know when to move on.

I didn’t want to admit that my business wasn’t successful; it just wasn’t successful yet. Sometimes, it can be hard to know when you’re failing until taking a step back. The hardest yet is making the decision to move on. In last week’s post, I talked about leaving a company as things went south just before the bottom fell out. In today’s story, I hung on for dear life and wouldn’t let go. In both situations, knowing when to move on was a difficult decision.

How do you know if something is failing?

To answer that question, let’s discuss what failure is and isn’t. Failure doesn’t always mean bankruptcy and a complete shutdown. It doesn’t always mean we scrap it and move on because sometimes we just need to tweak things and pivot. So many great products happened due to some amazing pivots like Slack pivoting from a failed game to their internal messaging tool.

Failure is having a goal and not being able to achieve it. Failure is a gap between intention and result. Slack’s story can be seen as a success (despite their failure), because they still succeeded at launching a successful app, even though it’s not the one they started with.

Lots of things can cause failure, including:

• Poor preparation

• Lack of planning or strategy

• External factors beyond our control

• Insufficient resources

• Current lack of skill

• Poor execution

• Unrealistic expectations

Failure means you must have a difficult conversation with yourself about what’s next—a conversation we often avoid at all costs. The sooner you acknowledge failure, the sooner you can move on.

What to do in the face of failure?

When referring to his work creating the lightbulb as we know it (before LED and fluorescent bulbs took over). Thomas Edison is famously quoted as saying, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”

As I mention that quote, it’s also worth noting he didn’t do it himself. Thomas Edison had a whole team of researchers behind him, tirelessly working in his lab, helping to make the discovery.

Whether you’re working with a team or solo, you will inevitably fail at something, especially if you have a habit of trying new things (which you should if you’re in product management). So, when you do fail, you have a few options. You can:

• Pivot

  The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. So, if something you’re doing is not working, try pivoting it into something else.

• Sell, merge, close, or leave

  This is the nuclear option, but sometimes a necessary one. You can take this option in part or in whole. Don’t shut down the whole thing if you don’t have to; shut down the part that’s not working. Or, leave and admit defeat, take your learnings, and apply them to the next opportunity. It doesn’t mean you’re finished.

• Pause or scale down

  Sometimes, we fail at something because we’re trying to do too much. Reducing scope and focusing on core metrics or features can give us a better chance at success. We can’t be successful at everything.

• Adjust expectations

  Adjust your expectations or that of the business. Accept that your original goals may have been too lofty, and use the new information you have acquired from your first attempts to re-adjust your expectations.

• Try again

  We rarely succeed the first time we try something new. It can take 100s of tries, so learn to admit failure quickly and try again. As product managers, this is the way.

Regardless of the scale of failure, it’s best to think of these scenarios as learnings and pivot or move on from them. In product, we fail all the time; we take what we learn from those failures and apply it to the next thing. At times, we abandon the project or feature altogether, but often, all we need is a slight adjustment in implementation or go-to-market strategy.