You never know how the world around will affect your product. Usually, we talk about the negative impact. Stock markets falling, new legislations, shifts in customers behaviour, fashion and so on. Sometimes though an external event might have a positive effect on our business. Take the latest situation where millions of people staying home (and rightly so). Streaming services such as Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime must have their numbers jump through the roof.
I wonder how they would attribute this success. On one hand, this is totally outside of their control and therefore should be attributed to coincidence. On the other hand, their PMs did a lot of work beforehand to prepare their businesses to take advantage of such situations. Because it might have been different.
Look at Robinhood, a mobile app that allows you to buy and sale shares. In recent weeks it went down twice during the two most busy market days in the last years. The circumstances are arguably the same but the results are vastly different.
Therefore, I think Netflix and other products’ PMs who will see their business grow should take just a bit of credit for the hard work they did beforehand.
Great leaders always take the blame but attribute success to their colleagues and good luck. No one would call the latest events “good luck”. However, life goes on and some businesses will find their numbers going up. They need to remember the root cause of this growth and the fact that their PMs prepared the business to take advantage.