“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.”

You should prepare to fail.

I mean it. If I've learned anything from 10+ years consulting and leading teams (at Boston Consulting Group, Meta, and a slew of startups), the work of building is in fact a lot of shots on goal that don't hit goal. Most sales calls get a no. Most products don't meet targets. Most marketing copy bombs.

Specifically for product managers, though, I mean:

• Your product should plan to fail.

• Your strategy should plan to fail.

• Your company and team should plan to fail, and for that failure to be unequally distributed due to dumb luck.

• You--as an individual human being--should plan to fail

What do I mean by this? Let's dig in:

Your product should plan to fail.

Servers crash. Bugs happen. This is the whole point of resiliency: when something breaks, can we "fail intelligently" to keep the impact of what's happened manageable?

During development, planning to fail also means figuring out what really matters. If you ask: “If this feature made the difference between getting this product out by X deadline or not, would you accept it without the feature?” Come to think of it, if X deadline slips, can we survive?

In day to day product development, tradeoffs are choices we make between greater and lesser failures. Put another way: if the bike rides, everything else is a bell or whistle. But if the bike crashes, you should have a helmet on.

Your strategy should plan to fail.

In tech research and development, let's not forget the research side: product bets are opportunities to clarify what your customers want. Sometimes, they don't want it.

This patently obvious corollary to "build an MVP and test it" is still regularly forgotten by product organizations who culturally fail to fully integrate what it means. When my PM friends discuss “toxic work cultures,” this is what it usually comes down:

• Gaslighting: "Oh well, that wasn’t our goal anyway."

• Grinding: Is it safe to share when hypotheses are disproven, or important to keep trying (fix the data, do more, don't acknowledge what happened)?
  

Your company and team should plan to fail, and for that failure to be unequally distributed due to dumb luck.

In fact, every company will fail -- in small workaday ways -- many, many times to reach goals (OKRs! KPIs!) it has set. In a brittle mentality toward failure, that leads to blame-games on a human level.

Planning for failure on a team and company level means, for example:

• Planning for failure to be unequally distributed in how you design your performance systems and incentives.

• Praising people who fail openly for the lessons they can teach others, instead of punishing them for "being wrong"

• Hiring and spending conservatively, because lean times in the industry always come (Meta, Google, and many startups are facing the music on this right now)-- and having a plan to take care of your people if they do

On a personal level: Do you feel safe in your company drawing the short straw on a bug, a reorg, or being assigned a bet that doesn't pan out? If not, leave--this is your life you're talking about.

You--as an individual human being--should plan to fail

You’ll get rejected from most of the jobs you apply for. Most of the people you meet won’t change your life. If you try to write a lot, most of what you write won't be read.

Most of life is spent outside a happy path -- it is constant redirection. This has always been true of the human condition. To really recognize this, and be okay anyway, means doing stuff that you’d be happy to do even if they didn't "succeed"--work you love, with fellow humans you trust and respect.

When I was starting my career 10+ years ago, I was single-mindedly focused on success: what could I do to be right? How could I pick winners? It took an embarrassingly long time to realize that a fairly successful career looks like a lot of little failures much of the way through.

I want to spare you that same mistake. Defang failure, and nothing holds you back from trying. Prepare for failure, both logistically (buy insurance! live below your means!) and emotionally, knowing that you've embraced the worst of what your journey could give you, and every day is upside. We all end up in the same place--that ultimate failure: dead.

Why not enjoy the present moment, and the game of life you're playing, every moment you show up to play?