Entry 8

What do you do when your CEO get's emotionally hijacked?

That's the question and the lesson for the day.

It started as a peaceful day, when a user/early investor reported an issue in production. Our engineering and QA teams had been putting in the reps, I (as the PM) had worked to cover the edge cases, error handling (yeah, not exactly strategic or good for long term team ownership but for a small startup team I feel this level of detail is needed) and partner with the engineers to think through 'all the things', and here we are shortly after releasing our first revenue generating miles with a major issue found in production.

Or...at least that was the perception of the CEO. The team was scolded, we were told 'this is really bad...' while the team was working to identify the root cause of the issue. My role in this? It's two-fold:

1. Keep things moving forward in a way that feels good!

2. Protect the team's energy from feeling bad and keep everyone hyper-focused on identifying the resolution.

Sounds great but much easier said than done. The CTO found a recording of the exact issue in our analytics tool (thanks #Posthog!) Fortunately, we were also able to hop on a call with the investor, walk through and get a recording of the issue using Jam and our amazing QA member was also able to join that call, which helped a ton in troubleshooting and getting a good recording of the issue.

In the midst of this, I got a call from CEO, who also gave me a hard time. So, I took a calming breathe, slowed my heartrate, and thought through the issue out loud. Turns out, this is exactly what the CEO wanted. Even though my thinking turned out to be wrong (I thought it might be a session timeout issue), the process helped both of us.

After the call with the CEO, I setup a impromptu zoom session with whoever could join from the team and opened with a calm thank you for dropping everything and thinking this through calmly.

Turns out, the it was a legacy user issue. The investor was an early adopter and the data was in an older format that we no longer support. We had actually made a conscious decision to move forward and not take the extra two weeks to migrate legacy users since we had so few at this point and runway was critical.

So, what did I learn? Well...I can certainly make up some platitudes here but honestly in the midst of this I'm still a bit annoyed that the team was berated for doing good work. Maybe the real lesson will come to me later, but I feel good about the team coming together today to find the issue. I feel bad that a whole day was hijacked for something we consciously decided would not be supported in the short term.

Meh, a timeline of events as they occur is a bit on the boring side, gotta work on my storytelling here.

...

Ok, editing this about 14 hours later, I think I found my lesson. On reflection, I've realized that I enjoy feeling useful :). While the dealing with the emotional hijacking wasn't fun, bringing the team together and resolving the issue absolutely was and made me feel good. That I think is a lesson worth keeping, the reaction to these events that feel terrible can bring me at least (and I think the team as well) up.