You Own It Now

How Leaders Are Owners No Matter What

Years ago, I took over a product and a product development team. It was a high-profile product for our company. I was only a few weeks in the role and was still coming up to speed with everything when I had a meeting with all the executives and key stakeholders to review the roadmap.

They grilled me for about an hour — why we were off-track in several areas, why certain groups hadn’t been informed about certain things, why we hadn’t done research on a few key questions. It was one of the most brutal meetings I had ever been to.

I had answers for many of the questions, having done plenty of prep work. When I didn’t know, I was upfront. I wrote down things to follow up on after our meeting. All the things a good product person should do.

But eventually I became exasperated (something a good product person shouldn’t do). I wasn’t the one who dropped the ball on all of this! I wasn’t the one who forgot to tell so-and-so about something! I was stepping in to right the ship. And I was going to let them know!

So I told them something to the effect of: “I wasn’t the one who was responsible for the product previously. I’ve only been responsible for it for a few weeks, so I know there are a number of things we need to fix, but it wasn’t me who messed it all up!”