Productside Webinar

No Bragging Required

How Women in PM Can Get the Recognition They Deserve

Date:

08/06/2021

Time EST:

1:00 pm
Watch Now

In this webinar, we explore why women in Product Management often struggle to get their contributions properly recognized—even when they’re doing great work—and how to change that without “bragging” or trying to be someone you’re not.

Executive coach Linda Thompson joins Pamela Schure and Roger Snyder from Productside to unpack:

  • How unconscious bias and social conditioning shape how women are perceived

  • Why women may hesitate to go for promotions or visibility opportunities

  • Practical, behavioral strategies to increase influence and recognition

  • How to speak up in meetings, handle interruptions, and project confident presence

  • A simple framework for communicating your impact without sounding boastful

You’ll walk away with tools you can use right away to advocate for yourself, amplify others, and get the recognition you deserve.

 

Key Takeaways

  • Bragging ≠ Visibility. You don’t need to boast to be recognized; you need to clearly connect your work to business impact and make sure others hear it.

  • Bias is real—and often unconscious. Studies show identical resumes and stories are perceived differently depending on whether the name is male or female. Awareness helps you strategize instead of internalizing it.

  • Don’t wait for 100% readiness. Men typically apply when they meet ~60% of the requirements; women often wait for 100%. You grow into bigger roles, not before them.

  • Balance likeability and authority. Women often face a narrower band of “acceptable” behavior (too tough vs. too nice). You can start a bit firmer and then warm up, rather than the other way around.

  • Your voice and body matter. Sitting forward, grounding your voice (no up-speak), dropping qualifiers (“maybe, just, a little”) and using power poses can dramatically change how you’re perceived—and how you feel.

  • Always answer the “So what?” When you report your results, don’t stop at what you did. Always explain what it enabled for the product, the business, or the customer.

Welcome, Housekeeping & Productside Overview

Pamela Schure | 00:00:00–00:02:30
Hi everybody and welcome, and good morning. My name is Pamela Schure and I’m the Director of Products and Services at Productside. Thank you so much for joining us this morning.

Things are certainly moving fast for all of us at Productside and, honestly, for all of us across the world. What we want to do is help people meet these challenges head-on. So we’ve been listening to what the PM community wants and decided that the best way to do this is to create a great space of community and learning for us all.

Today we’ll be covering some tips for increasing your influence as a product manager at your company. And while this is focused on women, I think the tips and tricks in this presentation are useful for just about anybody.

I’m joined today by two wonderful people. First, we have Linda Thompson, who is an executive coach at L2LQ Leadership Development. She’s in Los Altos, California.

Pamela Schure | 00:02:30–00:03:30
And we also have with us my colleague, Roger Snyder. Roger is our VP of Marketing at Productside. He’s here in the Scotts Valley area—“over the hill,” as we like to say—from where I am.

Before we dive into the content, I want to go through just a few housekeeping items for this webinar.

Pamela Schure | 00:03:30–00:04:30
After this webinar, we really encourage you to stay engaged with the product management community—now more than ever. Get connected with your peers by joining our LinkedIn group, join other groups, and use those spaces as forums to learn together.

You should start seeing a link on how to join our LinkedIn group in your webinar interface. We’d love to have you there.

Pamela Schure | 00:04:30–00:06:30
During the webinar, if you have any questions, please, please, please put them into the Questions window. We know there is also a Chat window, but we want you to focus on the Questions window. We love interacting with our fans and community, so keep them coming as we go along with the webinar. When we get to the end, we’ll have a Q&A session and we’ll answer as many questions as possible. Sometimes we have more questions than we can answer live, so we may follow up afterwards.

One very important question we always get is, “Can I watch this webinar later?” And the answer is yes. All attendees will receive a link so that you can view the webinar later. You can also share it if you find there are things that are important for other people you know.

About Productside & the Product Leadership Series

Pamela Schure | 00:06:30–00:08:30
Let’s talk briefly about Productside and what we do. Our mission at Productside is to empower product managers to be great at product management and product marketing—and especially to become product leaders.

We do that with our methodology and framework, the Optimal Product Process. It was designed by senior product leaders with a combined 150 years of experience. It’s been used across the world, in many different situations, and it’s a powerful framework that works for products in any industry, at any stage of the lifecycle, and with any development methodology—whether you’re using agile or waterfall or something in between.

