This show really is as great as everyone says it is, but it’s not an easy watch. I had no idea of the scale of the horror, or how close it came to becoming an even greater catastrophe without the intervention of a few people willing to confront reality.
What struck me about the events depicted in Chernobyl wasn’t simply that people made mistakes. It was the two very different ways people responded when those mistakes became impossible to ignore.
The first was driven by fear of blame. Evidence was denied. Bad news was softened. Impossible explanations were maintained because acknowledging reality carried personal risk. With each attempt to protect themselves, the people in charge made the disaster more dangerous. And some of them were real assholes about it (looking at you, Dyatlov).
The heroes Legasov and Khomyuk represent the opposite response. They didn’t cause the accident, but they assumed responsibility for what happened next. They confronted the evidence, challenged people with far more power, and acted on the truth as they found it.
Product teams often face the same choice, albeit at much lower stakes: defend the plan or confront reality.
For example, a project has been prioritized and has people in the company excited. But research reveals that customers don’t have the problem everyone expected. Or an experiment fails. Maybe actual usage data undermines the course the team had planned. In a blame-oriented culture, people respond by protecting themselves. Maybe an executive is invested in the idea and no one wants to be the bearer of bad news. The evidence is there, but following it means ruffling feathers. So the team keeps chugging along, hoping the plan will somehow prove itself right.
A healthy product culture makes a different response possible. Removing the fear of blame doesn’t remove accountability. It gives people the safety to acknowledge reality—and the responsibility to act on what they’ve learned. Teams can change course sooner, improve outcomes, and keep the same mistakes from happening again.
I’ve always believed in a “win or learn” mindset. But learning only matters if people feel responsible for doing something with it.
In a recent interview on Lenny’s Podcast, Netflix CPTO Elizabeth Stone described that distinction:
“The best people want to know there’s going to be a blameless retro and they’re going to feel so individually responsible that they’re going to say, ‘How do I make sure this doesn’t happen again?’”
That’s the foundation of a healthy product culture: people can confront what went wrong without fearing what will happen to them for saying it. Blame asks who should suffer for the past. Responsibility asks what we owe the future.