Balancing Confidence & Humility: How Product Managers Build Trust and Lead Effectively
Background
Given the number and magnitude of decisions a product manager has to make in a given day, it’s important to not only project confidence, but actually to feel it on the inside as well. You need to know when to be confident and move forward, even in the face of imperfect information, and when to admit you simply don’t know. Product management is a difficult role in part because there are so many on-going tensions you need to maintain: having imperfect information and needing to make a decision, leading and influencing without any formal authority, and projecting confidence in your plan and actions while maintaining people’s trust in your decision making ability.
Being Confident as a Product Manager is Not What You Think
I think a lot of product managers hear that they need to project confidence in the role to be effective. This soundbite often is related to the mindset of “you get to tell people what to do” or “I get to make decisions.” Frankly when I hear these come up in interviews or when talking to people it strikes me as just uniformed and immature. People who focus on the illusion of power, control, status, whatever that may come with the role are going to optimize for the wrong things in many dimensions. These are the folks that often create a bad impression of product managers with engineering and other functions.
Firstly, being confident and projecting confidence are two different things. For you to be confident in your actions, you have to know that you’ve got the full view of what’s going on, to understand the details, the business, and the customer, and some prior experience always helps too. If you’ve actually done all the work to be confident in yourself, having understood a lot of context and details, then it will naturally come across to others. Even if you are awesome at this, you’re not going to be confident in 100% of the situations that come up, that’s OK.
Projecting confidence obviously helps with leading and influencing, however the key is that it needs to be justified confidence. The fastest way for a product manager to lose credibility and end up in a really bad spot is to appear to be shooting from the hip, making questionable decisions on top of unearned confidence. You do the work to be confident, then it comes across to others. People who feel the title product manager entitles them to “lead” or “make decisions” without showing their work to earn confidence in their actions are going to fail quickly.
The nice thing is that showing your work is an easy way to build and maintain this credibility in the organization. If you’re actually doing all the detailed work to inform your decisions, it doesn’t take that much work to summarize, point to, share, etc with the wider working team. When people are very apprehensive about a product manager, it’s usually because they appear to be confident in what they are doing but the process they are going through to reach a conclusion is a “black box.” This is especially true when the PM wants to go in a direction that is not obvious to the rest of the team. It’s a bit backwards, but think of your brain like a machine learning model - people want to inspect the quality of the dataset that was used, as well as which factors are being included in the model and their relative weights.
You don’t have to do this for every decision all the time, but the more you let people into the way in which you are reaching their conclusions, the more they will respect and trust the decisions you are making when they can’t see all the details behind it. There are no shortcuts; you build trust and credibility through actually doing things the right way several times, but then you can bank against it over time to move faster. This is why I think it’s very important for product managers who are starting out, or senior PMs that are starting a new job and a new company, to over index on sharing their work to build this organizational trust quickly.
Humility Signals Better Decision Quality
I’ve already written about how being open-minded is a key quality that improves the quality of decision making. Being open-minded can simply be not getting set in your ways or feeling you need to stick with a decision that was already made when new information presents itself. From my experience, having a good sense of your own boundaries, ability, and knowledge allows you to know when to question your confidence and see if you should seek more information before proceeding.
In the context of product management, humility really means “knowing when there’s a good chance you’re missing something and your normal level of confidence may not be justified.” There are a couple of ways this manifests, but most often it’s a tension between being able to say “yeah I wasn’t aware of that” or “I don’t know” and feeling embarrassed because you have to admit to the team you missed something until late in the game. Product managers are human, and the job is complicated so things are going to get missed once in a while. As long as that’s not a repeat pattern on major issues that points to a poor work quality, then occasionally being able to say “yeah I didn't know about that, we should pause for a moment and reassess” is key to maintaining your credibility.
Unfortunately this means sometimes you will look a little stupid in front of people you work with every day. I still remember a time when I was about a month into my first real PM job where I had just confidently said “OK, let’s defer this bug until the next release” after a 5 min conversation with the team about the nature of the bug and how it affected the behavior of the app. My lead developer leaned over and whispered into my ear “um, actually, for this small group of users on older versions the app is not working altogether until we fix this.” The bug was reported against the latest version so this had not come up. I arguably should have known that already, but did not, and told everyone, “OK, in light of new info, we’re doing this now.”
I owned it, everyone had a chuckle, and we moved on. I try to treat moments like this as if I’m adding test coverage. Why did this slip through? What do I need to better inspect next time to make sure it doesn’t happen again? Ever since that day I always inquire about how a given bug behaves across all live versions even when only reported against a single one.
Conclusion
I have to give partial credit for the idea of “qualified confidence” to my alma mater, the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. While a slightly different application, one of the school’s defining leadership principles that they look for in admissions and encourage during the program is the notion of “Confidence without Attitude.” Here’s the description:
We make decisions based on evidence and analysis, giving us the confidence to act with humility.
When I started writing for Product Leaders in late 2021, and came up with the key personality traits as part of my Product Management Philosophy, I wrote “Confidence” and “Humility” as two of them on autopilot without remembering the connection to Haas. At the time I was in school, it made sense but I didn’t have enough work experience, certainly in leadership roles, to really understand how important the combination of these two qualities is to being an effective leader. The last 13 years of product roles and leading teams has shown me how critical these skills are to be an effective product manager.
You earn confidence in yourself and from others by doing the work and being transparent about your decision making process. As long as you follow the data and stay open to new information, you will have the humility to make the appropriate course corrections when necessary and do the right thing for your customers and the business.
