Describe a time you had to earn trust quickly.

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Anonymous · Accepted Answer

One example was when I moved from ServiceNow’s Platform Experience team into the
Risk Business Unit, where I became the Product Manager for Operational
Resilience.

I was moving into a fairly specialized domain—business continuity, operational
resilience, regulatory requirements like DORA, service mapping and scenario
analysis—so I knew I couldn’t expect stakeholders to trust me simply because I
had already been a PM at ServiceNow.

My approach was to earn that trust through preparation, clarity and
follow-through. I spent a lot of time understanding the customer problems and
the underlying data model, talking with engineering and domain experts, and
getting up to speed on how customers actually think about resilience. At the
same time, rather than trying to immediately make big strategic decisions, I
focused on creating clarity around the problems we were solving.

One example was the work that eventually became Nexus Map. There were several
different perspectives on what the experience needed to accomplish and how the
underlying service relationships should be represented. I worked with
engineering, design and stakeholders to turn those different inputs into a clear
product vision, user flows, scope and requirements. I also made sure that when I
committed to something, I followed through and closed the loop with the people
involved.

Over time, the dynamic changed. Instead of being the person who was new to the
domain, I became someone stakeholders came to when they needed clarity on the
product direction or wanted to work through a difficult product decision.

What I learned is that when you’re new to a team or domain, you don’t earn trust
by pretending to know everything. You earn it by demonstrating that you learn
quickly, ask the right questions, make your thinking transparent, and
consistently do what you say you’ll do.

Describe a time you had to earn trust quickly.

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