The Optimal Product Process is only one pillar of how Productside helps companies and individuals transform their product teams around the world.

Make sure that you continue to learn after this webinar by downloading the Optimal Product Process ebook in our free resources. Check it out—we have a lot of free resources that can help you no matter what you’re doing or where you are in your career.

Pamela Schure | 00:08:30–00:10:00
We’re very happy to bring you another installment in our Product Leadership webinar series this morning. As a reminder, we speak with your peers and cover the priorities that product leaders care about and want to improve in their product teams.

Our ultimate goal is to help you and your teams build great products that matter.

Today our theme is professional development as a PM leader, and it’s going to be awesome.

We’re especially pleased that a lot of product managers have joined us—that makes sense, because this is really oriented toward product managers more than their managers or executives. We’ve also got some product owners and a bunch of “other” roles represented. I’d say the tips today are useful for anybody, no matter where they are in their career.

Why Product Management Influence Is So Hard

Pamela Schure | 00:10:00–00:13:00
Let’s start with a really important question: how did we end up here as product managers?

Someone sold us this dream that we were going to be in this wonderful, executive role—super important, helping run the company. We were told we’d be highly influential: the CEO, the senior executives, the general managers…and then us, right there in the mix as strategic leaders.

It is true that we have tremendous influence. Pretty much everybody in the company knows who we are. People around the company recognize our contribution—sometimes with a few swear words in front of our name, which might also be fair enough. We’re the ones who have to move the product forward.

We have to get the development team on board, make sure they deliver what customers are telling us they want, and what we see as the future of the company. We’re working across marketing, sales, support, finance, operations—you name it. There are a lot of people we’re interacting with and influencing every single day.

Pamela Schure | 00:13:00–00:14:30
But when we work through a process model—whether it’s Optimal Product Process, agile ceremonies, or any internal governance—we also have to get agreement on content and decisions. That’s where our real influence shows up: how we deliver our message, how we make sure people understand us, and how we get alignment when we don’t have direct authority.

For many of us, we don’t manage the people we lead. We rely on influence, not positional power.

To do that effectively, we have to have a very deep understanding of people. We meet a lot of people every day. Every time we talk to them, we’re encouraging them to change direction, prioritize differently, or look at the world in a new way. And humans…well, we love doing the same thing over and over again. We’re creatures of habit.

So when we ask people to change, we generate stress in them. And when people get stressed, it becomes very difficult for them to actually hear what we’re saying.

Pamela Schure | 00:14:30–00:16:30
We’ve all heard of “fight or flight.” I want to expand that a bit and talk about three categories of reactions that you’ll see when you introduce change or assert influence:

Fight – Some people will want to control everything, avoid delegating to you, and make sure they own the plan. They may want to keep credit for the work, or they might even get mad. Sometimes they can use their power in ways that are uncomfortable for everyone involved.

Flight – Some people avoid. They might be critical: “What do you know? You don’t understand this space.” They may hesitate because they’re uncertain: “What if we’re wrong?” They can focus on the negative instead of the potential for growth. And they might find it difficult to interact with their own emotions, so they dismiss yours—or anyone else’s.

Freeze – And then some people just freeze. They say, “Yes, whatever so-and-so said,” because they don’t want conflict. They don’t know how to have difficult conversations, or they’ve been taught that the safest way to progress in life is to keep their head down, not stick their neck out, and not challenge the status quo.

These three patterns are what you’re up against as a PM when you’re asking people to do something differently.

And with that, I’m going to hand it over to Linda, who has a wonderful talk titled “No Bragging Required” to help us figure out how to work with all this.

Conditioning, Confidence & Coaching Themes

Linda Thompson | 00:16:30–00:19:30
Thank you, Pam. I’m really happy to be here.

I want to jump right in, because Pam has already set up the context so well.

Let me start with something very personal: my mother told me when I was a kid not to brag. She said it was unattractive, and that if I did it, I wouldn’t be liked.

Now, when I was a teenager, the fastest way to get me to stop doing something was to tell me it would make me ugly and unpopular. So believe me, this lesson really stuck. And it’s not just me—girls are inundated with this kind of feedback. We’re told not to “toot our own horn,” not to “show off,” not to “act full of ourselves.”

