Hi Reader,

How do you react when something unexpectedly bad happens? Ignore it, panic, or stay unfazed?

Great PMs don't just keep themselves calm. They help their team stay calm too, build a plan, and execute to fix the disaster.

Today's newsletter covers exactly that: what to do when disaster hits, and how to not lose your mind while doing it.

Today in 10 minutes you will:

• •Learn the science behind why stress helps up to a point, then wrecks your thinking
• Get short-term tools to calm down in the moment
• Get a real framework for what to do once you can think straight
• See why your calm (or panic) spreads to your whole team
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Why I am writing about this

Product management is stressful, that's not a secret. In the same hour, you might be fixing bugs, prepping slides for a big presentation, and fielding stakeholder pings.

Saw a meme on LinkedIn recently that captured our 9AM mornings perfectly.

Sometimes bigger things happen though. A critical incident. A project about to miss its deadline. The kind of event that sends you into a full panic.

I had one like this last week. I barely slept. Woke up every few hours with my heart racing. I'd just found out a technical infra update might miss its deadline, the only deployment window I had this year.

What made me want to write this: even with the panic, this time was easier. I believe that's because of the techniques I've picked up over the years.

I won't lie, how you react is also a result of experience. If you're just starting out, you can't fake that. I can't teach you experience. But I can teach you methods that will shape it, hopefully for the better.

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​What Happens to You

Before we get into methods, let's talk about what's actually happening in your body when disaster strikes. There's a very physical reason your brain goes blank right when you need it most.

I love understanding what happens in our brain. It gives me words, logic, and an explanation for what's happening beyond just feeling the emotions.

Here's the short version of the research.

Your brain doesn't really tell the difference between "there's a tiger chasing me" and "I might miss a deadline." Same alarm system, either way.

• Your amygdala fires first, before your rational brain gets a vote

• It floods your body with adrenaline and cortisol

• Blood flow shifts away from the part of your brain that plans and reasons, and toward the parts that react fast

Psychologist Daniel Goleman called this the "amygdala hijack." It's a tiny part of your brain, creating a very big alarm.

The good news: a little of this is actually useful. It's why you can pull an all-nighter and still think clearly enough to ship. Performance rises with stress, up to a point.

The bad news: past that point, it flips. Too much stress and your prefrontal cortex, the planning and reasoning part, starts to lose access. You get tunnel vision. You react to the last thing that happened instead of the actual problem.

There's actual data on what this does to leaders specifically. In one study, 53% of leaders in crisis became more closed-minded and controlling instead of curious. 43% got angrier and more reactive.

So understand this: getting paralyzed, wanting to run, your heart pounding at night, none of that is a personality flaw. It's just what stress hormones do to a brain. Including yours. Including mine.

Most of us can't run away from a work problem the way we'd run from a tiger. (Also, that sounds impossible.) So there are tools people have built to deal with this instead.

Methods to Deal With These Situations

I split this into two buckets. What to do in the first 60 seconds, and what to do after.

Short term: get your brain back online

You can't think your way out of an adrenaline spike. The body has to come down first, then the mind follows. This isn't a metaphor, there's a real study behind it.

Our brain influences our body: alarm sets in, heart rate spikes. But the reverse is true too. Certain body movements can signal back to the brain that everything's okay.

Guess what the best tool for that is? Breathing and mindset. Here are three things you can use in the moment you're panicking.

1. Physiological sigh: two quick inhales through the nose, one long exhale through the mouth. It's called cyclic sighing, and research found it's the fastest way to reduce anxiety and improve mood, working in as little as one to three breaths, about 30 seconds. The extended exhale slows your heart rate through the vagus nerve. My favorite, especially for calming down before sleep.

2. Box breathing: inhale 4 seconds, hold 4, exhale 4, hold 4. Second best to the method above, and used by Navy SEALs before high-stakes moments. If it works for Navy SEALs, it must work for PMs as well.

3. Name it out loud, and reframe what you're feeling: "this is stress, not danger." A pounding heart means your body is mobilizing energy for something that matters to you. In other words, it's helping. Thanks for the help!

