Self-doubt is very common in the career of any product manager. It also has a scientific name: impostor syndrome.
Imitation syndrome is a sense of depression, that is, your success is not how good you are. It will convince you that you are not as smart, capable or talented as you seem. It tries to convince you that your success is due to good luck and good timing. Self-doubt day after day makes you afraid that you will be exposed as a liar one day.
0 1 impostor syndrome occurs frequently among product managers for obvious reasons.
1. Reason 1 The product manager's ability is usually developed at work, and he may not have previous experience in solving similar problems.
There is no product manager in the university, and most of the required product skills are on-the-job learning. Because product managers have a wide range of skills, no college degree can fully prepare you for the early career of product managers.
Most skills are learned on the job, which means that product managers often encounter many problems that they don't know how to solve, whether they are strategic, commercial or technical.
About 60% of product managers have less than five years of professional experience, which explains why many product managers may not be able to come up with the corresponding skills or experience to solve more complex and challenging problems quickly. This may lead some product managers to worry that others will expose and test the product copy, and motivate themselves to be liars and feel that they are not worthy of the title of product manager.
2. Reason 2 Product functional departments are often expected to solve all problems, because testing product copywriting inspires them to be responsible for the two core questions of "what" and "why".
The product function should be responsible for the strategy, vision and direction. If a product cannot generate value, stakeholders may point out that the product department is the responsible party. After all, vision, strategy and direction all come from products.
Product managers may ask themselves some common questions:
Vision: Are we on the right track and solving the right problems? Roadmap: Do we know what we need to do tomorrow and in the future? Priority: Are we focusing on the right features today? Should I stop what we are doing now to fix this recent bug? Experiment: Why? My product experiment didn't get the correct result? Is my research incorrect? Is my opinion immature? When faced with the failure of any of the above items, product managers may easily forget the fruits of previous success, leading to self-doubt and deep self-blame.
3. Reason 3 Product managers are always on the way to study, trying to solve their own skills shortage in order to reach the standards and quality levels that people think, thus feeling like a liar in the process.
Because there are so many disciplines listed in their duty list (for example, business strategy, technology, product design, data analysis and even copywriting), product managers think they need to improve themselves in one or more of these disciplines in order to become a "good" product manager.
These shortcomings make the product king work harder and don't want to be "exposed" as a liar, so he seeks further personal growth and work achievements, but in the end he reflects on why he knows nothing and feels that he is a bigger liar, so he repeats this cycle again and again.
So how can we regard impostor syndrome as an opportunity for growth?
I always believe that impostor syndrome is almost inevitable for any product manager. However, dealing with this syndrome through reflection and psychological suggestion can strengthen the most important skills of product managers in their career.
This skill is empathy.
Once you realize that your expectations are set by yourself, not by external stakeholders around you, and you can distinguish between consciousness and reality, you will make great progress in adjusting your emotions and negative thoughts. This ability to regulate emotions can even affect the feelings of stakeholders around you.
For example, you can use it to make a * * * sound.
1) Your users
Your ultimate goal is to solve the problems of your users. If you don't interact with users, you can't solve their problems, which requires you to understand their background and motivation, both of which are driven by events, consciousness and emotions.
At the same time, if you can put yourself in the user's environment by controlling your own thinking, you can have more personal experience of their needs and problems by witnessing and sympathizing with their behavioral motives, whether positive or negative.
2) Your technical team
Instead of just harassing your engineers and asking them to provide the latest status of the delay function, you can try to understand the reasons for the delay and find ways to help solve all the problems that arise. Being able to understand and understand the difficulties of engineers will bring more trust and close cooperation.
3) Your leaders and subordinates
If one of your leaders asks a question about the strategy or direction of the product you are responsible for, it is your responsibility to accept this feedback and understand the reason you think the problem is. By improving their listening and negotiating skills, they gain more trust in the executive team and provide more support and basis for the work that needs the support of the executive team in the future.
By forming stronger interpersonal relationships with your direct stakeholders, you can make more valuable communication and product results.
03 1. redundant thinking Although I mainly talk about thinking methods in this article, there are still some practical things that can be reused in daily work to reduce cognitive bias in work.
The two things I agree with most are:
1) When you have no confidence to support your decision, you can use data to strengthen your confidence, including qualitative (interview results) or quantitative (user analysis). If you can't do this, admit that you don't have an answer and declare that you have done as much analysis as possible to offset the different risks that may arise.
2) When we are in an organizational structure that expects product functional departments to have all the answers, we should create opportunities for cooperation when solving problems, so that product managers will not only be responsible for making correct decisions. Although you don't want to be a * * * knowledge manager, you can ask more questions to people around you through correct dialogue and see how they will solve the problems to get different thoughts and answers.
But to be honest, if you think you have been troubled by this syndrome for several months in a row, it may be more effective for your self-development and mental health to treat your insecurity positively.
I recommend cognitive behavioral therapy, which is a structured, short-term and cognitive-oriented psychotherapy developed by A.T.Beck in 1960s. Mainly for depression, anxiety and other psychological diseases and psychological problems caused by unreasonable cognition. Its main concern is patients' unreasonable cognition, and psychological problems can be changed by changing patients' views and attitudes towards themselves, people or things.
Cognition refers to a person's cognition and views on a thing or an object, his own views, his thoughts on people, his understanding of the environment and his views on things.
Cognitive behavioral therapy believes that people's emotions come from people's beliefs, evaluations, explanations or philosophical views on things they encounter, not from the things themselves. As A·T· Baker, the main representative of cognitive therapy, said, "Disordered behaviors and emotions all originate from disordered cognition".
For example, a person always thinks that his performance is not good enough, and even his parents don't like him. Therefore, he has no confidence, inferiority and bad mood in doing anything. The strategy of treatment is to help him rebuild his cognitive structure, reevaluate himself, rebuild his confidence in himself and change his "bad" cognition.
2. Summarize that the impostor syndrome is real. Although I don't want this psychological symptom to appear on a large scale at all, product managers in various fields who have communicated in recent years can know that this is a common "heart disease" for product practitioners. But you can turn this experience into an opportunity for self-reflection and learning.
This article was published by the official account of @ wechat: it is really not necessarily original. Everyone is a product manager. Reprinting is prohibited without permission.
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