We even have a hard time accepting compliments. Someone says, “I love your dress,” and the response is, “Oh, this old thing?”

Amy Schumer did a wonderful sketch with four women friends where they deflect each other’s compliments in increasingly ridiculous ways. You can find it on YouTube. It’s funny—but it’s also painfully accurate.

Linda Thompson | 00:19:30–00:21:30
So we’re told not to brag. At the same time, we’re told that if we work hard and do a great job, our results will speak for themselves. Our knowledge, our skills, and our effort will yield great results, which will yield great rewards.

I learned early in my career that for women, there are additional challenges beyond just presenting great results.

In my very first job out of school, I was walking down a hallway. I was about 22. Coming in the opposite direction was a man—he was a director. I was brand new. I was looking down at the papers in front of me, concentrating, not really paying attention to him.

As we passed each other, he looked at me and said, “My…” with a sort of appreciative tone. I startled, looked up, gave a little nervous smile, and we both continued walking.

He was actually a nice guy, and I’m sure he never thought about that incident again. But it haunted me. I was embarrassed and humiliated. And all I could think was, “If I were a guy, he never would have said that to me.”

That’s when I realized I was going to be judged not just on my results, but on a whole lot of other things—like whether I smiled or not.

Linda Thompson | 00:21:30–00:23:30
Before I go further, I want to say something really clearly: this is not going to be a male-bashing talk. The stories and studies I’ll share are about women, but the strategies are usable by anyone.

I’m very glad Roger is on this call, and I hope we have other men here too. When I’ve given this talk in the past, men have come up to me afterward to say they found it valuable for themselves as well.

So while the examples are focused on women, many of the patterns apply to anyone who isn’t in the dominant group.

Now, in my coaching practice, I focus a lot on developing high-potential leaders below the executive level—both men and women, but especially women.

From that work, five recurring themes show up again and again.

Linda Thompson | 00:23:30–00:25:30
The first three themes are pretty universal:

Developing executive presence – how you “show up” as a leader.

Increasing influence across the organization – exactly what Pam talked about: influencing without authority.

Managing difficult conversations and relationships – having those tough but necessary discussions with peers, stakeholders, or managers.

The last two themes, though, seem to show up almost exclusively for women:

Self-advocacy and visibility – how to promote your work and get recognized without feeling like you’re bragging.

Confidence – which surprised me at first, because the women I work with are talented and effective, yet they often describe themselves as “not confident enough.”

Recent research suggests that lower confidence in women is not innate. It’s induced—by the way women are treated and responded to. If you’re interrupted, talked over, or have your ideas ignored repeatedly, that would shake anyone’s confidence.

So today we’re going to talk about how to navigate those dynamics and still get the recognition you deserve—without betraying your values or becoming someone you don’t want to be.

Barriers, Bias & Why “Results Alone” Aren’t Enough

Linda Thompson | 00:25:30–00:28:00
Let’s talk about some of the barriers. We know that as kids, many of us—especially girls—were told not to brag. That’s already one strike against self-promotion.

We also don’t like people who brag. We tend to judge them as arrogant. So we internalize the message that “bragging” is bad, and we avoid anything that feels like bragging, even if it’s just accurately describing our impact.

Then we layer on the competitive nature of business: reward systems that reinforce a win–lose mentality. If I’m a manager and I have a 4% merit budget, and I want to give one person more than 4%, that means someone else gets less. That can unconsciously encourage leaders to pick “favorites” or to amplify those who are already visible and loud.

Everyone is busy. Your manager is busy. It’s hard for people to pay attention to other people’s accomplishments in a sustained way—even if they’re your boss.

And today, the pace of business is so fast that there’s a lot of forgetfulness: “You did that two weeks ago? Great. What have you done for me lately?”

Linda Thompson | 00:28:00–00:30:30
We did a quick poll earlier asking which barriers people had experienced: being interrupted, having your idea ignored until a man says something similar, your contributions not being acknowledged, and so on.

From what I saw, the numbers were stunningly high across the board. You’re not imagining it. These are common experiences.

So what I know for sure is this:

You can overcome the barriers to being appropriately recognized and rewarded for your great work—but it won’t happen by osmosis.

