How to deploy your product superpower (even when it feels impossible)

Why you can and should lean on your strengths when you’re surrounded by your own personal kryptonite

Product is an amorphous and ever-changing discipline that spans an astounding array of business areas. While this quality is what draws a lot of us to Product, I always marvel at how different the day-to-day reality of product roles can be, varying wildly from role to role and even within the same role. You might be talking to users, analysing data, framing the vision and objectives for your product, or aligning on how the experience you want can be achieved technically, or maybe doing some or even all of those on the same day.

With such a breadth of skills that you could be developing, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and fixate on the bits that don’t come so easily to you. However, research shows that building on strengths is a much more effective way to enhance performance than trying to improve weaknesses. It’s also good for companies, as it encourages intellectual diversity and makes teams more productive and better able to manage risk.

If you’re not a confident person to begin with, though, you may discount the value of what you do well. While you might feel secure in your strengths, sometimes those strengths don’t feel as though they are enough, or that they are not the right thing to be bringing to a particular situation. When that happens, it can feel as though you aren’t good enough, because doubling down on those strengths seems about as appropriate as sharing a talent for beatboxing or bending spoons.

When you don’t feel that you are enough

I felt this way recently when I started in the middle of a project in a broad, well-established field that was new to me. Although I was positioned as an expert, I felt like a complete fraud.

Things got easier when I started working with a senior colleague in a complementary discipline, who had worked on many similar initiatives. Early on I shared my concerns that I might not be the right person and that I feared my previous experience wasn’t relevant. She asked me what I was good at and, to my surprise, told me that my skills were exactly what was needed.

As we started working together, I noticed two things: that the work I was doing was now having a much greater impact, and that the actual substance of what I was doing was only slightly different than before.

Where previously I had worked with individual business areas to map out priority journeys, now I pulled the focus back to take an end-to-end view of journeys that mapped to a specific business outcome, highlighted barriers to implementation, and brought senior stakeholders more fully into the conversation. I now presented a holistic view of how the team would make an impact, identifying specific areas that could be built more quickly.

However, the biggest difference was how I felt about the work. I had been looking at work that my predecessor had done and trying to figure out what was “normal” for this field, terrified that I’d be exposed as imposter. When I switched to mapping journeys in a way that made sense to me and leaning into my experience improving conversion on service journeys, I became more enthusiastic and authoritative.

Positioning your strengths for impact

I started reflecting on what I could do differently if I ever found myself in a similar situation. Although I’d thought I needed to completely transform who I was, when I instead gained the right leverage for what I could already do well, I was able to make better and faster progress. I thought about the questions that I could ask myself at the start of a piece of work that would enable me to position my specific skills and experience in a way that would give maximum benefit.

I’m sharing the structure I created as a downloadable agent skill, product-superpower-unlock, which walks you through the process of creating a Product Superpower Canvas. For token efficiency, this is a manually-invoked skill; install it and call it by name at the start of a project to quickly pin down your strengths (either by sharing existing assets or by answering a few questions) and plan how you can apply what you do best to maximum effect. I’m really keen to keep evolving this skill, so please let me know what you think.

Here I’ll walk through how I’ve retrospectively used this structure to analyse the situation I was in.

What does this situation need?

The project I had come into had been running for some time and was at a point where activity needed to be refocussed to ensure we were realising optimal value. The technical challenges meant that the most impactful work was getting stuck during implementation, and previous releases had not delivered on outcomes because the scope had had to be drastically pared back.

However, the perception of the stakeholders was that we just needed to be moving faster with the refinement and delivery of work. With stakeholder frustration running high, conversations about prioritisation weren’t landing very well, perhaps because they were received as a means of doing less rather than a focussing of energy to achieve more.

What we needed was to break through this impasse and find a way to quickly demonstrate real business value.

What can I, specifically, offer here that could be valuable?

I really care about what people who use the products I work on need and creating a great experience for them. While I’m ultimately responsible for the high-level business impact for the journeys I create, understanding how the detail of what’s happening ladders up to that is what brings everything to life for me.

I had several senior stakeholders who were also detail-oriented, so bringing specific examples to them was helpful, and my experience building account journeys and improving conversion allowed me to speak from a position of expertise.

How might I address any gaps I anticipate struggling to cover?

It’s worth considering the nature of any gaps you identify and making sure that you are aligned with your team and line manager on whether this is a genuine skills gap or if you are struggling due to other things that are missing from the project.

