Products Don’t Fail nor Succeed (It’s something else)

That’s right. Products don’t fail nor succeed.

A product failing or succeeding is simply just an outcome, a manifestation of a company’s leadership and culture.

Show me a product that has faltered, and I’ll show you a group of individuals, and their corresponding leadership and culture, that have failed to come together and perform effectively as a team.

Show me a product that has succeeded and I’ll show you a group of individuals that have wrangled with the complexities of human personalities and put individual egos aside to deliver a common objective as a team.

From the Exxon Valdez and the the space shuttle Challenger, to the Segway and the Apple Newton, to all the failed attempts at electric cars until Tesla came around, all suffered from failures in culture and leadership.

Some examples of this are leadership’s failure to communicate clearly, directly, transparently and in an inclusive manner, and team members not speaking up due to a lack of emotional intelligence and/or absence of psychological safety. Every failure, or success belongs to the team members and leaders that compose it.

What follows are two examples of what appears on the surface to be catastrophic product failures. But once you look deeper into them, you start to see how leadership and culture, more precisely the lack of these two variables, were direct contributors and responsible parties.

On the night of March 24, at 12:04 am the Exxon Valdez struck Prince William Sound’s Bligh Reef. You can read the accident report on?Wikipedia?for yourself. Other than a critical piece of equipment being broken, and negligently left in that condition to save money, the ship didn’t fail. What failed was the leadership team at the Exxon company at maintaining the ship in good working conditions, and the crew from following proper procedures and holding each other accountable and responsible for their actions and their impact in the overall performance of the ship, leading to one of the greatest environmental catastrophes the world has suffered.

On January 28, 1986 at 11:39 am EST — only 73 seconds into its flight, the space shuttle Challenger exploded, killing its entire crew (source:?Wikipedia). The “technical” cause of the disaster was traced to the failure of the two O-rings seals in a joint in the shuttle’s right solid rocket booster. However, as the wreckage was studied, and as many reports have indicated since, the root cause of the accident was actually traced back to NASA’s poor leadership and culture. Launching was more important than following proper safety and communication procedures (several engineers had raised issues due to the extremely low temperatures on the morning of the launch but they were dismissed and this information never made it to NASA’s higher ups until after the accident). A culture of cutting corners to meet project milestones, where group thinking was rampant and dissenting opinions were shunned, created a lack of psychological safety. If you wanted to be successful at NASA, you just had to go along with its culture no matter the danger and costs — even when that potential cost was human life.

In the two examples above, there is an obvious product failure. But one must ask, would these horrible accident have happened if there had been stronger leadership and culture in place? If the 3rd shipmate on the bridge of the Exxon Valdez would have had the confidence and psychological safety to call out the captain, or NASA engineers’ recommendations had been given more weight, maybe the outcomes would have been drastically different.

Products don’t fail nor succeed. Team do!

Given two different groups, where their respective individuals are of the same level of intelligence, drive, resources, and technical ability, in most cases it will be the group of individuals that come together as a team, empowered by strong leadership and culture, that succeeds.

Even in solo sports like golf, tennis or chess, there’s always a strong team providing support behind a champion. Tiger Woods, Venus William, Magnus Carlsen and other top athletes and professionals all rely on their coaching and support teams to help them succeed. Ask any of these individuals if they could ever have attained the level of success they’ve had without their teams and I’m willing to bet that the answer would be an absolute: NO WAY!

Every single product or service that has ever existed will always be a creation born out of human endeavor, driven by imagination, creativity but brought to bear by a group of individuals performing as a team. Building products and services is a hands-on contact team sport. It requires that every team member brings their intellect, creativity and drive, but it also requires leadership to create and provide the proper environment for success — there needs to be a strong, humble and confident culture. Not driven by ego, but instead by inclusiveness. It is only through creating a work place that honors psychological safety that will coalesce a group of strong performing individuals into a winning team.