You have to be deliberate.

From my years of working with leaders, I’ve identified five strategies that make a big difference. I’ll list them quickly now and then go into each one in more detail.

Master your job. I know that sounds obvious, but if you want your accomplishments recognized, you need real accomplishments.

If you want it, go for it. This takes courage, but you can build that courage by building support.

Find your balance. This is about the dilemma of how to be both respected and liked.

Cultivate a powerful presence. Executive presence isn’t just posture or clothing—it’s also voice, behavior, and energy.

Communicate your impact in a way that doesn’t feel like bragging—using a simple structure so people understand the true value of what you do.

Strategy 1 & 2 – Master Your Job & Go For What You Want

Linda Thompson | 00:30:30–00:33:30
Let’s start with Strategy 1: Master your job.

It’s tempting to skip over this one because it sounds so basic, but it has to be said: to have your accomplishments recognized, you need to actually do excellent work. That doesn’t mean perfection. It means you know your role, your responsibilities, your product, your customers, and your business well enough that people can rely on your judgment.

For product managers, as Pam noted, that’s even more challenging. You’re expected to understand the technology, the market, the customer, the business model, and the internal politics. It’s a lot.

But when you build real competence, you build a strong foundation for everything else—especially when you start advocating for yourself.

Linda Thompson | 00:33:30–00:36:00
Now, Strategy 2: If you want it, go for it.

A study by the Society for Human Resource Management showed something fascinating:

Men tend to apply for jobs and promotions when they meet about 60% of the listed qualifications.

Women tend to wait until they meet 100% of the qualifications.

When women were asked why they didn’t apply, they often said, “I was following the rules” or “I didn’t want to fail.” When men were asked, they usually said, “I didn’t want to waste my time if it wasn’t a fit.”

Here’s my dirty little HR secret—from many years in HR:

Job postings list impossible criteria.

They usually include everything the last person did really well and everything the manager wished that person had done well.

If you wait until you’re 100% qualified, you’ll never stretch.

Pamela Schure | 00:36:00–00:38:30
I want to add a quick story here.

At one company, I was asked to interview someone who was applying for a position. I interviewed this guy, and afterward my boss asked what I thought. I said, “Well…I could do just as well as he could.”

My boss said, “Then you should apply for it.”

I said, “Well, I’m pregnant.”

Bless him—he knew me really well. He said, “When are you due?” I said, “I’m due in March.” He said, “Well, the business plan ends in March. You’ll be fine.”

So I applied for the position, and I got it. I obviously knew the company better than the external candidate, and I did very well in that role.

But I had a lot to learn, and I spent the next three years learning how to do that job. It was incredibly exciting and challenging. And I’m very glad I went for it—even though I didn’t feel 100% ready.

Linda Thompson | 00:38:30–00:40:30
I love that story because it captures something important: you grow into the job.

If you only ever apply for things you’re completely ready for, you’ll never get the experience you need for the next level.

So don’t let insecurities, perfectionism, or fear of failure hold you back. If there’s a role or promotion you want:

Apply even if you’re not at 100%.

Let them tell you “no.”

And in the process, you’ll get valuable interview experience and visibility.

In fact, I sometimes recommend what I call “recreational interviewing.” If a job looks interesting—inside or outside your company—go interview. You’ll meet people, practice answering tough questions, and keep your interview muscles warmed up. Sometimes you’ll discover, “Actually, I’m better off where I am.” And sometimes you’ll find something amazing.

Just don’t wait for perfection.

Strategy 3 – The Goldilocks Syndrome & Being Liked vs. Respected

Linda Thompson | 00:40:30–00:43:30
Now let’s talk about Strategy 3: Find your balance.

This is not about work–life balance—though that’s important too. This is about the narrower band of acceptable behavior that women (and anyone not in the dominant group) often face.

I call it the Goldilocks Syndrome.

You’re either:

Too cold or too nurturing,

Too driven or “not ambitious enough,”

Too tough so “no one likes you,”

Or too nice so “no one respects you.”

The challenge is, how do you be both respected and liked? How do you drive for results and still be someone people want to work with?

There’s a fascinating study from Harvard’s MBA program that illustrates this.

