From bugs to crashes to features that creep—life as a product manager can be scary. This spooky season, we collected real horror stories from product professionals. Read on…if you dare.
In a recent LinkedIn Poll, we asked nearly 100 product managers what they feared most when it comes to launching a product. Over one-third of respondents agreed that “finding a bug… after go-live” haunts their thoughts.
And while last minute feature requests, system crashes, and corrupted/lost data all induce nightmares of their own, there are many other things that can go wrong.
To better understand other terrifying scenarios, we ran a follow-up study that asked product professionals from a variety of company sizes and industries to share their bone-chilling tales of launches gone wrong.
You can learn about their greatest fears and horrifying experiences below.
Buried alive by the backlog
“I was asked to take on a ‘stretch project.’ But by stretch project, they meant fielding all (ALL) integration requests and roadmapping them into reality. I was constantly yelled at by leadership when integrations took longer than they wanted. It got so bad that we stopped adding new requests to the backlog. I quit a few months after.”
The roadmap to nowhere
“I was working at a large enterprise company. We were asked to research product opportunities and make some proposals. A few days before we were scheduled to present, the company made an acquisition that pretty much killed our idea. Worst part is that we had been kept in the dark about it.”
The nightmare before launch
“My executive team axed half my engineering team 2 months before launch and were surprised when we went live with only half the features they wanted.”
When the bugs bite
“Found a bug which we couldn’t have caught during testing after we went live. The next few weeks were nothing but complaints and escalations regarding the same issue.”
Feature creep(ed) out
“Two weeks before a major launch, my CEO goes to our #1 client and tells them that there will be new features in the release that we never scoped and weren’t part of any roadmap. The client then emailed me about how excited he was for the new features. We spent the next two weeks working 24/7 to get it done. Worst case of feature creep.”
It’s alive! …. or is it?
“I was supposed to demo a new feature at our customer conference but couldn’t get anything to work. Total system crash. I had to fill a 2 hour slot with Q&A while my engineers frantically tried to fix the issue.”
Don’t let fear get the best of you
Delivering new features and making changes to your roadmap doesn’t have to give you and your team goosebumps.
An embedded integration platform as a service (iPaaS) can save you from integration backlogs and help your engineers escape the hair-raising work of building integrations natively. Instead, your team can deliver integrations quickly and at scale, while your engineers can take on the less spooky—and really important!—work of building out your core product features.
How successful product managers use an embedded iPaaS
Learn how brands like Tango Card, Unanet, and CyCognito leverage an embedded iPaaS to transform their customer and employee experience.