While I was very glad to be able to draw from my colleague’s experience when she arrived, I wondered what I would do differently if I found myself in a similar situation but now with the benefit of having learned from this experience.

Although the established nature of the field we were working in was what made it intimidating to me, it also ensured the presence of a broad knowledge base that has long been available in the public domain and which has since been incorporated into LLM training. In hindsight, I might have been able to get more value from AI tools to formulate a basic industry-standard approach, while focussing conversations with the tech subject matter experts on how to elevate that into something exceptional.

What’s the most powerful way I can harness my energy here?

Looking back, the intimidation I felt about working in a new area made it difficult for me to connect what I had to offer and hesitant to take the bold action that the situation required. However, being an outsider did have some advantages; it let me see the bigger picture on what needed to change on the project, and how the seemingly tiny decisions on scope were eroding business value.

When my colleague joined, she pinpointed journey mapping as a particular strength, and positioned it as critical to understanding the overall shape of the workstream and prioritising next actions. This meant that what I pivoted to doing was not significantly different, but the scale and centrality was.

What made this a non-obvious move was that nobody was asking for it, and it did create a sense of pulling back when there was a lot of pressure to demonstrate immediate forward energy. Although it took some persuasion to start pursuing this approach, its worth soon became clear.

The story around value needs to come from ensuring the strategic positioning of something you do well. It requires having the conviction to tell that story, particularly when it represents a significant narrative reframing. However, your strengths are what will ultimately give you the energy and the credibility to be heard.

Why only your superpower will work

Because Product can be so many things to many people, simply flexing to fit can sometimes be helpful. However, if you become stuck in an imitative mode you may become less confident in your own judgement, denying your team the full benefit of you at your best. The breadth of Product means that product people do come in all sorts of different shapes, and that is a good thing.

In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders writes about how giving up the idea of trying to write like Ernest Hemingway enabled him to capture “some essential ‘me-ness’” and write “the best thing I’d ever written.” He describes the moment of finding his own voice as both triumphant and sad, as it required him to know and fully accept himself. He writes, “The story was oddly made, slightly embarrassing—it exposed my actual taste, which, it turned out, was kind of working-class and raunchy and attention-seeking.” Although the book offers analysis of the construction of Russian short stories as a means of helping writers develop their craft, I’ve found the ideas in it useful when thinking about all kinds of creative work.

Saunders writes powerfully about finding your energy, no matter what form it takes, and using that to propel you forwards:

To write a story that works, that moves the reader, is difficult, and most of us can’t do it. Even among those who have done it, it mostly can’t be done. And it can’t be done from a position of total control, of flawless mastery, of simply having an intention and then knowingly executing it.[…] The writer has to write in whatever way produces the necessary energy. For Turgenev to get his energy level up above 1,000, he had to make those dossiers. He had to admit that he wasn’t good at integrating description and action. He had to plunge ahead, doing things his way, or die.

Now, the concept of bringing your authentic self to work has had something of a backlash. Critics have interpreted it as showing up in the workplace completely unfiltered, regardless of who you are interacting with or any professional cost. Leaning so far into who you are that you alienate people is not a good strategy for a product manager, or for a writer. Saunders pictures the reader as riding in a sidecar of a motorcycle driven by the writer; if the space between the two becomes too wide, the reader will simply go and not come back.

Similarly, a focus on product strengths could become inhibiting if it is taken as an excuse to avoid whole areas that seem difficult and never learning or developing new skills. However, if you use your strengths to set the direction in which you extend your professional skillset, it unlocks a way to grow while continuing to execute successfully. I see this an ongoing process akin to editing. Saunders describes editing as “intuition plus iteration” in which the writer gradually shapes the final piece with “the benefit of the opinions of literally hundreds of manifestations of you”. As a product professional, this means reflecting on the proficiencies and passions you can draw from, continually adding to your toolkit, and curating your approach on an ongoing basis in a way that is true to who you are.

When you find a way to leverage what you do well, you set yourself free from half-formed expectations and put yourself in a position where you are shaping the work’s structure and fully leading it. The idea of there being a “right” way to do something, although seductive, is harmful, because it ignores the value that having diverse strengths and perspectives brings. By trusting your own judgement about what is needed to drive impact, and steering the work in that direction, you can use your energy effectively and expand what’s possible. More than enough, you are infinite.