Linda Thompson | 00:43:30–00:46:00
Harvard uses case studies extensively. In this particular study, they handed out a case describing the career of a real person: Heidi Roizen, a Silicon Valley luminary. She’s been an executive, CEO, board member, VC—she’s done it all.

The case was identical for everyone. The only difference was that for half the students, the protagonist was named Heidi; for the other half, the protagonist was named Howard. Same story, different first name.

The good news: both male and female students rated Heidi and Howard as equally competent.

The bad news came when they were asked, “Would you want to work for this person?”

Howard was described as “results-oriented, decisive, with high standards.” Students said they’d be happy to work for him.

Heidi, with the same behaviors, was described as “demanding, pushy, selfish, and shrill.”

Same story. Different name. Very different judgments.

Both male and female students reacted this way. That’s what unconscious bias looks like—deeply embedded and often invisible to us.

Pamela Schure | 00:46:00–00:48:30
I have my own story about this, from my first management job.

I was interviewing candidates to join my team. My manager—who was a man—was also interviewing them. We were using behavioral interviewing, so we had standardized rapid-fire questions and tried to keep a neutral expression, so the candidate couldn’t tell if their answer was “good” or “bad.”

We started getting interesting feedback from candidates.

What they said about my manager was: “Wow, he is really tough. I could learn a lot from him.”

What they said about me was: “I wouldn’t work for that [bleep] for a million dollars.”

For context, I’m about five feet tall and not exactly intimidating physically. But the exact same behavior—neutral face, tough questions—was interpreted very differently.

After I finished raging at the unfairness of that, I realized I couldn’t change other people. I could only change myself.

So I experimented with warming up the interview:

I started by asking, “How was your drive? Did you find us okay?”

I offered a cup of coffee.

I smiled more at the beginning.

And that small change made a huge difference in how people experienced me—without sacrificing my standards or the rigor of the interview.

Linda Thompson | 00:48:30–00:50:00
That’s a great example of finding your balance.

I often suggest starting a little more on the “tough” or “authoritative” side and then warming up, rather than starting too warm and trying to “catch up” to authority. It’s easier to soften than to reclaim authority once you’ve been placed in the “too nice” box.

There’s no formula for this; everyone’s balance is different. But it’s worth noticing where you naturally fall, and then experimenting intentionally.

Strategy 4 – Getting Heard & Cultivating Powerful Presence

Linda Thompson | 00:50:00–00:52:30
Let’s move to Strategy 4: Cultivate a powerful presence.

We showed a cartoon earlier: five people in a conference room. Four men, one woman. The woman says something in the meeting, and the meeting leader responds, “That’s an excellent suggestion, Miss Triggs. Perhaps one of the men here would like to make it.”

We laugh because it’s so familiar.

In our virtual-meeting world, presence looks a little different, but the principles still apply.

Here are some specific, practical things you can do:

Sit at the edge of your chair. It energizes your posture and your voice, and signals that you’re engaged and ready to contribute.

Project your voice. Powerful people take their time; they don’t rush or trail off.

Avoid sitting “out of power.” If you have a choice of seats—physical or virtual—don’t tuck yourself off to the side in a tiny tile. Show up where you can be seen.

Linda Thompson | 00:52:30–00:55:30
There’s a great quote from historian Rebecca Solnit about “voice” as vital power. She breaks it into three parts:

Audibility – Can people actually hear you?

Credibility – Are they willing to believe you?

Consequence – Do your words have an effect?

When you speak, ask yourself: am I audible, credible, and consequential?

There are also specific behaviors that help you get heard in meetings—especially when you’re being interrupted or talked over.

In the Obama White House, the women noticed that they were often interrupted and their ideas were being co-opted. They adopted a practice called amplification:

When a woman made a good point, another woman would repeat it and explicitly credit her: “As Jessica just said…”

This made it harder for others to ignore or steal the idea, and it raised the profile of women’s contributions.

You can do this for others—and ask allies to do it for you.

If you’re the only woman in the room and you have no allies, you may need to amplify yourself:

“I’d like to finish my thought.”

“I wasn’t done speaking yet.”

“As I mentioned earlier, my suggestion is…”

It can feel uncomfortable at first, but it’s essential.

