Francesca is the CPO at Swedish property platform Hemnet. She starts by relating how difficult she’s found it to get comfortable with the idea that things can be good enough, and how she’s come to realise that the concept is more about making mistakes and learning from them. She says: “This is because mistakes force us to stop and think, analyse and reflect, they attract our attention in a sea of things done right and make us remove the autopilot.”
She then runs through some of the mistakes she’s made that have also taught her important product lessons. For example she underestimated the importance of communicating a piece of product news, which created a big reaction from customers. She says: “Answering personally some angry emails and calls really taught me the importance of understanding that what I considered ”good news” are instead really bad ones for some customers. I now created a system that ”categorises” which kind of product news we are communicating, to better handle the rollout plan.”
She says that it’s critical to create an environment where product teams can learn and fail. Some of the actions she suggests to allow a team to fail include:
- Take a step back and watch the failure - when doing a test might seem like losing time because you know how the test will end up but as PM /CPO you must not act, and let the team test and try. She says that something they try on their skin will always be more powerful than whatever you say.
- Share your own mistakes
- Praise people who share when they fail
- Create a culture of learnings - go beyond success and failure and always ask “what did you learn?”.
- Make sharing mistakes a habit
Francesca concludes: “Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.”
Read the original article: Why mistakes are key for product excellence
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