1 tip & 3 resources per week to improve your Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery practices in less than 5 minutes. Explore my new book on realprogressbook.com
How to Close Your Confidence Loop
How to Close Your Confidence LoopDear Reader, Most teams can tell you what they're building. Far fewer can tell you why it matters and how they will know it has worked. And I mean in a connected, defensible way that traces from their next release or discovery back to a company goal. That gap is where confidence lives (or doesn't). The confidence loop describes the critical questions you need to be able to answer and connect to when prioritizing any meaningful work. It is a loop because you can start anywhere and continue your non-linear journey through each section. The answers inherit the quality of the surrounding ones: you can't credibly answer what the very next thing we're working on is without first answering how we expect behavior to change, which in turn requires clarity about which strategy or business goal we believe that behavior change contributes to. The more you're able to close the loop, the more confidence you'll have in your decisions: either about pursuing a given direction or idea, or about dropping it. The confidence loop only breaks down when answers never meet, not because one is wrong. Each Discovery action, strategy choice, or OKR is defensible on its own. But together, they don't close. And a loop you closed in Q1 is not automatically still closed in Q3. Your strategy changes, and your OKRs turn out not to be realistic. You will always have to re-loop through cycles of increased or decreased confidence - surprise: It's never over. Letting AI Close the Loop for YouAsk an AI to fill in the loop, and it will do that very plausibly and very quickly. In thirty seconds, you have something that looks like a closed loop. But that only simulates your confidence. It doesn't make it real. Confidence requires you to be able to defend each answer because you're the one accountable when one of them turns out to be wrong. "Human in the loop" in the general AI sense means oversight. In product work, it means something more uncomfortable: Being accountable for decisions, no matter where you drew your information from. Your task is to actually close the loop, not just review what has been produced.
AI can (and, in many cases, probably should) accelerate your work across different parts of the loop. But the moment you hand over the judgment (whether it's to another person or a machine), you've left the loop and started watching it from the outside. You haven't internalized a decision until you can answer the questions in your own words, without reaching for a slide. That's what a closed confidence loop feels like. And I believe it's the version of confidence worth aiming for at the moment. Thank you for Practicing Product, Tim As a Product Management Coach, I guide Product Teams to measure the real progress of their evidence-informed decisions. I focus on better practices to connect the dots of Product Strategy, Product OKRs, and Product Discovery. |
Product Practice Newsletter
1 tip & 3 resources per week to improve your Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery practices in less than 5 minutes. Explore my new book on realprogressbook.com
Product Practice #426 You don’t need toinvestigate every problem PUBLISHED Sep 18, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, Discovery without direction leads to endless exploration. Teams can feel overwhelmed, believing they must investigate every problem. Your strategic audience choices determine which customer feedback deserves priority investigation, while discovery insights reveal whether your strategic assumptions about customer problems and competitive positioning hold up in practice. This...
Product Practice #425 What Part of YouIs Making the Decision? PUBLISHED Sep 11, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, For much of my career, I’ve helped product teams work through uncertainty. Chilling with my buddy King Arthur at Tintagel Castle I challenged assumptions, introduced frameworks, and helped people make better decisions when there was no obvious answer. While I still love doing that work, I’ve become increasingly interested in a deeper question over the past six years: From where...
Product Practice #424 Linked Better Practices over Stacked Best Practices PUBLISHED Sep 4, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, “Let’s prioritize by value.” Value for whom? That was the question I explored in last week's essay Business Value, Customer Value, and Team Value Are Different Arguments. Today, let's demystify the term value even further. Nothing is inherently valuable. The same opportunity can have different value under different strategies. For that narrative to check out, we need...