Resilience: How the best Product Managers remain effective when times get tough
Background
If you talk to product executives about what they look for in product management job candidates, you’ll often hear one or more of the following statements:
They have a high pain threshold
They can deal with pressure
They can roll with the punches
They have grit
They don’t give up easily
They don’t get rattled
They aren’t thrown by rapidly changing circumstances
They have determination
In my time as the leader of a product org and in my conversations with clients since, I’ve heard all of these come up multiple times. I knew everyone was talking about the similar qualities, but there was no single unifying term to describe what everyone is talking about. After stepping back and thinking about it, I’m proposing resilience as the term that best describes a product manager’s ability to stay effective while dealing with change and adversity.
Why Is Resilience Critical for Product Managers?
To start, I’d say there are really two related concepts rolled into one here, which is why there are so many varied examples. The first is how well (or not) a Product Manager handles stress or pressure in the classical sense. The second is the ability to forgo instant gratification for your work - in essence, you’re OK doing a lot of hard work and dealing with difficulty when the payoff is not expected until far in the future.
I might be guilty of saying this at the beginning of half of my posts, but product management is an extremely challenging and oftentimes stressful job. You are often under a lot of scrutiny to perform, there’s pressure to deliver results, or some capability, and if you subscribe to an ownership mindset, you often feel responsible for not just your own performance, but that of the extended team. Yes all of these things are intellectually challenging, but it’s also just plain stressful.
In terms of why product leaders feel this is so critical, there are a few “vanity” answers and then one that I think is key. Honestly, I think a lot of hiring managers are concerned that a non-resilient PM might snap, lose their cool in a meeting with the execs, alienate their working team, etc. Of course you don’t want an employee who turns caustic when experiencing stress or change, however this feels more like managers trying to avoid the potential pain of dealing with that situation. To me the key here is that if someone can’t deal with adversity in the role, they are going to either make bad decisions, or no decisions at all. At the end of the day, a product manager is measured by the quality and consistency of their decision making and the outcomes that come as a result. If a product manager is not highly resilient, they will simply struggle to do well in the role.
In terms of delayed gratification, I think this one actually gets talked about less, but is just as important as dealing with stressful situations. Even if you are lucky enough to work someplace that ships daily or weekly, you’re not always going to see a big payoff from the benefits of your work for weeks or months. The job often requires dealing with a lot of fires, many of which are not of your creation, day in and day out for a long time before you see a positive outcome. Successful PMs are the ones that are able to weather the ups and downs of the short term by keeping some future benefit in sight.
The people who succeed as product managers, especially those who make it into leadership positions, are the ones that learn how to deal with these pressures and stay effective in the role. Some have had prior work or life experience that gives them an edge when they start as a product managers, and many learn to develop this skill on the job. The important thing to note is that it is something you can develop, not something you are either born with or not.
Where does the adversity come from as a Product Manager?
Thinking through examples from my own career, my employees, and my clients, I came up with these four primary sources of adversity in the role of product manager:
Direct delivery pressure - being on the hook for a specific thing with time or metric goals, including the implied pressure of letting people down by choosing not to deliver something
Market / Customer Uncertainty - There are major unknowns and unanswered questions that make it challenging to identify “the right” way forward
Internal Ambiguity / Lack of Direction - When there is little to no strategic guidance, can they self-orient and get stuff done?
Rapid disruptive change - The situation in the market, the company, or their team is constantly changing for whatever reason, causing disruption and frequent “resets” on the team’s work
I’m sure there are probably other examples, however these struck me as the sources of the most intense situations and greatest tests of a product manager’s resilience. Each of these has its own failure mode, but they all thematically sum up to either inaction or failure to deliver. The best PMs have developed strategies to navigate these situations without getting rattled, losing focus, or giving up.
Can you work on becoming more resilient?
Like most behavioral traits, people are born with slightly more or less natural resilience than others, however it can be improved over time. Starting from a purely psychological perspective, the APA states:
“Like building a muscle, increasing your resilience takes time and intentionality. Focusing on four core components—connection, wellness, healthy thinking, and meaning—can empower you to withstand and learn from difficult and traumatic experiences. To increase your capacity for resilience to weather—and grow from—the difficulties, use these strategies.”
This article and the suggested strategies are of course not specific to product management, and are meant to help deal with a range of traumatic experiences, however they are still valid. Engaging the power of your team rather than trying to solve issues by yourself helps to distribute the load. Wellness, taking care of yourself, getting adequate sleep, etc while obvious to state are obviously key to having the right starting mindset to deal with a difficult situation.
Under the banner of healthy thinking, the article mentioned two things that I actually felt were really important and took me a long time to figure out as a junior PM. First up is maintaining perspective. Given that you are the central routing point for not just your own actions and decisions, but all issues related to your product and the extended team, there are times when it feels like all you are doing is putting out fires, and it can be overwhelming. It’s easy to start to catastrophize, think that it will always be like this, or that it’s not worth it. I found it very helpful to try to keep the longer term objectives in mind. The book The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef talks about how people are naturally wired to avoid situations with short term pain and a long term payoff. If you believe in the goal, and you believe that what you have to deal with, while unpleasant, is necessary to achieve the goal, it gets a lot easier to just focus and move on.