None of these solve the problem. They just get your prefrontal cortex back online. Do this first, always.

Long term: what to actually do once you can think

Here's some good news: plenty of fields more critical and dangerous than product management have already figured out a framework for how to act in a crisis.

It's called the OODA loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. Military strategist John Boyd designed it. It's used well beyond the military now, in cybersecurity incident response, crisis management, and increasingly in business strategy.

1. Observe.

– Gather what's actually true, not what you're afraid is true.

– What's the real state of the deadline, the real scope of the incident.

– What's working, what isn't.

2. Orient. This is the step most people skip.

– Make sense of what you observed. What does it mean for the team, the timeline, the stakeholders? Your gut reaction here is often shaped by fear, not facts, so slow down here, even when everything else is fast.

– What happens if the timeline slips? What are your options, your alternatives?

3. Decide. Pick a course of action. It won't be perfect. There's rarely time for perfect. It needs to be a good one you can commit to.

4. Act.

– Set a drumbeat for crisis communication.

– Execute.

– Ask for the resources, time, or escalation you need.

– Then loop back to observe again. The OODA loop isn't a one-time sequence, it's a cycle you run repeatedly until the crisis resolves. Each pass gives you better information for the next one.

Here's what this looks like for a PM.

Say you find out your product is completely down for one enterprise client, right in the middle of a renewal conversation.

1. Observe: you check the status page and error logs, and confirm it's isolated to that one client's instance, not a broader outage.

2. Orient: you realize this client is mid-renewal, so timing matters as much as technical severity. You also remember your team already has a workaround for this exact class of bug from three months ago.

3. Decide: you apply the workaround immediately instead of waiting for a permanent fix. Restoring access matters more right now than doing it the "right" way.

4. Act: you loop in engineering to apply the fix, message the client's CSM with a status update and ETA, and set a 30-minute check-in to reassess. Then you observe again.

Calm Leadership and How You Impact the Team

Here's the part that changes once you're leading other people, not just managing your own reaction.

One of the biggest mindsets that helps me: if I don't want to do this for myself, I should do it for the benefit of others. Sometimes I'm not my own best motivation. Other people are.

EMOTIONS ARE CONTAGIOUS

Even researchers say so.

If you show up in fight or flight, that spreads. Minor issues start to feel like major ones. People stop bringing you problems early, because your reaction makes it not worth it.

THE COST OF A PANICKED LEADER

This connects to the concept of psychological safety. The best performing teams reported more errors, not fewer. Not because they made more mistakes.

That's the real cost of a panicked leader. It's not just the mood in the room. Your team stops surfacing the information you need to catch problems early. That's exactly why last week's deadline scare went the way it did for me.

CALM URGENCY, NOT FAKE CALM

The goal isn't to fake calm or pretend nothing's wrong. Researchers call the useful version "calm urgency": serious, without broadcasting panic.

You can say "this is important, we're moving fast" without handing your team your adrenaline spike too.

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Behind the Scene

I always get surprised by how much work prepping a workshop is.

It starts with a small idea: let's do a hands-on technical workshop, so people can actually touch what they're learning and pick it up twice as fast.

But then that small idea becomes:

Creating slides. Cutting out the noise. Building an interactive playground. Making sure it actually works. Designing games. Thinking through how we learn best. Building registration pages. Writing emails. Writing LinkedIn posts so people even know it exists.

A small idea ends in hours of work.

But it all pays off if it helps even one of you.

If that one is you, here's where to start:

Join my free hands-on API workshop

For product managers who want to get technical by doing, not just reading. In one hour, you'll be able to explain what an API is, use one yourself (no code), and spot the APIs behind the websites you use every day.

📅 Monday, September 7 · 17:00 CEST
💻 Live on Zoom · Free · No experience needed

​Save your spot →​

What do you think?

Did this change how you handle disaster days? Hit reply and let me know, or tell me about the last time you had to keep your cool when everything was on fire.

Hit reply and let me know — do you love it, hate it, want more of something else?

See you next week,

Maria