Trust as Currency
Trust is built by repeatedly setting and meeting expectations — and it buys you resources
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 92%
McAllister treats trust as a literal currency: the thing you spend to get resources, scope, and latitude. It is not built by being likeable but by the mechanical loop of calling your shot, hitting it, and owning it when you don't. He calls this the skill he was slowest to recognise, and the one that most separates PMs who grow into leaders from those who plateau.
Origin
Added by McAllister to his top-1% PM list only in the recent refresh — he says he didn't recognise its importance early or even mid-career. The catalyst was mentoring his wife Sarah, a product manager at AWS, and watching trust operate as a superpower in her career.
Core principles
- 01Trust is the currency of a product leader — resources flow to whoever has it.
- 02It compounds through repetition, not through single grand gestures.
- 03Calling your shot (forecast, goal, launch date) and hitting it is worth more than doing good things quietly.
- 04Trust with peers requires working backwards from THEIR goals — a lateral application of the same discipline.
- 05The trust-losing behaviours are the exact mirror of the trust-building ones.
How to run it
- 1
Call your shots explicitly
Forecast the outcome, set the goal, name the launch date. Don't just do good work — state in advance what you will deliver and by when.
Pro tip Forecasting then measuring also builds your own instincts — it's the thing McAllister says separates PMs from consultants.
Watch out Vague commitments cannot be met, and therefore cannot build trust. Weasel words are trust-neutral at best.
- 2
Hit them, repeatedly
Launch when you said you'd launch, and launch what you said you'd launch. The loop of setting and meeting expectations is the entire mechanism.
Pro tip Under-scope so you can hit it. A smaller kept promise beats a larger broken one.
- 3
Tell the truth without fail, and own your mistakes
The trust-losing list is precise: lying, being evasive, not shipping what you said, ignoring your mistakes, and repeating them. Avoid all five.
Pro tip Owning a mistake early costs a fraction of what it costs when someone else discovers it.
Watch out Repeating a mistake burns more trust than making it, because it signals you didn't learn.
- 4
Work backwards from your stakeholders, not just your customers
For the leaders whose support you need, invest real time and energy understanding their goals and their organisation's goals, and forge alignment before you charge ahead with what you believe is right.
Pro tip Being on stage together is not the same as alignment. Test whether they will actively rally their org behind the plan.
Watch out Being bullheaded about the right answer is the classic PM failure. The right strategy still doesn't land without the support to execute it.
- 5
Spend the trust on bigger bets
Once you have a track record of being a good steward of resources with a given team, use it to ask for more — bigger scope, more headcount, more ambitious bets.
Watch out If leadership doesn't trust you to use resources well, you simply won't get them, no matter how good the idea is.
In the wild
Brought in by Joe Gebbia to build out Airbnb's customer support technology platform, McAllister went heads-down applying his Amazon toolkit: strong analytics framework, measure everything, prioritise hard, work backwards. What he underinvested in was building genuine alliance with the customer support leadership team — the people who would actually have to rally their organisation around the strategy.
→ The team shipped a lot and accomplished a great deal, but McAllister's own retrospective is that he mistook shared stages and apparent alignment for real support, and would now spend far more time earning that trust up front.
McAllister mentored his wife Sarah, a PM at AWS, and observed how deliberately building trust functioned as her primary lever — not just honesty and consistency, but genuinely working backwards from other people's goals to reach alignment.
→ It caused him to reflect on the roles where he could have earned more trust, and to add 'earn trust' to his top-1% PM list a decade after first publishing it.
Common mistakes
Assuming trust means being honest
Honesty is table stakes. Trust is the compounding record of stated expectations met. You can be perfectly honest and still have no currency because you never called a shot and hit it.
Charging forward on the right answer without the support to land it
The correct strategy, correctly executed by a team that doesn't believe in it, still underperforms. Building the alliance is part of the work, not overhead on top of it.
Mistaking visible agreement for actual alignment
Appearing on stage together and nodding in meetings can mask an absence of real buy-in. Test alignment by whether the leader will actively drive their org toward it.
Is it for you?
Best for
Senior PMs and product leaders who consistently ship good work but struggle to get the resources, scope, or organisational support they ask for
Not ideal for
Very early-career PMs still learning to ship at all — the loop needs deliverables to build on
From the transcript
“trust is just built by repeatedly setting and meeting expectations”
“build trust you know you tell the truth without fail and you launch when you say you'd launch and you launch what you said you…”
“if if your leadership doesn't trust you to use those resources well or do what you said you're going to do you're probably not going…”
From the episode
What it takes to become a top 1% PM
Ian McAllister (Uber, Amazon, Airbnb)