Prompt of the Day: Biggest Flop
Question: Talk me through your biggest product flop. What happened and what did you do about it?
Source: Meta, Lenny Rachitsky, Muse, etc.
Advice: Don’t try to sugarcoat it. Anyone asking this question wants to hear brutal honesty. They want to know how bad it failed and why. Start with your learnings.
My (working) Answers: Right now, I am playing with explaining how Google failed to build an attribution modeling product because I focused too much on the technical problem and not enough on the people problems. Or, my biggest failure (without a doubt): Recommendations product at Amazon for which I didn’t do enough of a data dive before placing a huge bet on the initiative.
I am sharing a general description of the challenges I am thinking about discussing. These are not proper introductions. I am sharing because sometimes my clients find knowing the general type of situation I use as an example is inspiring, helping them find an example from their own career to use during their interviews.
Google: I walked in when it was already failing, but it was my job to turn it around. I failed on two fronts: getting engineering buy-in without the engineering leader I was working with feeling threatened and a competing team wanted the product to get promoted, not because they were the best team to own the initiative. It was a valuable product that could have won in the market if I could have proven value faster.
Amazon: I had to tell executives 6 weeks into the year that we didn’t have the right data and wouldn’t in time to make our goal. I prefer the second over the first but for some people, it might be too old a story. My director was so happy he didn’t ask, I should have known better, the failure was mine.
