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By Lenny Rachitsky · lennysnewsletter.com · @lennysan on X · YouTube · LinkedIn
Lenny Rachitsky answers a reader who must deliver bad news after inheriting a six-month onboarding overhaul that performed worse on metrics than the old flow. He argues the key is imagining you are the decision-maker, then offers five tactics: deliver news early, highlight what was learned, share context, bring a clear recommendation, and separate your identity from your projects. He closes with a personal story about letting a doomed experiment run its course.
Subscriber post — summary only01Key takeaways
- Imagine being the decision-maker and ask what you would want to know, and how fast.
- Tell external stakeholders the bad news yourself before they hear it secondhand.
- Pair the results with what the team learned and what will be avoided next time.
- Walk leaders through the original hypothesis and context before presenting the metrics.
- Always bring a concrete recommendation: iterate, kill, or ship and mitigate.
- Don't tie your identity to a project's outcome; projects succeed or fail, you persist.
“The trick to sharing bad news effectively is to imagine being on the other side of the table.”Lenny Rachitsky · Lenny’s Newsletter
“Be the solution to the problem, not just the messenger of it.”Lenny Rachitsky · Lenny’s Newsletter
Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.