Date: 6/5/2022
Self doubt. You have it, I have it, we all have it*
Managing a product, department, company, etc. includes many many decisions. Me? I struggle with choosing where to eat with my friends, so you can imagine how tough it is to choose whether we should pursue feature X over feature Y or investigating issue Z.
Self doubt likes to creep in whenever meaningful decisions come around, making me question whether or not the decision I’m making is a good decision or it just seems like a good decision to me. To me, most indecision comes from feel of failure and risk aversion—sometimes reminding myself of that helps me take the leap and trust my judgement—but it also comes from knowing how much I don’t know and knowing how inexperienced I am compared to other decision makers I look up to.
As somebody who has a tough time with trusting myself in a professional setting, I’ve had to develop a strategy for overcoming this decision paralysis. Here’s two examples of self doubt that sometimes make it hard for me to be decisive when managing my product.. and how I try to mitigate them
X can be a bunch of things—project/task management strategy, adding another meeting, deciding on a certain structure of handoff between product designer and developer, you name it.
There are thousands of PM who were once new to managing a product. They can certainly look back on their early career and pick out a few things that they wouldn’t re-do.. and I imagine a lot of those are typical for green PMs.
Mitigation
The short of it: Consult trusted colleagues, and if the most likely non-ideal outcome is not severe, make a decision and just ensure you have a proper feedback loop set up
Oftentimes you’re going to be in very different shoes (figurative obviously) than the market you’re trying to reach. This makes it extra hard to trust that your version of the value proposition and the vision is correct to set the product up for success.
I wrote a bit about this in my first PM post, highlighting the difficulty of understanding the market. It’s very hard. But what I’ve done to try and keep this from crippling me is balancing customers’ pain points and the products strengths
Mitigation:
The short of it: Find your products strengths, and identify the market’s problems that it solves. There’s your value proposition.
I like to think that at some point with more management experience I’ll begin trusting my decisions more, but in the mean time, avoiding decision paralysis and self doubt requires a lot of validation work.
Validation of roadmap decisions, vision and value messaging, and all other management tasks requires collecting data and feedback:
And last but not least, I go back to some advice that my grandfather gave me in high school, “Making the worse decision is better than making no decision at all.”2 If the worst outcome of a decision is inconsequential—make the decision and pivot later if necessary.
1 Of course not everybody has self doubt but you know what I mean 2 There are plenty of exceptions to this, but again, you know what I mean