Dealing with a crisis in a productive way
A practical guide for a Product Manager
Dealing with crisis management is part of being a product manager, it’ll happen eventually, and your job is to guide everyone through it. It can cause a small impact to your customer or a huge one, but the steps you have to take are pretty much the same.
I summarize my way of dealing with these situations in 6 steps that can happen simultaneously. When I’m able to do all this, I know that even though life will suck for a while, I’ll be able to help my team get through.
1. Start by stopping the problem
After you discover there is a problem in your product, your primary and only focus is to stop it, so gather your team and let them focus on the fix. While the problem is happening you don’t really need to figure out the root cause, you just need to make it stop anyway possible. You’ll have plenty of time to discover the reasons behind it later. That’s something, sometimes, you need to help your team to understand, so you can stop the bleeding faster.
2. Communicate to your important stakeholders
Once you have your team looking into what's happening, your focus changes to awesome stakeholder management.
You need to get in front of the problem, even if you don’t know the impact the problem is causing and you don’t have all the information, you need to share with important people of the company what’s going on and the information you have. It’s important for them to hear it from you and not the customer.
Here the key insights are: choose correctly the people you first tell to and think about how to give the news, the message has to be clear and not cause panic, because the problem might be small.
My suggestion is to talk to the core leaders: your boss, any director if you see it as needed, in my case sometimes that would include the CEO and the support team managers. You don’t want to cause panic, so be careful with what you say, don’t speculate on impact if you have no idea, just say there is a problem happening and you’ll give updates as soon as you have news.
3. Communicate to your support team
After your main stakeholders know the news, coordinate with the support managers to inform your support team, because they might get flooded with contacts from your customer affected by the problem, depending on the impact.
Here is very important, your support team needs a plan. They need to know what to say and what to do when the customer calls, the worst thing that can happen is for them to get flooded with calls without knowing whats going on.
You don’t need to right away know how to fix the situation but you need three things:
- The speech ready to tell the affected customer.
- A way for them to register everybody that was impacted.
- A clear way for them to talk to you. This way the more you get information, the more you can help your support team help your customer and the team to fix the consequences.
The way I do this: I create a document with the speech and have a slack channel with the support leaders, not all support agents so that the leaders can filter the information and share it with the rest of the support agents. You don’t want to get flooded with direct messages from all your support team, use the reporting line of the support team to deal with that.
4. Develop a plan to deal with the consequences
Once the problem is fixed and everything is in control, gather your team, and develop a plan to deal with the consequences of the problem. Sometimes you won’t be able to do anything, but usually, there are next steps.
This plan has to include a lot of information:
- What were the impact, how many customers?
- If and how are you going to contact your impacted customers
- Are there any fixes needed to be done for the customer?
- Are there any actions for the support team?
After you know exactly what you’re going to do, share with the company. Sometimes, your action plan will be very simple, but other times you’ll be dealing with the consequences for a very long time, so guarantee you have all use cases mapped and dealt with.
5. Learn from the crisis
After the crisis, take your time to learn from what happened, here are important things you need to have a clear point of view after:
- What was the root cause? Was it a deploy? Why wasn’t it properly tested?
- Was there something you could have done to prevent it? if yes, plan to do as soon as possible.
- Was the way your team responded to the crisis effective? Was there something to be improved? For example, did your monitoring caught the problem? Do you have system alerts for this problem? Were they calm or did they got anxious and panic?
- Did the company understand what happened and is ok with the steps your team took?
- Were you able to keep everybody calm? Was there anything you could have done differently?
6. Team building
This is a soft but important step if your crisis was major, the morale of your team will go down, everybody will be upset and tired. Take your time to do something together and take the edge off. Life sucked for a little while, but you worked as a team and managed to live through, celebrate that.
This is my way of dealing with a crisis, sometimes it’s a very small one, other times a major one, but you’ll live through and be better prepared for the next one, because, yes, there will be a next one.
