There's a version of product management that looks like this: you read the frameworks, you learn the vocabulary, you adopt the posture of whoever the most respected PM in your organization is, and you perform competence until it becomes real.
I did this for a while. Most of us do.
The problem is that performing competence is exhausting. And it's detectable. The people you work with: engineers, designers, stakeholders, customers: can tell the difference between someone who's leading from their actual perspective and someone who's playing a role.
What Authenticity Actually Means
Authenticity in product leadership isn't about being unfiltered or oversharing. It's about leading from your actual perspective, your actual experience, and your actual values: rather than from a borrowed framework that doesn't fit how you think.
For me, that means leading from a design and human-centered background. My instinct on every product problem is to start with the human on the other side of the screen. Not the metric. Not the roadmap. Not the stakeholder request. The human.
That's not a methodology I adopted. It's how I actually think. And because it's authentic, it's consistent. People know what to expect from me. They know how I'll frame a problem, what questions I'll ask, and what I'll push back on. That consistency builds trust faster than any framework.
The Force Multiplier Effect
Here's what I've noticed: when you lead authentically, other people feel permission to do the same.
Engineers who have been waiting to raise a technical concern feel like they can. Designers who've been holding back a perspective feel like it's welcome. Stakeholders who've been performing alignment feel like they can admit uncertainty.
Authenticity is contagious. And in product work: where the best outcomes come from diverse perspectives surfaced early: that contagion is enormously valuable.
The Authentic Swing
In golf, there's a concept of the authentic swing: the swing that's natural to your body, your tempo, your mechanics. It's not the textbook swing. It's not the swing of the person next to you on the range. It's the swing that, when you stop trying to replicate someone else's, actually produces consistent results.
Product leadership works the same way. The frameworks are useful. The vocabulary matters. But the most effective version of you is the one that leads from your actual perspective, your actual strengths, and your actual way of seeing problems.
Find your authentic swing. Then trust it.
That's not a soft skill. That's a competitive advantage.
What this looked like in my work
The most authentic product decisions I've made were also the most defensible ones. When I pushed back on the conventional wisdom about front-loading value propositions at USAA, it was because the A/B test data said something different. The authentic position was: I don't know yet, let's test it. That posture, applied consistently, is what produced the delayed value reveal finding that changed the design approach across the entire funnel.
Read the full case study: Funnel Conversion and A/B Testing: USAA
