How a Bold Reversal Turned a Stalled Project into a Game-Changer for Product Management

I'm not sure if I have anything around that. Um, Let's see, the first two places, I didn't have anything. OK. Yeah, I don't have, I mean, if I could give you an example from my developer days, it's not exactly related to my product management role. Uh, there was basically just one instance wherein as a developer I had to come up with this, uh, uh, you know, it was blue sky product, uh, development. So I had to design a feature which basically animated some physics in the back end, right. And this was taking quite some time because we were not exactly sure of how to build this speech. It was, there was no uh ready-made solution for this. And after a couple of months of me working on it, I still didn't have, I had a solution, but the solution was not, uh, what do you call market ready. It was taking a lot of time just to, uh, let's say if you as a user were trying to use a solution. It was not something that uh would uh help you out? And uh so then one day we, I sat with my manager and the guy said, you know what, if this is gonna take some time longer, let's ditch it, right? Let's see when I come back maybe in a couple of months, take a look at it again, maybe the software capabilities of the toolkit would have changed. I said, fine, let's do that. We can shelf this and then one at that particular evening, you know, I basically Brainstormed, did, uh, the entire, uh, spent an entire night, uh, redoing the entire approach. And I finally figured that I had a much simpler solution, something that actually worked. And by that time, I had a sign off from my manager saying, let's not do this. So I, I had to make a decision. Either we do this or we don't. I basically wrote an email to him saying, you know what, whatever I told you earlier in the evening, just ditch that. I have a solution. If you give me 2 to 3 days, I think this can work. And that worked. That, uh, basically, that solution worked. That's something that I have and that might address this particular question.

Uh, it's mostly, I think it was a little, uh, personal because I just didn't want to give up and say, you know what, I couldn't do this. Um, so, I mean, that's one of the reasons why I spent that entire night looking at the problem all over again. And, uh, call it a personal ego or whatnot, uh, and so I was actually very relieved when Uh, you know, I actually found a solution to that particular problem, and, uh, so when I did find it, then I was in two minds, you know, do I say You know, it's easy to say, uh, you know what, we've taken a decision, we're moving ahead with a different project, but at the same time, uh, we say, you know what, If I know a solution that was given upon because of something that I said, it's like a certification of something. I don't want to be there at that stage, right? I wanted if there is a solution, uh, I'm perfectly willing to accept a mistake, and that's why in the first sentence of that email was, you know, discard everything I said. I was wrong. I have a solution and if you're willing to, uh, you know, take a chance at it, I can give you a solution in a week. But, OK. I might have another answer to that question that you asked me. is.

Right. Uh, so, basically, um, we, I had a solution that, uh, OK. So I had a solution. It was not very practical. It was taking quite a bit of time in terms of, uh, the things, which is why we uh did the solution in the first place. So by that time, I had, uh, certain ideas of, you know, what are the other approaches that we can take. It was just, it wasn't implemented. And then when the decision was taken that, OK, fine, let's ditch this project, let's move on to something else. Like I said, personal ego came into the place, you know, I did not want to give up on a project and say I could not do this, and I thought, OK, last ditch effort on my own time, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna try out an alternate approach. Uh, if it works, it works. And, uh, what I did was, you know, I basically scrubbed out all of my code. I tried a very basic module which, uh, took a very simple approach in terms of seeing that if this could improve the solution by this much, right? It was basically an animation. And uh the initial animation was taking at least 5 minutes to execute and the solution that I came up with, uh, are the uh newer solution. It basically was, you know, 10 times faster. It was taking maybe 1020 seconds, and I knew that, OK, fine, this works because that was the expectation in the market also. So when that was there, I knew that, you know, we, I had the foundation of a solution. So I basically, uh, it, it wasn't the full solution yet, but I had the foundation. So I wrote to him and said, you know, and I was quite, uh, open about accepting mistakes and all of that, you know, because that's nothing.

It was basically time. I had already spent around 2 months on the existing solution because we were using different toolkits. Like I said, this was not a solution that was out there in the market. It was not something that I could, uh, you know, search, uh, stack overflow or something and find a solution. I had to actually like come up with an algorithm. I had to come up with, you know, uh, use OpenGL and figure out a way how to implement this particular feature. And uh so I spent some time around it. Uh we were using different toolkits. I tried different approaches. Basically, I was Hitting a blank wall, right? I wasn't getting the solution. And after a period of time, I had a solution. It wasn't a viable solution. And finally, when I pitched it to my manager and I said, you know, this is a solution that I have right now. What do you think? And we were pretty sure, you know, at least 90% sure that this is not something that the end user is gonna appreciate. So there's not something that we could release into the market or into the software. So we said, you know what, if this is not working, uh, let's take a step back. Let's revisit this because there are a lot of other things in the backlog that we could take a step at. So this particular feature, let's revisit this maybe in a few months once the other priorities are taken care of. And I mean, um, it was, it was not a formal process wherein, you know what, there's a backlog, we're not going to do this, all of that. This is via email and over Skype discussion and, uh, so my manager was based out of Austin, you know, he was sitting there. I was in India. So, over the next, you know, before we decided on what the next task is gonna be, I basically sat in and said, you know what, let me take another stab at it before he gives me another task. Uh, so it was just something like that. So before he got up the next morning, I said, you know what, I'm gonna send out this email and say, you know what, don't assign me anything else. If you wanna take a stab at this, that's perfect, OK.