Manage issues and risks

If you want to be a bad product manager, ignore issues and risks. Try to pretend they don’t exist and hope they go away. Don’t tell other people about them — especially higher-ups — since if they find out, it will make you look weak and like you can’t control your product. Downplay the likelihood of risks becoming issues, and downplay the impact of issues that have come up. You want to look like you know what you’re doing, and you can’t do that if people are focusing on all of the things that are going wrong.

If you want to be a good product manager, identify and proactively manage risks and issues. Project managers know this, and product managers should too. Though this is most often the responsibility of the project manager, product managers can not just offload this on the project manager and remain removed from the situation. Rather than trying to ignore or downplay risks, product managers can work with project managers to confront these risks and issues head-on.

Issues are anything that are impacting your product or project negatively, and risks are anything that has the potential to impact your product or project negatively. You need to do prevent risks from becoming issues, and prevent issues from having a negative impact.

Traditionally, risks and issues are discussed in the scope of a specific project — a new product being developed, enhancements to a current product, a new line extension. However, product managers can also track issues and risks for their product in the market. This is often done as part of a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats), but SWOTs tend to be done once as a snapshot in a certain point in time. Tracking risks and issues on a weekly or monthly basis for your product can help keep you from being caught off guard by a new competitor, a change in the market, or other factors that can present problems for your product.
Identifying risks and issues early and getting them out in the open can help them get addressed. There may be simple things that you or others on the product development team can do to minimize the likelihood and impact of risks or mitigate issues. It can help provide evidence for additional support needed from others within your organization — additional funding, resources, or assistance. Proactively communicating the impact of potential risks that are outside of your control will allow you and others to plan for how to react if they do become serious issues. Stakeholders may not be happy with these issues, but they at least will not be surprised and can help work through solutions.

A successful project or product is not one where there are no issues or risks. Instead, a successful project or product is one where there are many issues and risks, but the product manager and project manager are able to work together to identify, address, and mitigate them, and still deliver a successful product.