"[Psychological Safety is] a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking." — Amy Edmondson

A psychologically safe environment enables product teams to take risks together. Psychological safety isn’t a nice-to-have on empowered product teams—it’s the unseen arena that provides fertile ground for building amazing products. When team members feel free to challenge ideas (including yours) without fear, the work gets sharper, the learning gets faster, and the outcomes get better. To be a high-performing PM, it's necessary to create an atmosphere of psychological safety.

I'll be following this post up with a second post for product leaders aimed at cultivating psychological safety among the PMs that report to them.

The Importance of Psychological Safety for Empowered Product Teams

I've worked on teams that have high psychological safety and others that don't. The difference is notable in both outcomes and team ethos. The former churn out some of the most amazing and boundary-pushing products I've had the pleasure of contributing to. The latter have an atmosphere that feels "chilled," where contradictory ideas that would spur discussion often fail to surface and the team's work feels like delivering checklist items rather than owning a problem space. The good news is that psychological safety is something that can be developed over time - so if you're on a team that doesn't have it today, your next order of business is clear! Shift your ways of working toward psychologically safe ones.

As you move toward cultivating a fully psychologically safe team, your team will deliver on key business objectives more regularly. Cultivating an environment of experimentation and safety to try other approaches will unearth new and exciting possibilities that better deliver key outcomes.

A good North Star goal is to create a team atmosphere that honors everyone’s unique perspective and acknowledges the reality that great ideas come from everywhere (not just product)!

Toolkit: Cultivating Psychological Safety

Below are some ways to move toward cultivating a strong sense of psychological safety on your teams. You can employ these regardless of leadership support for psychologically safe ways of working. A large part of your job as a PM is to insulate your team so that they have the freedom and space to ideate and make an impact!

1) Lead with vulnerability (model fallibility)

To be a great PM, you have to admit your own fallibility—that you are not a perfect person with all the right ideas. You need the whole team to come up with the best ideas and to challenge assumptions. There are moments you will get overcommitted to a solution to early. When your team calls you on it, respond with grace! Acknowledge you're ahead of your skis and push for validation of ideas that haven't been tested yet.

One great way to model fallibility and free others to speak up is to "think out loud." Before ideas are fully formed, throw them into the arena for team consideration. As you think out loud, name the risks you can see and invite contribution to consider other pros, cons, risks, and ways you might test assumptions together. This signals collaboration as the critical part of the product process that it is!

Leading in this way means you will often surface bad ideas (which is a good thing!), but as Amy Edmondson, the coiner of the term "Psychological Safety" puts it, "Psychological safety is about candor, not comfort." Cultivating safety means being comfortable that your idea may not be the best and sharing it anyway to spur the team onto greatness.

Toolkit Tidbits:

• "Here’s my rough take—not fully baked. What am I missing?"
• "This decision has a few risks I can see. What would make it fail? What would make it succeed?"
• "I have this crazy idea I'd love to get everyone's thoughts on. Feel free to tell me I'm wrong!"

2) Frame problems, not solutions

One common detriment to cultivating psychological safety is starting with solutions instead of problems. Instead of passing a product team the objective to "Increase customer conversions in the onboarding flow by 20%," many teams are handed solutions (by their PM or leadership) to that problem like "Remove one page from the onboarding flow to increase conversions in the onboarding flow by 20%." These solutions are often based on unvalidated assumptions (that removing the page will result in greater conversions).

When handed solutions like this, it's a PM's job to cultivate an atmosphere of safety to challenge the assumption that the proposed solution (removing a page of the onboarding flow) will have the desired outcome and to think critically about how best to deliver a solution to the core problem (increasing conversions in the onboarding flow). The worst thing a PM can do for team morale and cultivating safety is pre-committing to a single solution and foreclosing discussion of alternative approaches.

If it's important that the chosen solution meet certain criteria, you can use "guiding policies" to help define the outer limits of team ideation. These policies state what would need to be true of the chosen solution and demarcate the "edges of the sandbox" that the team can play in to think about ideas.

Even if you work in an organization that only passes specific solutions to product teams, work backwards from that solution to the problem it's seeking to solve. Give your team that problem space and let them run wild to think through solutions. If you end up with better ideas that you're more confident in, you can take those back to your leaders and explain why your team believes they'll move the needle more effectively. They may or may not buy in, but you've then done your due diligence and equipped your leaders with data to better make decisions moving forward.

