Fighting the Product Manager’s Tilt
On Tilt
The term “tilt” (or being tilted) originated from poker where it is used to describe an emotional state in which a player performs sub-optimal plays (usually over-aggressive or irrational) due to previous negative in-game events, such as losing 5 hands in a row and or a large sum of money. Small things like that.
Since then the term tilt was carried over to other fields, including competitive gaming. Playing a MOBA competitively I have witnessed players do the weirdest things when when going full-on tilt, from rushing the entire enemy team by themselves or typing terrible things at their teammates which ultimately lose them the game and further fuel their emotional state of frustration and rage.
In the world of software development, mistakes will happen and things will break. No way round it, no way to fully prevent it. Even though the above is pretty much a given fact, I caught myself not once ‘almost’ making a call that would throw my team (or worse, our users) into a loop. The PM tilt is real and because I found so many parallel lines between gaming and product management tilting, I thought it would be cool to make that analogy.
Embracing the tilt
You are on day-1 post release of a new version and adoption rate scale nicely. You open up crash logs and there is a huge crash staring you right in the face. Stop the press! We have to get a hotfix out there right now!!!
Oversimplifying, tilt happens when you feel threatened or anxious so your primal brain start calling the shots over your rational brain (also known as Amygdala hijack). This type of emotional reaction comes natural and is embedded in our DNA. Our primal brain knows how to fight common hazards of life like danger using the fight of light mechanism but most likely it won’t have a programmed reaction to a huge crash day-1 after release. In that case an emotional, sub-optimal reaction can happen.
The good news is that we recognized and embraced the tilt potential in the scenario above. When this sort of thing happens I take a mental note (often a written one as well) of my emotional reaction because when reviewing the situation rationally, there is always option on the table: Call off whatever we are working on, shift focus towards a hotfix, communicate to management and deploy that hotfix as soon as possible. But is it the optimal play, or am I tilting?
Embracing the tilt to me means having the ‘almost about to make the call’ moment before I come to terms with the fact that a rational analysis needs to happen and as a product manager who sits on the junction of users-dev-management it’s often very emotional when something in the product calls isn’t sailing smoothly. So what is this crash all bout exactly, who does it effect, what is the scenario? Let’s go and collect some data before we can make any informed response.
Tilt is worse when kept inside
True story: I was supposed to have a version at a staged rollout once and I mis-clicked it all the way to production. I felt anxious, the feeling was terrifying, it was a great tilt potential and my immediate reaction was wanting to hide under my desk and hope that everything will be ok.
I knew I could be going full tilt and pull off something irrational like manually reverting the build (throwing users into an upgrade-fiesta) or just keeping it to myself and somehow make an excuse for it. But I also knew that I work with a team of very talented people, and that I’m never alone in a bubble. So I communicated it, a bunch. I coordinated with the data team and let them know that the data would scale different, I let the operations team know and have them coordinate with other teams and I managed the expectations of management by letting them know what happened but also gave them options in case something will go wrong.
The bottom line was that things went ok, as they usually do but it was an important lesson in tilt prevention, communication and teamwork under not the greatest of circumstances.
Re-focus on what matters
Software development and product management is a team game, and reading product management articles one might think that impending the right methodology, framework or mindset will make life smooth. It kind of does in a sense, and when everything’s great everything’s wonderful. Often times, things get de-railed, plans get shifted and the human factor of it all has a hidden tilt potential.
“If only QA didn’t spend 2 days on feature X” or “If only that guy didn’t had to refactor code”, you name the role and task and you can probably find an excuse to tilt. I tend to leverage those opportunities to re-focus the team (and myself, for the most part) on the primary goal and try to rally the team around it.
For example, if I do believe priorities and resource allocation should be different, the pre-tilting thing to do would be to challenge the current work order and re-focus the team on the sprint’s primary goal which is <insert here> and perhaps re-route other things to relive some pressure where it’s not needed. In professional gaming, players often compare tilt to highway hypnosis where you’re doing the same thing for so long so you often lose focus on the small things that matter. Challenging and re-focusing help me with that.
Look at the bigger picture
This part is of tilt prevention is probably the hardest of me and I assume it would be for anyone who lives the competitive lifestyle (less in product management, but in gaming for sure). It’s really easy and tempting to go full tilt based on a single performance: One day one of your KPIs might be down and by the time you plan the fix, another one is calling your attention and soon enough you’re playing the KPI whack-a-mole, the users suffer, you’re feeling frustrated and nothing’s fun.
Product management is supposed to be super fun.
My way around that is to look at things at scale and for the long run: One of the things I like to say the most is that the product is bigger than any of the team members involved (Steve Jobs came pretty close though) and our jobs is to make people’s lives better and to leave them in a better state then we found them. If you take both of those assumptions and put them to scale, that crash on day one after release is a thing that will need your attention for sure but in the grand scheme of things, you will deal with it in a measure that will serve the users in the best way possible, and you’ll have fun doing it.
I’m also fighting tilt on Twitter @omerkaplan. Follow me for product mangement, tech stuff and competitive gaming
