Part 2: Building Trust as a Product Manager

Applying Brené Brown's BRAVING Framework to Product Management

This is part two. If you didn’t catch part one, read it here.

As a reminder, below is my attempt to apply Brené Brown’s trust framework, BRAVING, to product management. The second part covers integrity, non-judgement, and generosity.

Integrity

“Choosing courage over comfort; choosing what’s right over what’s fun, fast, or easy; and practicing your values, not just professing them.” This brings to mind three reflections.

In this first story, I changed some of the details since I don’t want to out someone else’s story. The story starts with a liquidity event at my company, where one team had many new employees that weren’t going to get anything from the event. Their manager, empathizing with these employees, chose to redistribute some of their own equity to them. As far as I know, the employees never knew how they ended up getting equity and I only found out about it later in passing. 

My second point is an observation. Every company I’ve ever worked at has “integrity” as a value. But integrity is rarely well defined and often at least one person is rewarded for something that could be considered to be done with bad integrity. I don’t know the solution to this.

Finally, a personal experience: when I joined my previous company, it was located next to JUUL (it looked like this back then). Despite the hype around this new age tech company and being stressed out in my own job, I never considered joining them. Even though JUUL was in a nascent state, in my gut, it didn’t feel like what they were doing was right.

Non-judgment

“I can ask for what I need, and you can ask for what you need. We can talk about how we feel without judgment.” 

As a product manager, the hardest engineer to work with is not the one that works “slow”, it’s the one who never tells you if they hit a roadblock. If someone works slowly and checks in with me, I can help descope the project or proactively communicate we’re moving timelines out. If an engineer doesn’t share with me what’s going on, I can’t trust them.

Generosity

“Extending the most generous interpretation to the intentions, words, and actions of others.” I find I’m really good at this when things are calm and terrible at this when things are stressful.

Furthermore, I've noticed that remote work intensifies this challenge. With much of our communication happening via Slack and email, it's easy to misread others' messages. I try to assume best intent and lead with questions but am not always successful. Personally, I've discovered that adopting a friendly writing style requires less effort. For me, this involves incorporating more emojis, using exclamation points, and consulting ChatGPT to change tone. Having said that, I believe in being direct and maintain that it's possible to be both direct and kind.