Personal Development and Imposter Syndrome
Symptoms of imposter syndrome can take many different forms. However, the anxiety of not being good enough can often be a force for good, motivating us to learn, self reflect and reduce bias. Other-times though, it can be crippling. Workplaces typically aren’t set up to help you get to grips with this either.
It’s pretty unlikely you had a strong onboarding experience which clearly defined your role. Managers and peers typically don’t provide actionable feedback until it’s too late and a yearly performance review just doesn’t cut it.
On top of this, there is so much noise. What about that blog you read last week? Should you be using the latest framework? What about a former colleage that just got a promotion. How do you compare?
Somehow it is your job to know what you need to listen to, what to ignore and where to ask for help. It’s a minefield.
I know what helped me; coaching. Having someone in your corner, who is experienced and willing to put effort in is only going to increase your chances of success. If you are fortunate enough, they might even be your manager. But all too often this isn’t the case.
So why don’t we all have coaches? Because they are expensive! *
However, you can still reap some of the benefits of coaching by doing it yourself! But be warned, it is still hard work! You will need a strong desire for personal development and deeply care about your career for this technique to work. See — self management.
1. List the things you need to be good at
Start by listing all the technical skills and people skills that you need to do the job. This will be a long list. To do this:
- First, map out the work from start to finish. For a PM, that might be anything from interviewing customers to writing documentation. But map it all out, a whiteboard is fine!
- Attach the skills to that work that you need to achieve that work. Written communication, qualitative research, interviewing techniques, empathy, self awareness etc.
- Sense check this with literature, training, workshops, managers and peers. For example Teresa writes specifically about the pitfalls of customer interviews. Add these skills to your map.
2. De-duplicate and group the skills
Trying to be completely exhaustive at this point is a poor use of your time. You could spend years trying to get this perfect. The list only needs to be good enough for you to move on. You can always revisit later.
Let’s say you need to be good at helping others understand. Take helping developers understand business problems and helping stakeholders understand technology issues. These are not 2 different skills sets. You likely need to be empathetic and competent at using analogies; you might group these skills under ‘People’, for example. Which is exactly how Marty laid out the framework in Empowered. Here’s an example.
Don’t try an add every technique required under each of these groups. Know there are many, and probably many more that you don’t even know about. We will get to that bit later (see step 6).
3. Translate these skills for others
Terms like ‘Product Evangelism’ and ‘Discovery’, will only mean something to you. It’s a dangerous assumption to think that other people have done as much reading/reflection on your career as you have!
It would be hard, if not impossible, for peers and managers to rate your skills in ‘discovery’. Unless of course they are a strong product coach already. So that is why I love Petra’s PM wheel. ‘Understanding the problem’ is a much better term for others to assess you on.
Getting to this point alone will make performance reviews and personal development plans much more useful. It will also help everyone speak the same language.
4. Get input from others
Rate yourself and ask for feedback. It will help highlight gaps and reduce bias in your thinking. Be careful who you ask because the results can be pretty noisy. Notice in the example how it turns out I’m better at planning than I thought I was. This really starts to keep that imposter syndrome at bay!
5. Learn from others
Ok. Hard work up to this point, right? Keep the process as light weight as possible. It’s better to be quick rather than exhaustive, because next up is the important bit.
Learning from others.
- Find someone who is better at this than you. They don’t have to be an expert, but better so that you can learn from them.
- Watch them do the task. You will want to see them do the task at least 6–12 times depending on how complicated it is. Ideally map this out; I use process mapping, but bullet points, or drawings would be as good, if not better. Here is an example from Teresa Torres on what is involved in ‘Understanding the problem’.
- Highlight leading indicators of success. What are the common features that lead to success? What don’t you do? For me, when I was working on understanding the problem it came down to one single thing: “Speak to customers at least once a week”.
A quick note on learning from others. This is probably the most accessible option to you. But, you might not be able to find someone you can learn from. This is when formal training, or great content can be extremely useful. When I was in a product department of one and working on this problem, I bought the continuous discovery habits book.
6. Mapping it out (SMART goals)
I hate ‘SMART’ goals. I can never remember what the acronym stands for. And every year I have written some for performance reviews only to forget them until it’s a year later.
But if you have followed the process above, you now have a “SMART” goal. In my case, last year it was Speak to customers at least once a week. But that doesn’t actually tell you how to do it. So now for more mapping!
Using the same list from step one, organise all the things that you need to do to be good in the task. Add to this all the things that stop you from achieving your goal. Themes begin to arrive like:
- I don’t learn enough from customer interviews. ⇒ I don’t know how to interview customers ?
- It’s too hard to maintain a pipelines of customer interviews. ⇒ How do I organise customer recruitment?
- Notes are rarely helpful and take up too much time. ⇒ What am I missing in note taking?
You now have specific questions to ask people. You can go to the person you shadowed and ask them how they manage to organise so many interviews. You’ll get a much clearer answer, and hopefully a broader learning group. Now it might make sense to ask the people team how they do this process with new candidates!
7. Anti-patterns
There are two anti-patterns that I made the mistake of doing earlier on in this process.
- Don’t ask others what it takes to be good at ‘X’. Chances are they have been doing this for years and it is instinctive. They are ‘unconsciously competent’, and won’t give you a helpful answer. Even if they want to.
- Don’t ask what the hardest part is for them. It won’t be relevant. They will likely give you a personal answer, that they themselves are working on. But this is unlikely to be the bottleneck for you.
That’s it, what did you think? Steps 1–4 should help you avoid imposter syndrom and provide focus. Steps 5–7 helped me improve at my day job! Want to skip this, and learn faster? Find a coach.
8. Find a coach
*Looking for coaching? Coaches are excellent. If you can afford to get a coach or apply for a coaching scholarship then please stop reading and go and seek expert advice; I promise you won’t regret it. I have been incredibly lucky enough to have been coached by product leaders and great past managers.
- I’m looking to take on the next cohort of 3 junior product managers. If you are interested — apply here. NB it is free!
- More senior and want to get product management coaching? I would thoroughly recommend Petra Wille.
Hiring?
- I’m looking for my next role in product management with coaching responsibilities. If you are looking for someone, please get in touch.