Do not be a stormcrow

You have ever been a herald of woe. Troubles follow you like crows, and ever the oftener the worse. J.R.R Tolkien - Two Towers

Well. No one want be the one, who comes and says about trouble. Unfortunately very often we are bringing our self in that position. Imagine you hire rockstars to run technology in your project, great worldwide marketing campaigns and then you see it. You open application and see "white screen of death" or you read Tweet saying "your product is a crap". Worst from all - you find your competition suddenly found new way to win with you and you desperately need to do the same.

You run to the office and say: "nothing works!", "all is wrong", "we are in great trouble", "we need to change all now!"

After saying that you can calmly pack your box, bag and go home. You just killed your project. You killed your culture, your team morale, predictability and people faith in your leadership.

It is so easy to address the same things in different way to get: positive response and manageable information:

Technical issue:

• what you did (link you entered, browser, machine, have you plugged your PC to the network?)
• what you expected (precisely what you expected and why, maybe you forgot we don't have this yet there?)
• what you found (screenshot, error message)

Marketing / management issue:

• What information made you worry
• Why that information worry you (how precisely it affect us? We don't understand sentence like "all will collapse")

And in the and please ask:

Could you please check that and come back with estimation IF we have to address it (is it a real issue, or my mistake?), IF we can address it now (is it possible, what will be cost, does it work with our current goals, if research won't consume time we have planned for strategic actions already?), WHEN we could expect results then (keeping in mind all we agreed to do already).

Walk away. Give your team time. They are rockstars. They will come back with solution.