Linda Thompson | 00:55:30–00:58:00
A few more quick tips:

Avoid qualifiers. Phrases like “maybe,” “just,” “a little,” and “I might be wrong but…” can undercut your credibility. Try: “I recommend…” instead of “I just feel like maybe we should…”

Watch your intonation. Ending every sentence on an upward note (up-speak) makes you sound tentative, even if you know exactly what you’re talking about. Practice landing your sentences on a downward tone.

Use power posing.

Harvard professor Amy Cuddy popularized the idea of “power posing”—standing in a strong posture (like Wonder Woman) for two minutes before a high-stakes situation:

Feet shoulder-width apart

Hands on hips

Chest open

Chin slightly raised

Physiologically, it changes your breathing and your hormonal balance. Psychologically, it helps you feel more grounded and confident.

I’ve had clients use power posing before depositions, big presentations, and tough meetings. One woman told me she did it in the restroom during a break in a deposition and came back transformed—suddenly articulate, clear, and effective. They wrapped up in 15 minutes.

As Amy Cuddy says:

Our bodies change our minds. Our minds change our behavior. Our behavior changes our outcomes.

Strategy 5 – Communicating Impact with the “So What” Framework

Linda Thompson | 00:58:00–01:01:30
Finally, Strategy 5: Communicate your impact.

Often when we report our results—to our manager, in a performance review, or in a status report—we do something like this:

We list what we did.

We maybe say what’s next.

And we stop.

What we forget is the most powerful part: the “So what?”

Here’s a simple framework you can use in written or spoken updates:

What – What did you do or deliver?

Next – What’s happening next? (Optional)

So what – What does that make possible? What does it enable? How does it impact the business, customers, or team?

For example:

“We launched the new onboarding flow.” (What)

“Next, we’ll A/B test the call-to-action variants.” (Next)

“This reduces time-to-first-value for new users and is expected to improve activation rates by 15%, which directly impacts expansion revenue.” (So what)

Don’t assume your manager will automatically infer the business impact. Spell it out.

Pamela Schure | 01:01:30–01:03:00
I used to do this almost instinctively. Our CEO would walk by my desk frequently, and I’d use that as a micro-update moment:

“Here’s what we’re doing.”

“Here’s what’s happening next.”

“And here’s what you’re going to get out of it.”

Over time, that rhythm built a clear picture of my impact in his mind. So when it came time to ask for a promotion or a bigger role, he already had a narrative of the value I was bringing.

You don’t have to talk endlessly about your work—just intentionally and succinctly.

Checklist, Coaching Offer & Summary

Linda Thompson | 01:03:00–01:05:30
We’ve covered a lot, so I want to summarize the key strategies and leave you with a simple checklist.

Master your job. Do solid, reliable, high-quality work. It’s your foundation.

If you want it, go for it. Don’t wait for 100% readiness. Let them tell you no.

Find your balance. Be both respected and liked—start a bit tough, then warm up.

Cultivate presence. Use your voice, body, and behavior to project confidence and credibility.

Communicate impact. Always answer the “So what?” so your work is tied to business outcomes.

I’ve also created a self-assessment checklist that you’ll receive. It covers four areas:

Executive presence

Influence

Difficult conversations and relationships

Self-advocacy and confidence

If you’d like to consider how to become more effective in any of these areas, I’m offering a free 30-minute consultation. In that time, we can explore whether now is a good moment to work on some of these skills, and whether coaching is right for you.

Linda Thompson | 01:05:30–01:06:30
Before we move to Q&A, I’d love for you to think of one bite-sized action you can take this week:

Maybe it’s removing “just” from your emails.

Maybe it’s practicing a power pose before a meeting.

Maybe it’s reframing your next status update with a clear “So what?”

Open your calendar and make a small appointment with yourself to do it.

Do great work. Don’t let perfectionism or fear stop you. Maintain that balance between being liked and being effective. Show up with presence. And always connect your results to what they make possible.

Q&A Highlights & Closing

Pamela Schure | 01:06:30–01:08:00
We’ve got a lot of great questions, so let’s jump into a few of them. We won’t have time for all of them, but we’ll try to bundle and cover as many themes as we can.

One question we received was:

“In a few situations, I’ve had managers who did not want me to connect with people on other teams. In one environment I couldn’t speak on conference calls—I had to pass in my questions and comments on a piece of paper—so it was impossible to build a reputation. Eventually I left. What else could I have done?”