Toolkit Tidbits:

• Give the team outcomes to hit and guiding policies, then open the field for competing solution ideas.
• Example Outcome: "Increase first-week activation by 8%."
• Example Guiding Policies:
  • "Our solution should be flexible across customer use cases"
  • "Our solution should reduce reliance on manual user intervention"

3) Actively encourage dissent (and reward it)

Treat disagreement like oxygen - it's a necessary part of getting to the best outcomes! When team members surface alternatives or directly challenge something that you've said, thank them for the challenge and explore their idea on the merits. Disagreement should not be contentious! It can be done in a respectful way that aligns your whole team in the pursuit of the best outcomes for your customers.

If you're new to cultivating psychological safety and other team members tend to shut down discussion of alternative ideas, bring the idea back front and center for further discussion to signal that it's safe to bring up other ideas. If you're new to this, there's a good chance folks won't bring up alternate ideas and you have a role to play in creating space for alternative viewpoints. A great place to start is by asking questions like "Does anyone feel differently?" and then waiting for what may feel like a very long time. Getting comfortable with silence is a fantastic method for stimulating discussion!

Toolkit Tidbits:

• "Does anyone feel differently? How else might we approach this?"
• "I hadn't thought about it that way! Say more about what you're thinking."
• "Thanks for surfacing the idea! As part of us tackling this, we need to remember that whatever solution we implement needs to reduce reliance on manual user intervention. Is there a way we could augment with more automation?"
• "I'd like to hear more about the idea Max brought up. Can you say more about why you think that's a good route, Max?"

4) Respond to unexpected outcomes with grace

Product is probabilistic. We do the best we can with the information we have at the time, and that means we are guaranteed to fail in some of our objectives. When things don't go as expected, run blameless postmortems: analyze contributing factors and system fixes—not who to blame.

When you personally make a mistake, bring it up with your whole team. Admit that you were wrong! Failure is a tremendous opportunity for team learning and growth. For instance, "I was wrong, team. I thought that building in this way would cause our users to convert more frequently because X, but it looks like that isn't the case in the data. Let's dive into the data together and set up some more user calls to learn what we missed and how we could better approach!"

When you glean new learnings from failure, surface the failure and learnings broadly so that other teams and your company can benefit!

Toolkit Tidbits:

• "What helped this slip through?"
• "Which guardrails, alerts, or rituals would’ve caught it earlier?"
• "We missed the mark on this one. Let's learn what we can so we can figure out how to be better!"

5) Make speaking up the default with rituals

Your team rituals are a powerful tool for creating an atmosphere of collaboration and safety. For example, when ideating toward how your team might solve a given problem, structure the ideation in a way that provides space for each team member to contribute. Don't run ceremonies in a way that only caters to ideas from those who are loudest or most comfortable speaking up. You can also prompt others to speak up when you notice they aren't.

Speaking up tends to happen more frequently when teams have the same context you do. A great way to ensure the entire team has the same context is to include your full empowered team in all customer discovery sessions. Coupling these sessions with a time to debrief after each session can lead to more interesting learnings and ideas. Each team member usually picks up on slightly different things and will then have fuel and evidence to back the perspectives they espouse in team rituals.

Toolkit Tidbits:

• Run ceremonies in a way that gives space for quiet team members to contribute without getting overwhelmed
• Schedule frequent customer touchpoints with the whole team so opinions are evidence-anchored.
• "Do you have any thoughts on this, Juan? I know you've been thinking about this for a bit."

PM Safety Checklist

The below checklist is a great way to assess your team's psychological safety. If some of these aren't true, that's a great place to focus your efforts on improving the safety on your team!

Psychological Safety is Fuel for Empowered Teams

Psychological safety is the fuel that enables empowered teams be empowered: to surface sharper ideas, take smart risks, and learn fast. As a PM, it's your job to build the conditions that lead to safety, model the behaviors that project safety, reward the signals of safety—and watch the work level up.

"Candor fuels learning; learning fuels performance." - Amy Edmondson

Suggested Further Reading

If psychological safety is something that interests you, below are some great resources that I used to help write this post and can help you further dive in!

• Amy Edmondson — The Fearless Organization
• NY Times Article About Google's Project Aristotle
• Kim Scott — Radical Candor
• Marty Cagan — Empowered
• Teresa Torres — Continuous Discovery Habits