How great product managers earn trust and build things people love

Executive overview

Most teams don't hate product managers — they hate the incompetent ones they've encountered. The PM's job is to know customers, data, and business better than anyone else, and that competence is what earns the right to make decisions.

Christian Idiodi (SVPG partner) shares a framework built around three compounding ideas: earn trust through deep learning, validate products through real reference customers, and develop leaders before you promote them.

The certificate of appreciation: you solve a problem so well on someone else's behalf that they give you something in return — revenue, loyalty, a referral.

Why PMs get disliked and how to fix it

• Teams lack trust when PMs can't demonstrate deeper knowledge of customers, data, or the business than anyone else on the team
• The four product risks are: value (will people buy/use it?), usability (can they use it?), feasibility (can we build it?), viability (does it work for our business?)
• PMs own value and viability; the whole team owns the other two
• Value is the most important and most overlooked risk — roadmap-driven teams skip it entirely
• Just because users can use something doesn't mean they will choose it, buy it, or keep using it

How to build trust and accelerate learning

• Find the loudest, most influential person in the organisation and ask them to teach you
• Alternatively, volunteer to help them — you extend their trust to yourself and learn what drives their influence
• Ask your manager to let you shadow that person; being seen learning from the best signals seriousness to everyone
• Once you have their knowledge, keep doing discovery — people trust whoever has the most current insight
• The two moves: "teach me" or "let me help you" — both build relationship and competence simultaneously

Reference customers: the one discovery method that matters most

• A reference customer is someone who loves your product enough to put their reputation on the line by recommending it
• For B2B, target 6–8 reference customers; for B2C, target 15–25
• If you can't find enough people with the problem, it may not be a problem worth solving
• Immerse yourself with people who have the problem and don't leave until you've solved it — "pressure-cooked discovery"
• All reference customers must want the same core thing; if one person wants something unique, don't build it
• References do double duty: they validate product-market fit and seed word-of-mouth for sales
• Marketing language should come directly from what reference customers say, not from internal assumptions
• Launching with 25 five-star references on day one removes guesswork about whether the product is ready

The Snagajob story: doing things that don't scale

• Problem: Starbucks needed to hire ~800 workers fast after an acquisition revealed undocumented employees
• Team drove around, talked to a McDonald's construction manager and a Macy's manager — confirmed the problem was widespread
• Manually recruited and shepherded candidates to interviews, measuring show-up and hire rates without any software
• Iterated week over week on sourcing channels and reminder tactics; Starbucks hired 784 people in one week
• Only after proving the manual process worked did the team build technology — the product launched and booked $32M in its first 90 days
• The key insight: there is nothing better for learning how to solve a problem than actually trying to solve the problem

Coaching: the day job of managers

• Doing product management is the PM's job; getting better at it is the manager's job
• Most managers coach poorly because they've never experienced good coaching themselves
• The fastest way to extend trust to a new hire: introduce them to the most influential person and have that person spend a week with them
• The influential person will defend the new hire's development because it reflects on their own reputation as a teacher
• Create practice arenas — volunteer work, nonprofits, community groups — anywhere with collaborative problem-solving at low stakes
• Reps matter: you learn product by watching it done well, then doing it, then teaching it

Promotions and the competence trap

• Most promotions put people into a role they've never practiced, then expect them to perform without coaching
• The origin story of micromanagement: a great engineer gets promoted to manager, doesn't know how to develop others, solves problems directly instead
• Don't wait until someone is promoted to teach them the new role — let them practice it first, give feedback while mistakes are cheap
• "Go be a director" — act in the role before you hold the title; that's also the fastest path to getting the title
• The moment someone holds a senior title, their mistakes carry full leverage; before it, they get coaching and cover

Building product in Africa

• Many solved problems in North America and Europe are unsolved in African markets — don't assume solutions have spread
• Innovate Africa Foundation focuses on education and technology enablement across the continent
• The 2023 Inspire Africa Conference drew 1,000 attendees from 31 countries
• Core challenge: infrastructure gaps (power, connectivity) must be solved before the product problem can even be addressed
• Innovate Africa Fund (launching 2024) is an angel fund from the product community to help African startups reach product-market fit before taking institutional money