Working On A Product Where A Lot Can, And Probably Will, Go Wrong. How To Preserve Reputation?

I’ve taken a role as a product lead at a large organisation, joining from a non-delivery oriented role but I do have delivery experience.

The role is exciting but it’s immensely challenging. There are a million reasons things can go wrong:
- the business unit I’ve joined doesn’t typically launch products
- there’s new digital leadership completely ripping up the operating model for how digital has worked before
- the org more broadly is mid restructure that is aiming to change completely how they deliver
- the project spans many business units meaning there’s a ton of dependencies
- it’s been given an expedited delivery timeline set by the executive
- there’s a lot of politics about ownership of this work
- I inherited the project inflight in a state of poor documentation and had to build a new team around me to start to level set
- this is probably the first project pioneering some of the new ways of working that are really being defined as we go by leaders above most of us

Well despite all of this there was an escalation this week to my manager that one of the teams wasn’t getting what they needed from me. If it had of stopped there it would’ve been fine, I spoke to the stakeholder, they articulated exactly what was needed, and I got it to them by the next day. The issue is the escalation brought into question the appropriateness of my experience and my ability to form an effective team around me to deliver - at the time I was 3 weeks into the role and I just can’t believe this sort of brain dead take was ever put onto paper.

Fortunately my manager has my back, but these comments came from someone who I was working hard to keep onside. This person has been immensely difficult and has made comments to me before about how things should be better in this way or that.

In my mind, we’re working at the intersection of a whole bunch of shitstorms, and just need to be mindful of that - we’ll work together doing the best we can, and if things go wrong we’ll deal with them. Well they’ve made it clear they just want to point fingers and blame someone.

So how do I prevent stuff going wrong, which I’m sure it will, from becoming ‘stuff went wrong so it’s my fault’? And if anyone has any tips for managing this combative stakeholder whom I need to get onside I’d love to hear them.