The second part of perspective, which is so critical in companies trying to drive innovation, is to ensure you see setbacks as feedback, not personal failure. A lot of stress is “phantom stress” that we create in our mind because of how we perceive people will react. The Scout Mindset also does a great job of explaining all of the reasons why we naturally try to “defend” against failures, rather than accepting that it will happen and trying to learn from it. Obviously company leadership can do a lot to foster an environment that embraces risk taking and learning from mistakes, but you can do a lot as an individual as well. If you are looking at the data, following best practices, taking calculated risks and things don’t work out some percent of the time, that’s expected, and you are doing your job.
The second element of healthy thinking the article mentions is accepting change. I don’t think this can be overstated in most modern companies, especially tech companies. Your responsibilities will change, your team members will change, the target customer’s needs will change, the competitors will change. Maybe not all at the same time all of the time. But it’s very unlikely that large parts of your operating environment will stay stable for a very long time unless you are working on something that is mature and heading towards end of life. If your product is anywhere other than the top of the S curve, change will be constant. You need to be able to dispassionately accept the change, figure out what it means, adapt if necessary and remain effective.
The last strategy the article mentions is finding meaning. As I mentioned earlier, I think believing in the mission, the company, the strategy, your goal - whatever long term objective helps you to overcome the near-term hardship. This of course is not something that is entirely up to the individual. You may or may not work at a company that does not have a mission you believe in, have a codified strategy, or discrete goals. I think it’s not a surprise that not only do those companies have trouble executing, but they have trouble retaining good people. When times are tough, you need to feel like the near term sacrifices are worth the long term payoff. Some people can find that for themselves, some people need a presentation from the CEO. Either way, be honest with yourself whether you have a future payoff that is truly motivating you through the hard times, or are you telling yourself that you are staying through bad times because you are resilient and in reality you are just avoiding looking for a new job.
How do you screen for resilience in an interview?
If you are looking to come up with targeted interview questions that really get at resilience, start with the 4 primary sources of stress and adversity:
Direct delivery pressure
Market / Customer Uncertainty
Internal Ambiguity / Lack of Direction
Rapid disruptive change
Each of these easily turns into a series of “tell me about a time when” question that gives you insight into actual stressful situations, what strategies they’ve developed to work through them, and the outcomes. I also like asking a few questions in this territory just to calibrate “what does stressful mean to you?” Pressure and uncertainty can vary a lot from company to company. Make sure to get enough detail not only to hear that this person has had to deal with real issues and remain effective, but also that the magnitude of the situations is not too far off what they are likely to experience in this role. There’s a big gap between the direct delivery pressure of an analysis on retention your boss asked for by next week and addressing a critical bug that has taken down the service while every stakeholder in the business is calling to figure out when it will be fixed. Are they self-aware enough to know what types of stress are most challenging for them? How likely are they to experience those types of stressors in this particular role?
If you are interviewing someone junior, or trying to switch to product from another field, you can ask about other adverse situations and the the answers will be just as useful. Also, scan their resume for evidence that they have voluntarily done challenging things in their past outside of work and stuck with it for a long time. As an example, people who were competitive athletes in high school, college, or after had to train hard and make short term sacrifices for a long term payoff. Once you know what the sources are, you can find good proxies that map to anyone’s life experience.
I see a lot of people start off in the right direction on this topic and then end up completely off the rails. Like I said at the start of the post, most product leaders know they are looking for characteristics of resilience when interviewing, however most have not tried to break down what exactly it means or how they’d screen for it. What ends up happening is we’ll get to an interview debrief, and someone will say “they haven’t worked at a startup, I don’t think they could handle working here.” Someone may have only worked at large companies but have had many moments in their professional and personal lives where things were really hard, there was a lot of uncertainty, and they stuck with it, pushed through, and found success.
As an aside, only because that particular example is so common, big companies can have many of the same failure modes as tiny start ups - frequent changes in direction, no documented strategy, frequent org changes, strong / toxic personalities. Perhaps some of those things are more common in smaller companies, but assuming everyone who’s worked at a large institution won’t be able to succeed in a challenging environment is oversimplifying to their own detriment. For more on a similar thread, see my post about focusing on what actually predicts success when hiring a product manager.
Conclusion
The best product managers are the ones that become resilient to the constant change, adversity, and stress that come with the role. Things will go wrong, setbacks will happen, you won’t have perfect information, and yet the business still needs to move forward and decisions need to be made. By understanding the sources of stress and adversity common in the role, and strategies to remain effective, you can improve your own resilience and set yourself up to take on more responsibility and larger roles.
