A product manager that I coached on her resume and product-thinking got an amazing job at Mastercard, a global payments company. It was a huge step up for her, going from product owner-style delivery work to deciding how to scale a new real-time payments offering into other markets. She was very proud and a bit nervous.

Six weeks later, she came back to me with a question that sounded less about product and more about confidence. "How do you speak up in meetings as a new employee when you don't understand half of what people are talking about?"

She was halfway through her first 90 days in a complex payments ecosystem she had never worked in, with acronyms she hadn't learned yet, and conversations moving fast around her. She wanted to project confidence and sound like she belonged. But I told her that was the wrong goal.

When PMs feel out of their depth, the instinct is to fix the feeling. Read a book about executive presence, practice power poses, tell yourself you belong in the room. But that gets it backwards because the feeling is data, a clue that points to something else. Impostor syndrome, when it shows up in a new role, is telling you something useful: you don't yet have the knowledge you need to contribute yet. You don't need a better mindset so much as better information, and information is fixable.

So I walked her through three things. Before you worry about how you sound in a meeting, go gather them for yourself.

1. Market insights. What's happening in your space? Who are the competitors? And what are customers already being told about your product? For her, this meant reading every piece of marketing material the company had published on real-time payments: the external website copy, the internal sales decks, and whatever the customers in that first market saw before they signed up. You need to know what promise is being made to the market before you can have an opinion about whether the product keeps that promise.

2. Metrics. How is success measured for your product right now. Not what you think it should be (which you can influence later), but what the team actually tracks today and what your manager reports on. You can't contribute to strategy conversations if you don't know what the scoreboard looks like.

3. Existing strategy. Not the roadmap of features, but the value prop, the differentiation, and how your product fits into the company's larger portfolio. The "why this, why now" that someone decided before you arrived. This is the information most new product managers skip. They learn the features but not the reasoning behind the features, and then they wonder why they feel like they're faking it in strategy discussions.

Gathering this by yourself doesn't work well because internal documentation is scattered or outdated and the real knowledge lives in people's heads. So I gave her a tactic. Set up 30-minute meetings, one person at a time, and ask them for advice on a topic you know they have experience with. Then let them talk for the full 30 minutes.

The trick is specificity. Don't ask "can I pick your brain?" or "can you tell me more about the product?" because nobody has time for that. Instead try something like: "I'm trying to understand how our pricing differs between batch processing and real-time clearing, and I heard you might have context on that." A narrow question, and then you listen. At the end of every one of those meetings, ask one more thing. "Who else do you think I should talk to about this [or adjacent topic]?" They give you a name, you ask them to make the introduction, and now you walk into the next conversation carrying the credibility of the person who sent you. One relationship turns into the next one, and each warm introduction makes the following meeting easier to get.

Do that steadily for a month and you'll understand the product, the market, and the politics better than most PMs who have been there a year. You'll also have built the relationships with key stakeholders before you ever need to ask anyone for support in a meeting. That's where confidence actually comes from: knowing enough to have something worth saying, instead of persuading yourself you belong.

I also gave her a challenge. Be able to demo the product by the end of three months. She didn't need to give demos as part of her job, but preparing one forces you to map the customer's workflow from start to finish. You can't demo what you don't understand, so the act of preparing becomes the learning process itself. And a good demo is NOT a tour of every feature and every page. It starts from what one customer is trying to accomplish and shows how the product gets them there, which means you need three or four versions of it for the different situations your customers are actually in. Most PMs in new roles set vague goals like "get up to speed" or "build relationships," and none of those are concrete enough to drive urgency. Demo proficiency has a deadline and a specific deliverable. Either you can walk someone through how your product solves a customer problem, or you can't.

Near the end of the session she told me she was stressed out because now she thought she had wasted the first six weeks staying quiet. "Good," I said. Use that stress to learn as much as you can in the next six weeks. The PMs who struggle in new roles are the ones who get shy about not knowing things, so they try to figure it out alone, take too long to learn, and by the time they're ready to contribute, the window for making an impression has closed. The first 90 days of a new PM role are the most forgiving stretch you'll get. People expect you to be learning and you have permission to ask "dumb" questions, so use that window while you have it.

Be voracious in your learning, and later, people will give you the floor to speak because they know you've done your homework.

Competence before Confidence.

-Brennan

P.S. That concept is the first thing I teach in my course, The Influential PM. If you're in a new role or preparing for one, that's where to start.

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