A Tuesday stand-up.

The feature is late.

Engineering shrugs.

Design isn’t sure what’s in or out.

Leadership is pinging in Teams:

“Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we — ”

And the PM?

She’s refreshing her dashboard, scanning for any kind of signal, clinging to a vague, paper-thin sense that maybe — just maybe — everything’s okay.

But she doesn’t know.

Later, over lunch in her car in the Starbucks parking lot, second cortado in hand — ordered “not too hot” so she can hammer it — she flips open her notebook and writes:

Q2 Goal: Increase confidence by 5%.

Not in the roadmap.

In herself.

The trouble with confidence is it’s hard to come by in product work (or most work for that matter). It lives in the negative space — the parts of the job no one teaches you.

Priorities shift mid-sprint.

Feedback contradicts itself.

What felt like clear signal on Tuesday becomes noise by Thursday.

And yet confidence is the currency we’re all expected to carry in abundance.

Teams want it.

Leaders demand it.

Customers rely on it.

Nobody wants to follow a maybe, a possibly, or a pretty sure.

And the product manager? They’re the one with the map. The calm in the spiral. The person who knows what the customer needs, what the team can build, and what trade-offs the business can stomach to get there.

The one who can definitively answer “what if?”

But what no one says out loud is that most product managers are just trying not to panic.

Behind every roadmap is a prioritization session that ended without clear priorities.

Behind every confident update is a Teams thread full of second-guessing.

Behind every “we’re on track” is a tab open to three tools telling three different stories.

We fake confidence because we think that’s the job.

But maybe it’s not.

Maybe the job isn’t to perform confidence.

Maybe it’s to build it.

Confidence is not certainty. This bears repeating because the two get used interchangeably.

Confidence is not certainty.

Certainty is brittle. It shuts down inquiry. It punishes doubt.

It injects answers when the real work is still unfolding.

Certainty promises the future in neat waterfall notation — and then gaslights the present when things go sideways:

“We didn’t execute well.”

“We failed to follow the plan.”

“Users just don’t get it.”

Confidence, on the other hand, is durable.

It doesn’t fear unknowns — it works with them.

Confidence says:

“We don’t know everything. But we know enough to take the next step — to keep learning.”

It doesn’t come from having the answers.

It comes from knowing how to ask why.

And how to keep asking when things get murky.

In that Tuesday stand-up, what the PM lacked wasn’t a plan.

It wasn’t information.

It was belief — a thread of coherence that tied the work, the direction, and her role into something she could trust.

So she started building it.

There was no slide deck. No framework.

Just a quiet decision to stop chasing certainty and start cultivating clarity.

She began with the team.

Every Friday, they did a gut check at Stand Up.

Not a status update. Not a KPI review.

Just two questions:

Are we clear on what we’re solving?

Can we clearly describe the next milestone?

No judgment. No fixing. Just signal.

Some weeks, the answers came easy.

Other weeks, they circled the same ambiguity a couple times and made notes for discovery. But over time, something shifted — not just in the answers, but in the questions:

“What do we need to believe for this to work?”

“What problem are we really solving here?”

“How will we know if we’re wrong?”

Slowly it began to emerge.

They weren’t chasing the illusion of certainty anymore.

They were building something else: the ability to surface the right questions — at the right time — and trust that they’d know how to answer them.

Confidence wasn’t the absence of uncertainty.

It was trust — in the team, in the method — that they could meet uncertainty with curiosity, structure, and … something else.

Resilience.

She turned the lens inward.

Not “Do I have the answer?”

But: “Do I trust myself to ask the right next question?”

She started scribbling quiet truths in the margins of her week:

“Jumping to solutions again.”

“I don’t understand. I need to ask why.”

“Unclear — but not unsolvable.”

“I’m avoiding because I don’t want to look unprepared.”

“Waiting for permission I don’t actually need.”

“Got clarity — now courage.”

These became a compass.

Not confidence in outcomes — but in her capacity to navigate toward them.

She began capturing decisions in a simple spreadsheet:

Wins. Challenges. Learnings.

A gnarly problem. Rabbit holes we followed. What shipped.

Documented.

No polish. No posturing. Just coherence.

A way to show herself where they’d been — and remind herself how they got there. How she got there.

Because the shift wasn’t in what they knew.

It was in the growing belief that they could handle not knowing.

Confidence, it turned out, was a byproduct of trust — in the process, in each other, and in their ability to drill down when “what if?” questions started flying.

Not certainty.

Capability.

The kind that compounds.

Confidence didn’t announce itself with a trumpet.

t crept in.

Stand-ups started to feel sharper — less hedging, more questions.

Teammates started saying, “I believe…” without glancing for permission.

She hadn’t removed ambiguity.

She’d made it livable. Shareable.

Something they could examine together without freaking out.

And somewhere along the way, her posture changed.

She stopped treating leadership questions like traps.

She stopped rehearsing answers and started narrating decisions.

She stopped trying to be right — and focused on being clear.

And it equaled 5%. And then some

Not a transformation. A tilt.

Just enough to walk into meetings without armor.