Signaling Decisiveness

As a product leader, you’re often navigating a space where formal authority doesn’t exist. Your influence is built through relationships and the respect you earn from your team, stakeholders, and peers. In this dynamic, how you carry yourself—what Sylvia Ann Hewlett describes as "gravitas" in Executive Presence 2.0—plays a significant role in how others perceive and respond to you.

Hewlett breaks gravitas into four essential components:

1. Projecting intellectual horsepower.

2. Displaying confidence and credibility.

3. Signaling decisiveness.

4. Maintaining grace under fire.

I’ve explored the topic of projecting intellect and expertise before, but we’ll focus on a less-discussed aspect of executive presence: decisiveness.

Decisiveness in Product Management

As product managers, we make decisions daily—about priorities, feature trade-offs, user experiments, and future research. These decisions shape the product’s trajectory and, in turn, the success of the business. To confidently communicate these choices to stakeholders, we must have self-assurance not only in our judgment but also in our ability to make those decisions quickly and effectively.

We’ve all experienced the pitfalls of indecision. When we delay making a choice, the situation often forces a default outcome upon us—typically not the one we’d have chosen. Avoiding this requires mastering the ability to make swift, informed decisions.

Gaining Confidence Through Information

One key to fast, confident decision-making is having access to trusted information that you can quickly digest and apply. Everyone processes information differently, so finding your ideal method for gathering insights is critical.

Some ways to gather the necessary information to confidently decide your product’s next steps:

1. Qualitative User Feedback – Mine your existing user feedback or lean on your UX team’s insights. Understanding the real-life experiences of your users is vital to making informed choices.

2. Internal or Quantitative Data – Build a strong intuition around user behavior by analyzing the numbers. Metrics often reveal truths that anecdotes can’t.

3. Experience with the Product – Use your own product like a customer would. Understanding the user experience firsthand gives you an invaluable perspective.

4. External Market Trends – Keep an eye on competitors, industry shifts, and broader consumer patterns. This will help you predict what’s coming and position your product accordingly.

5. Financial Modeling – Work with your finance or business partners to evaluate how various decisions might impact the bottom line. Long-term success often hinges on understanding the financial ripple effects of today’s choices.

6. Prototyping – Create mockups, sandboxes, or prototypes. Experimenting with different solutions can help you see how they perform in practice and make more informed choices.

While it’s impossible to cover all of these areas for every decision, pulling information from a few can lead to a decision that’s "good enough" to move forward.

The Role of Intuition and Circumstance

Of course, decision-making isn’t purely an intellectual exercise. As product managers, we juggle competing priorities, unpredictable constraints, stakeholder politics, and shifting business goals. Sometimes, our choices are influenced by factors beyond the data—like gut feeling or external pressures.

Even so, when you’re grounded in reliable information, you can navigate those complex variables with greater confidence. Decisiveness becomes less about bold assertions and more about informed, thoughtful action.

Leading with Influence, Not Authority

At the core of product management is the need to lead through influence. You don’t have the luxury of positional power; your authority comes from the expertise and trust you cultivate. Decisiveness is a key part of that influence. When your team and stakeholders see you making informed, timely decisions, it builds confidence in your leadership.

---

STAND-UP EXERCISE

Discuss with your team how they typically make decisions, or how they might feel forced to make decisions. Of the methods discussed above, which ones are applicable to their learning style, the product, and the business. What other ways might they collect information to make better informed and quicker decisions?

Bonus: Learn about the framework of one-way door and two-way door decisions. Jeff Bezos explains the philosophy in this video.

Projecting Expertise

In Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s book Executive Presence 2.0, she breaks down EP as an amalgam of qualities that true leaders exude, a presence that telegraphs you're in charge or deserve to be. Through extensive research and interviews with executives, she has determined that the largest component to EP is gravitas. Gravitas is how you act and affects much of how others perceive your intellect. The ability to project intellect is an important skill for product leaders who are looking to gain respect and cultivate influence. Most product managers have extensive expertise, but they might need some coaching or framing to be able to project that within their organization.

There are a couple ways in which product managers especially should be able to project expertise in their product, users, and objectives.

1. Know your stuff cold. You should know the salient details of your product strategy, user journey, stakeholder requirements, etc. by heart, being able to recount them fluently without much filler or stammering.

2. Be able to go 6 questions deep. Be able to answer questions at the root of the issue or topic - have the context necessary.

3. Read the room. That means tuning yourself out for a moment in order to tune in to the needs and wants of others. Then you can course correct on the spot to establish a connection. You want to make your audience comfortable so that when you speak, they hear you. You aren’t compromising your message, you are calibrating it.

Product managers very rarely lead by position, it is most often through influence, which is based on relationships and expertise. To garner the respect necessary to lead without given authority, product managers must be able to project their expertise and intellect to others in a convincing manner. That is a learned skill all product leaders should develop.

---

STAND-UP EXERCISE

Product team members may not feel like they are experts, despite their extensive knowledge on a subject. (In fact, the well-documented Dunning-Kruger effect shows a cognitive bias exists where people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities, and high performers in the domain tend to underestimate their skills.) Use a stand-up exercise to illustrate to team members that they do have expertise.

Ask team members if they feel like they are an expert in a domain. You’ll likely get a combo of yes and no’s. Then, ask each team member to write down five topics that they could speak on for 10 minutes without any advance preparation. You could have this be open to any topic, or attempt to narrow it to professional topics. This exercise is entertaining to see what topics team members generate (and a good get-to-know-you activity!) but also creates discussion on how easy/hard it was to compile the list. Do they feel like an expert in these domains? Would they be convincing to an audience speaking about these topics?