Part 1: Building Trust as a Product Manager
Applying Brené Brown's BRAVING Framework to Product Management
Building trust—with my customers, sales team, implementation team, engineering team e.t.c.—is, I think, one of my top responsibilities as a product manager.
Recently, I read a book by Brené Brown, who has the acronym BRAVING—Boundaries, Reliability, Accountability, Vault, Integrity, Non-judgement, Generosity—to describe what we need to do to create trust in relationships.
Her findings combine her personal experience with an analysis of responses from thousands of leaders, aimed at pinpointing trust-building actions.
It’s impossible to speak better than her on the subject and I recommend her book or this video excerpt. In this post, I attempt to apply her trust framework, with quotes directly from her, to the realm of product management.
This is a two-part blogpost. The first part covers boundaries, reliability, accountability and vault.
Boundaries
“Setting boundaries is making clear what’s okay and what’s not okay, and why.” I’ve always been told boundaries are healthy and it creates trust by respecting others boundaries but, till I read Brown’s work, I never realized setting boundaries also creates trust since the other person knows what to expect from me.
As a product manager, one simple example is making it clear for client services teams how to give feedback. The method always depends on the size of the company and maturity of the product, but by making it clear how to file feedback and how you’ll respond to the feedback, teams feel heard and it ensures you are receiving quality feedback from customers.
Reliability
“You do what you say you’ll do.” When I read this one, I thought about how reliability as a product manager is important as an individual but way more important when you are a spokesman for your team—like in product management.
For example, when I put out a timeline, I always try to be conservative with customers and client-facing teams to correctly set expectations. I use terms like “target” release and share any dates with a buffer.
In addition, I also try to be conservative so that my own team trusts me as their spokesperson. But it’s a balance between being conservative and motivating. I set the expectation of trying to hit 80-90% of our goals. Falling short indicates overcommitment, while consistently exceeding this range suggests our goals aren't ambitious enough.
Accountability
“Owning your mistakes and making amends.” In particular, when speaking to customers, one of the best pieces of advice I’ve received is to be honest when you don’t know an answer or make a mistake.
For instance, during a data pipeline upgrade, we missed processing a couple of files, which one customer noticed. Along with the customer’s account manager and implementation representative, I responded to their email inquiries and jumped on a call to directly receive the customer's feedback. This allowed me to acknowledge the oversight, give specific dates for delivering the missing files and start to rebuild trust with the customer.
But, there is nuance to this. Admitting a mistake to a customer is only effective if they perceive it as a mistake. Otherwise, it’s confusing and a waste of their time (and, perhaps obviously, will just make you look bad). Continuing with the same example, when we had missing files, some customers weren't impacted as they only used files from a certain date range. In these cases, we emailed them to inform them that they would be receiving larger data files the next week and provided the missing files in that week’s data delivery.
Even in the example above, I won’t pretend that I certainly did the right thing—these situations are complex, stressful and need to be dealt with quickly. Above all, I’ve found having reliable internal collaborators is crucial to make informed decisions and effectively communicating with customers.
Vault
“You don’t share information or experiences that are not yours to share” is straightforward, but there’s an important nuance: it’s not just about keeping others' secrets or them keeping yours—it's also about not sharing someone else's secret.
This reminded me of a story. A friend, an individual contributor at their company, started dating a manager at their company. When they shared the news with coworkers, their skip manager was happy for them and also advised them to not discuss their coworkers at home. I interpreted this as a strategy to maintain fairness within the organization. Reflecting on this after reading Brown’s work, I think it might have actually been more about preserving trust in their relationship.
Part two coming soon.
Good reflections.