How to: Get people to believe in product management
Building authority when everyone else has hard skills and you have... making slides
Product management can feel like a tough sell. Engineers and designers build tangible things, while we appear to mainly make tickets and run meetings. But here's the truth: product management isn't just about presentations and JIRA tickets. It's about orchestrating value creation and getting everyone to elevate their game so that they can achieve something beyond expectations.
Early in my career, I inherited a team that had been burned by previous product initiatives. Features would mysteriously vanish from roadmaps, requirements would shift without explanation, and promises would evaporate under pressure from leadership. The result? A deeply skeptical group that viewed product management as an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy.
Sound familiar? Many PMs face similar challenges. The key to overcoming this skepticism lies not in defending the role's existence but in demonstrating its value through consistent, principled action. Here's how to do it.
The 7 Principles of Building Product Management Authority
1. Build Trust Through Predictability
The foundation of product management authority isn't about being liked - it's about being trusted. I learned this lesson the hard way, having spent my first years oscillating between trying to be everyone's friend and clinical detachment. Neither worked. What did work was establishing a consistent, predictable approach to:
Decision-making: Using clear frameworks that teams could understand and anticipate allowed teams to predict where I’d stand and adjust accordingly.
Communication: Maintaining transparency about what's changing and why and updating teams regularly helped teams focus on their work.
Commitment management: Following through on promises, no matter how small, even when the cost to me was high, gave teams faith in my word and its weight.
I found that when teams can predict your behavior and methods, they become easier to work with. This predictability removes ambiguity and builds trust, which evolves into respect. Teams quickly lose respect for managers whose actions seem arbitrary - they'll always prefer someone predictable over someone unpredictable, even if they disagree more often with the predictable one.
2. Master the Art of Collaboration
Product management isn't about being the smartest person in the room - it's about orchestrating collective intelligence. The faster you develop your ability to get people to work together effectively, the faster the team will understand the value of product management. Here's what effective collaborative leadership looks like in practice:
There are forums for input about projects and decisions and those forums feel appropriate and heard
Discussions feel free-flowing and shared across many team members as opposed to dictated by the PM
Team members understand and trust specific individuals to navigate challenges within their domain and communicate their processes with the team
There is a strong sense of accountability across the team without fear of repercussion or blame
Every team member should have input on product value; the key is finding the structure and moments to make that collaboration happen. An effective PM will quickly show their value through their ability to make teams work better together.
3. Demonstrate Unwavering Resilience
For teams to believe in product management, they need to see that our principles hold up under pressure. If product management betrays its principles at the first encounter with friction, then it will fail to inspire trust in the team. Withstanding pressure generally means:
Maintaining consistent processes even when facing setbacks
Using failures as learning opportunities rather than excuses
Pushing through organizational resistance with principled persistence
Showing that setbacks strengthen rather than weaken our approach
When teams see that you remain steady and focused on improvement regardless of circumstances, they begin to trust that they can adapt to your leadership style and methodology.
When teams believe their PM will not waver and will keep pushing to improve things, they will accept that reality and adapt to it. By being unrelenting, you’re sending a message to your team that they can safely adjust to you and that they can trust that you will be consistent regardless of what comes your way.
4. Champion the Long-term Vision
One of product management's most valuable contributions is maintaining focus on the bigger picture. In a detail-oriented environment, having an individual who can broaden the perspective is often very helpful in improving team performance. This is something technical teams often realize and seek out. Specifically, owning and articulating your product’s vision impacts the team in different ways:
It provides context for decisions and trade-offs
Teams are motivated by understanding their work's impact
It creates a shared sense of direction
It helps teams understand the "why" behind decisions
It empowers teams to filter and debate decisions through a shared lense
Most individuals have a strong inner desire to be part of something bigger than themselves. When teams believe their mission is worthy, they will find ways to elevate themselves to meet their goals.
At its best, product management is about getting people to see the potential in something and believing they can meet it together. By providing this value to your team, you will indirectly illustrate to the team that product management brings an important intangible variable to the work, and they will value it more as a a result.
5. Develop Craft Knowledge
Nothing undermines PM credibility faster than strong opinions paired with shallow understanding. While having opinions is core to the role, speaking confidently without understanding fundamentals undermines credibility.
You're often working with people whose entire career focuses on their craft - they need to see you value and respect it to accept your input as valid. Here there are several ways to get better:
Invest time in understanding technical fundamentals through courses, books, projects
Learn continuously from team members' expertise by proactively asking questions, especially when you feel those questions are dumb
Seek to participate in projects that challenge your technical knowledge in new ways
The key here is that you accept that the subject matter you work with is a world in itself and that you have a commitment to being knowledgeable about that world and respecting it for what it is. Your world can be software, hardware, or anything else. The key is that you commit yourself to becoming someone who understands the inner workings of that world and is constantly trying to build a better understanding of how they can be better at the creating process.
6. Deliver Measurable Results
Product management ultimately depends on results. To believe in it, teams need to see tangible, differentiated value from your approach. When teams win, ideas become easy to implement and buy into; when teams struggle to produce value, teams start isolating and fighting against their structure.
There are many, many ways to get better at delivering results (many of my past articles address this problem directly). However, there are some easy strategies you can pursue to highlight how practices are tied to results:
Implement value forecasting and project retrospectives to identify how/if practices are leading to more consistent value delivery
Show your team how proper project scoring leads to better prioritization and decision-making through examples and work sessions
Connect product management practices to concrete results in tangible ways through stories and scenarios
Remember: you're a business person first, equipped with tools and perspective to drive value creation through collaborative leadership. Your actions and, most importantly, your results will determine whether others see product management as essential or expendable. By making product management practices well understood and tying those practices to tangible results, you can help build a shared belief in the value of your role.
7. Become a Product Evangelist
Effective product management requires more than process expertise - it demands genuine belief in your product's potential impact. Being a hardcore fan of your product helps teams become bigger fans of you. This is because authentic passion for your product:
Reveals to the team that you care about what is being built and that you will care for the work they do
Inspires teams to push beyond immediate obstacles and, in doing so, builds a connection with the team
Creates emotional investment in outcomes, which often fuels creativity and innovation
Builds resilience during challenging periods and creates a “we’re in this together” mindset
The industry has many mercenary PMs - those motivated primarily by compensation and advancement. Truly effective product leadership requires being an evangelist who can inspire others even when sacrifices are needed. Your genuine belief in your product's impact and approach to building it can spark similar dedication in others.
Authenticity matters here; if teams believe in your commitment and passion, they will be infected by it and carry it on. Passion is a fuel source for creativity and collaboration, and that fuel will open the team up to product management practices as they will relate these to a desire to make better things.
Parting thoughts:
Building belief in product management isn't a one-time achievement. It's built and rebuilt through daily actions, decisions, and interactions. Teams may be initially skeptical of product management, but consistent application of these principles can transform that skepticism into trust and eventually into belief.
I've found that organizations don't really change their mind about product management through theoretical arguments. They change their mind through experiencing effective product management in action. Each time you demonstrate trustworthiness, show deep craft knowledge, and maintain long-term vision while delivering near-term results, you're not just doing your job - you're showing what product management at its best can be.
The future of product management isn't determined by industry trends or thought leaders, It's determined by how we practice it every day. Focus on embodying these principles consistently, and the value of product management will become self-evident to your organization.