Have you ever thought to yourself, “If I had the confidence, I would be a better Product Manager?”

Me too.

In fact, this topic comes up often when I coach other product managers.

Without confidence, we can fail to achieve our potential as a Product Manager

“So far nothing we’ve found correlates with high performance scores across the board more than confidence.”

Brendon Burchard, High Performance Habits

Less confidence, less achievement

When you lack confidence, you lower your ambitions.

When you lack confidence, you express yourself less. You don’t bring your full self to work; just a limited version of yourself, custom-tailored to fit in with other people at work.

When you lack confidence, you get defensive easily. You don’t take feedback well, because any criticism of your actions amounts to a criticism of you.You think it’s you vs. the world.

When you lack confidence, you rush through things. You don’t take time to reframe the problem. You feel like you need to get to answer fast, because that is how you are adding value as a Product Manager.

When you lack confidence, you think short term. And you act short term. You prioritize shorter, project management type tasks because those give you a return quickly. You fail to adequately prioritize customer research, especially in an organization that has typically not done enough of it.

When you lack confidence, you don’t determine your own schedule. You let the job run you, rather than you running the job. You attend all meetings because showing that you add value is more important than actually adding value.

When you lack confidence, you don’t pitch big ideas. You prefer to go with safety and with the flow. You know — at a deep level — that you have good ideas, but you don’t fight from them hard enough.

When you don’t have confidence, you stop pushing for what you know to be right at the first sign of resistance.

Manufacturing confidence

First I want to break a belief that you might have.

That you “have confidence.”

Nobody has confidence.

You can and should manufacture confidence on a regular basis.

I was always have known to have confidence. Until I lost it.

At some point in my career, I went through ups and downs. My performance was lackluster. My attitude sucked. My confidence was down in the dumps. I was unhappy and miserable.

But slowly, I realized I could generate confidence with one thing: momentum.

Momentum generates confidence

See, it’s easy to just wait for things to happen. But when you make them happen, that’s when the magic starts. Even on tiny step forwards starts to create the momentum. And that momentum leads to more confidence.

What creates momentum? Movement. When you take action and put things out into the world, stuff happens. Eventually, there are results. The more you move, and the quicker you move, the more results you get. When you get results, it leads to inspiration and motivation, which then leads back to momentum.

Jesse Tevelow, Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion

There are many ways to generate momentum as a Product Manager. But it starts with setting the right goals.

The three types of goals

Most people take a narrow definition of goals. Consider goals of three types:

1. Mission and ambitions
2. Achievement goals
3. Presence goals

Mission and ambition

What’s your mission? What change do you want to drive in the world? What are you excited by? What gives you joy and fulfillment?

Having a solid mission is critical to confidence because when you are clear on your mission, you know what you can let go. You get a clear rubric to measure what you should focus on and what you should let go. And you lose the fear of missing out.

You start to align your actions. And this alignment gives you confidence.

I don’t believe you need to have a single ambition for the rest of your life. In this day and age where we change jobs faster than we change fashion trends, I believe even a three to five year goal for your career is enough.

But it has to be something you are excited for.

Optimize for excitement. Everything else will fall in place.

Achievement goals

The second type of goals are achievement goals. Let me ask you:

1. What are your goals for this month? For this week? For this day?
2. Have you broken them down into must do, should do, and could do?
3. Have you connected your ambition and purpose to your goals?
4. How many of your goals do you actually achieve every month? Every week?

So many product managers don’t either set up big enough goals. Or they setup goals that are completely unrealistic.

As the book Smarter Faster Better tells us, “Remind yourself of long-term goals to stay motivated. But also have SMART goals that help you get work done on a consistent basis”

Motivation generates momentum, which generates confidence.

Being goals

The last, but often must overlooked category of goals is “being goals.”

The first kind of being goal is how do you want to show up in any situation.

The first Product Management practice I work on with my students is Powerful Presence. The most crucial part of the practice is setting moment to moment goals of how you want to show up to a particular situation.

The more you practice this, the more you begin to realize that you can literally change yourself with your thoughts.

Try this. For the next meeting you go to, write down the three words that describe your best self in that situation. Read those words at least three times during the meeting.

Then reflect how that changes you.

The magic of being goals is often lost on most of us. In a world where we Product Managers run from meeting to meeting, juggling ten things at once, with no time for rest or rejuvenation, meetings goals often get lost.

The more you can set being goals, the more you can make sure that one bad meeting, email or interaction will not cause your confidence to wither.

How you show up is a choice.

The second being goal is about how you want you perceive others.

The core practice that works for me is giving my coworkers an A.

If you automatically assume the best and give everyone an A in life, then you let the best come out in them and you remove a lot of the barriers that have been the relationship back. (From the Art of Possibility)

The more you give your co-workers, your customers, your boss an A, the confidence you get. Because then you stop worrying about your co-workers intentions, you lose the “Me vs. World” attitude, and you just focus on building the best possible products

Time to try these practices

My challenge to you is to try these practices out. In a notebook, write down the answer to these questions:

1. What are my goals for the next five years?
2. What are my must-do goals for this week?
3. How do I want to show up today?
4. If I gave my co-workers an A in the next meeting, how would it look like?

You might already be doing some of these, but one can never have enough clarity.

The important thing is to keep reminding ourselves of these things on an ongoing basis. What we pay attention to changes us.

Before you go

If you liked the blog post, you would love my free workshop, “5 Steps our Product Manager Clients Take to Land Their Dream Job, Increase Their Salary by 200%+, and Accelerate Their Career.” Go ahead, enroll now!

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