Reflections on being too eager to say 'no'

I did something cocky a few weeks ago and missed an opportunity. It turned out all right in the end, no thanks to me, but on the bright side, now I have something new to share when an interviewer asks, "Tell me about a time when you failed at something." 

In March 2020 my organization launched a major re-platforming effort to move our CRM from a legacy system to Dynamics online. We are a nonprofit that relies on bringing sponsors together with families in difficult economic conditions around the world to help children be healthy, educated and empowered to reach their goals. Given the global pandemic, we implemented interim business rules for our families to help them comply with local quarantine measures and ease the burden on them of communicating with sponsors. The cost was that sponsors didn’t hear from families as often, and we are grateful that most were understanding.

However, since leadership prioritized re-platforming over enhancing the legacy CRM, three years post Covid, the more lenient business rules were still in force for about 40% of our supporters, meaning they had not resumed the normal cadence of communication yet.

Given this, a leader in another department asked if my team would make an update to the legacy system, despite a management directive not to do so, so that the customers not migrated yet could have more frequent contact with their sponsored kids. 

What I did: 

I immediately jumped to “no.” As a product owner, it’s my job to make tough calls, and I’m empowered both the literature and my IT executive team to say it if needed. I need to be able to be the 'bad cop' when it's called for. More importantly, I saw this as a self-resolving problem. With every migration to the new system, fewer and fewer people were affected. By this time, we were already 60% complete with the migrations, with an aggressive 4-month timeline to finish the rest.

What I should have done:

I missed an opportunity to ask, “what else could we do that could solve this problem?” Ultimately, others in the stakeholder group did ask that question, and kept at it while I was out on a family emergency. When I returned, my business owner, who had backed me up, had also thought of an alternative. After conferring with my tech lead, I realized it was a reasonable compromise. We squeezed the work into the sprint to get it done, and everyone lived happily ever after. (Until the next crisis, that is, but that’s another story, and isn’t there always another one of those? ) 

Overhead view of a woman writing in a journal.

Reflecting on failure

One of our corporate values is “always learning,” which includes embracing failure. I certainly failed this time, so I reflected on it.  

• I could demonstrate that the problem would go away on its own within a few months and therefore thought wasn’t worth diverting resources for. That logic might have been sound if I had also asked the dev team to check my logic, or even confirm that the ask was 'bigger than a bread box.'

• I was so focused on fighting the bigger fires that occupied my day, that I didn’t spend enough time to assess how a minimal amount of effort might disproportionately improve an outcome.

• Whether the effort was large or small was irrelevant. Spending any time upgrading the legacy system was out of the question, as dictated by senior management, so I didn’t even try to take the time to think further about it. Somone else had made the decision higher up than me, which in the moment, I used as an excuse not to deal with it.

• Most importantly, I failed to consider all the options by not seeking alternative ideas.

The trick, as every good relationship builder knows, is getting to the root of the pain. The problem in my case would cure itself, so I really only needed to treat the symptoms long enough for the problem to go away on its own. I was moving so fast from one fire to the next at the time it never occurred to me.

What I learned from all of this is that there is a better way to say no, and that is,

 “Not this, but what else could we do?”