Linda Thompson | 01:08:00–01:10:00
First, I want to say: leaving may have been exactly the right choice. That sounds like a very restrictive and unhealthy situation.

If you had wanted to stay and try to change it, the only real path would have been a difficult conversation with that manager. Something like:

“I’d like to understand why you prefer that I not speak directly on calls.”

“Here’s the impact on my ability to do my job and build relationships.”

“Can we experiment with me taking a portion of the agenda, or answering certain questions directly?”

You might also explore whether there were other leaders in the organization who could sponsor you or create visibility in different ways. But sometimes, when you’ve tried what you can and the environment is fundamentally limiting, the healthiest thing is to leave—which you did.

Pamela Schure | 01:10:00–01:11:30
Another question was:

“Is it ever appropriate to challenge the person who repeats or ‘steals’ your idea in a meeting?”

This is such a common situation. Linda, what would you suggest?

Linda Thompson | 01:11:30–01:13:00
Yes—it is appropriate. The key is how you do it.

If someone repeats your idea and gets credit, you might say something like:

“Thanks, Alex. That builds on the idea I shared earlier about [X]. Maybe we can combine those points.”

Or, if it’s more blatant: “I’m glad that resonated. As I mentioned a few minutes ago, my proposal is [X]. I’d love to hear reactions.”

The goal is not to shame the other person; it’s to re-anchor the idea to you and keep the focus on the work.

And you can use the same approach to support others: “Yes, that’s a great point—and it’s similar to what Priya said earlier.”

Over time, this creates a culture where attribution is more accurate and people feel safer contributing.

Pamela Schure | 01:13:00–01:14:30
We’ve got more questions than we have time for, as usual. We’ll look for ways to follow up through our blog or future sessions.

For now, I want to leave you with two things:

Join us for upcoming webinars. For example, next week we have a joint webinar with the AI PMM community titled “Nine Tools to Know Thy Enemy”—it’s all about understanding your competition and building effective competitive playbooks.

Keep practicing. Even one small change—from how you sit in a meeting to how you phrase your status update—can start to shift how you’re perceived and how confident you feel.

Pamela Schure | 01:14:30–01:15:30
Linda, thank you so much for sharing your insights and stories today. And thank you to everyone who joined us.

We really hope you found this useful, and we look forward to continuing the conversation in future webinars.

Have a great day, everyone. Bye.

Webinar Panelists

Roger Snyder

Principal Consultant at Productside, blends 25+ years of tech and product leadership to help teams build smarter, market-driven products.

Linda Thompson

I coach and train emerging leaders to accelerate their impact, helping organizations build strong, capable leadership teams below the executive level.

Pamela Schure

Product management and consulting leader with deep expertise in strategy, digital transformation, and building teams that deliver lasting impact.

Webinar Q&A

Women in PM often face unconscious bias, social conditioning, and visibility gaps, which can cause their ideas to be overlooked, interrupted, or credited to others. Even identical accomplishments can be perceived differently depending on gender, creating a structural barrier to recognition—but one that can be strategically overcome.
Use impact-based communication: clearly state what you did, what it achieved, and why it matters to the business. This framework boosts visibility without self-promotion theatrics and helps others connect your work directly to outcomes like revenue, customer value, or efficiency.
Women can increase influence by using grounded voice techniques, avoiding qualifiers (“maybe,” “just,” “a little”), sitting forward on camera, and reclaiming space when interrupted (“I’d like to finish my thought”). Teams can also use amplification, where colleagues repeat and credit women’s ideas to ensure they’re heard.
Research shows the same behaviors—decisiveness, ambition, direct communication—are often labeled as “strong” for men but “pushy” or “abrasive” for women. Even identical résumés can be judged differently solely based on the candidate’s name. Understanding these dynamics helps women adopt strategies that increase credibility without compromising authenticity.
Women can grow recognition proactively by: Seeking stretch assignments before they feel “100% ready” Using power-presence techniques (e.g., Amy Cuddy’s “power pose”) Building cross-functional relationships Advocating for themselves with concise, business-aligned updates Supporting and amplifying other women in PM to create shared visibility These actions help shift perception, expand influence, and accelerate leadership readiness.