Building Trust In Product Management

Demonstrating value in product management is part of the profession. No wonder that in a recent survey 76% of product professionals told us that they often or always feel the pressure to clearly show the value of product work and justify product investment to leadership. But what happens when you actually are delivering clear value, but no one is listening? Well, then you might have a different problem than showing value. You may have a problem with trust.

Building trust in product management goes beyond delivering value and requires a deeper understanding of organisational and interpersonal context. This is because trust is not just about numbers on a spreadsheet, but about human elements like reputation and perception.

When product teams have the trust of leaders and stakeholders, they can move faster and do more. However, when trust is not there, often product teams fall into the cycle of ‘proving value’ without acknowledging the more human elements of trust. So, what does building trust in product management look like, and why might it not be there in the first place?

Trust Has Two Sides

The first thing to note is that trust is by definition about relationships – so there are two sides to trust:

1. The Trustee – the person or team who is asking for trust (i.e., you / the product team)
2. The Trustor – the person or team who is giving trust (i.e., your stakeholders / leadership team)

A trusting relationship requires something on both sides of this relationship. On the trustee’s side, it requires competence in the work to be done, reliability, predictability, transparency, performance and reputation. On the trustor’s side it requires engagement and awareness of the work being done, openness to trust and relevant prior experience (i.e., we are more likely to trust someone who has helped us before or at least not let us down). Trust can break down if either side of this relationship doesn’t hold up their end.

Moreover, trust is impacted by interpersonal difficulties like miss-matches in personality and communication style; as well as organisational elements like culture. This is why adaptive capabilities in product professionals are so important. They allow you to adapt your personal style through skills like communication tailoring to better suit the conditions of the stakeholder or organisation.

Now this is not to say that all elements of trust are in our control. A product team is highly unlikely to change the culture of a low trust organisation for instance. However it may help us to ask; is the lack of trust and pressure I am feeling to prove my work personal to me or general to my team / profession / organisation?

Depending on the answer, your next steps will be slightly different:

• General distrust: Understand why the stakeholder / team holds this opinion / stereotype of your team. Is it because of their history in the organisation with the product team (or lack of history)? Is it a feeling that your goals are unaligned with theirs? Is the organisation pitting your team against theirs (e.g., for budget)?
• Personal distrust: Understand why the stakeholder / team holds this opinion of you. What is your reputation with this person / team? Do you have a history with this person / team – if not, how can you create some wins? If you have had poor interactions, how can you build better ones going forward?

More often than not, trust issues are general, but if there are personal trust issues, you may need to work on your reputation – or even build one in the first place. It is hard to ask for trust if there is no historical reputation to rely on – this means both a product team and personal reputation. Building trust takes time and consistency, so it is best to look at investing in each relationship intentionally and perhaps one (or a few) at a time.

Where To Start Building Trust

Just like good product practice, we can look at iterating on our trusted relationships and building our reputation one step at a time. As an experiment, choose one relationship (personal or team) that would make your work easier if you had trust. Start by understanding the interpersonal and organisational context:

1. Understand them – what are their goals, what pressures are they under, what historical context do they have with you / your team that may impact trust.
2. Look for win-win situations – what opportunities do you have to collaborate to achieve both your / your team goals and their / their team goals – ideally looking for quick wins.
3. Execute – remember that reliability, predictability, transparency and performance are essential to building trust. This means being transparent about when you can’t do something as well as when you can and openly making plans to get back on track and fulfill your end of the bargain.

Finally, remember trust is two-way. If they don’t hold up their end of the bargain, they may not be trustworthy themselves. But before making that judgement, try to understand the context – did you choose the right win to work on together? Was it within their capability? Remember – you are both trustee and trustor (two way), so your openness to trust matters too.

This may sound like a lot of effort, but it ultimately forms the basis of a highly trusted and respected product management team. Trust builds trust and as the product team’s reputation grows one relationship at a time, it will reinforce the perspective that product is a highly valuable function that can be trusted with business investment. This doesn’t mean you can stop doing the most valuable work, but rather you will have an easier time doing it, because you won’t be burdened by the additional very human baggage of distrust.

Check out our State of Product Leadership research – State of Product in ANZ 2025 Research Summary