If you treat risk as the enemy, you’ll achieve nothing as a leader and product manager.
This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.
Eric Ries, The Lean Startup
Failure, or at least the risk of failure, is how we learn. It’s how we grow. It’s how our team grows.
As a leader of others, if we don’t risk failure both for ourselves and our team, we’ll never grow.
And as a product manager, if we never risk failure with ideas for our products, we’ll never create the best products. We might create safe, mediocre products that match our competitor’s features, but we won’t have a consistently innovative product.