It is always inconvenient to write about failures. Most articles and speakers constantly say that risk and the failures associated with it are normal phenomena without which success cannot be achieved. But you have to admit the fact that failing is just awful. Although failure is the best teacher, some mistakes can and should be avoided.
To minimize the risks you need to ask yourself the right questions. Jessica Dubin, product manager at Creative Live, based on her experience, identified the main workflow errors, distributing them into four groups. In addition, she formulated questions that will help them avoid:
# 1 Communication errors
Communication is extremely important, especially in unplanned situations and failures. To illustrate her thoughts, Jessica gives an example of when a company's website should have moved from one domain to another. Performing this task required to close access to the site within two hours. The support service wrote a beautiful letter to users, where they noted the time of the move. In turn, Jessica told the programmers what time to complete their tasks. But Jessica missed several important points. A few minutes before the designated time, she did not check and did not tell the programmers that it was necessary to begin the move. In addition, she did not warn the support service that the move might begin later than originally planned. As a result, the claimed time did not coincide with the actual, and users were unhappy.
In order to avoid this error, it was necessary to ask the following question: Did I tell all the staff involved in the task about the current status of the implementation of this task?# 2 Contextual errors
The context is to see the entire ecosystem of your product and make decisions based on a complete analysis of the situation. One of the first tasks of Jessica, during her work in the online platform of preparatory examination tests, was to introduce a new user interface. The interface was created specifically for the needs of high school students and their way of thinking, so the task seemed very simple. However, Jessica did not notice one detail, which was to change the standards of the SAT exam ("Academic Evaluation Test", a standardized test for admission to universities in the US). While the team implemented a new user interface for the old SAT type and spent all its resources on it, a completely new test with new content and structure appeared. If she had analyzed all aspects of the project, she would not have made this mistake.
To avoid a contextual error, you need to ask questions: What should the product look like in the future? What changes are coming in the next 6 months (internal or external)? How is the ecosystem changing right now?# 3 Complication Errors
Creating a product is always accompanied by complex processes, so it’s very easy to make a mistake here. The difficulty becomes almost insurmountable when the technical infrastructure is not fully developed. Such a task arose from Creative Live. Jessica has created a multi-quarter plan for adding more than 2,000 pages to a website with keywords. However, the plan relied on architecture that was not yet fully implemented. Creating something new from the same new and untested parts makes the project very difficult to implement. It turned out that the content is already repeated in the user directory, where you can view, search and filter data. The complexity of the project began to paralyze Jessica's team. And although they managed to complete the first stage of the plan, it took away too much time and effort. All obstacles are difficult to see in advance, but future errors can be predicted by building state diagrams and analyzing the architecture.
To reduce the number of failures associated with complexity, ask: Am I well versed in basic technology to have high confidence in it? Are there any difficulties in introducing a new one?# 4 Mistakes related to overconfidence
The ego delivers many problems and leads us along a dangerous path, drowning out the warnings of those around us. There was a pop-up on Creative Live that Jessica hated. She knew that users also hated him. It worsened SEO promotion. What is significant, 92% of users closed the window. Jessica was convinced that the window was ineffective. The only problem was that the pop-up window was necessary to attract users to register on the site. After 20 seconds on the site or 3 minutes of viewing the content, a pop-up window occupied the screen and suggested the person create an account. Although many closed the window, this turned out to be the most effective way to attract visitors to the site to register.
Colleagues, including those occupying higher positions than Jessica, were against removing the window. But she insisted on removing the pop-up window, at least in the mobile version, where it was the most annoying. After viewing the content, users themselves had to decide whether they wanted to register for a fee or not. After 6 months, results showed that user conversions increased. Removing the window was one of the factors increasing the sales funnel. However, this conversion did not compensate for the loss of potential registered users. The customer base that could be sent by email was shrinking, and so was the income. In this case, the ego led to a great failure.
To suppress your self-confidence, ask: If I am mistaken in this decision, what can happen?Mistakes can occur at any stage of your career, and no one is immune from them. Therefore you should ask yourself the right questions as often as possible. In the comments, share your stories about errors that led to problems in the company or on the project.