How to deal with negative feedback as a Product Manager

If there is one lesson, that goes unspoken in many Product Manager books, teaching, and courses is how to deal with stakeholder feedback. Many times it will hit you, hard. It will affect your self-esteem, you will feel hurt or treated unjustly. The feedback will feel personal. That’s a mistake! Click “more” on how to handle it.

Stakeholders don’t know your big picture; you are the only one that knows all the stakeholders and circumstances and tries to make the best choice in a given moment. Feedback will NOT hurt if you have the right perspective. Make sure never to treat this personally! The stakeholder is like an ancient human astronomer, saying that the moon is flat; not knowing it is really a rotating sphere in a geosynchronous orbit. You can’t blame the astronomer to falsely describe the moon in his/her book, as he/she doesn’t know enough.

Same with unpleased stakeholder; she/he may also not know the full scope of your decision process. Working on transparency and making sure those people know enough to understand you is hard work and will never be enough. That’s OK!

However, even if you are wrong, even if a mistake is pointed out — this is not a reason to beat yourself up. As mentioned, you make the best possible decision in given circumstances, but you also may not know enough or make a plain mistake. In that case, even angry feedback is great feedback. If you agree with that stakeholder, simply thank him or her and transform that feedback into actions with an assigned person and due date. This person helped you get more value out of your work and that’s all we are here for as PMs!

On the other hand, if you believe you are right and stakeholder’s feedback doesn’t change your decision; probably it’s not the best place and time to convince that person that is the case and provide all the solid, data-driven evidence to prove this. Therefore, simply thanking the person and assuring him/her you will re-assess your decision and follow-up (either by email or a personal meeting) will be enough to level a potentially nervous plain field and keep a difficult decision, private.

I hope you will have a great making optimal product (and not only!) choices week everyone! Don’t let anyone bring you down and enjoy your days :)

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