The Commitment Equation: How to Build Trust in Product Teams
How to stem any slow erosion of team and individual commitment
It can start super small.
A feature decision is made without team input. A key risk is flagged, but leadership waves it away. A roadmap change lands suddenly, leaving engineers scrambling. Over time, people push back less. They stop raising concerns, stop debating trade-offs. The fire dims.
Not overnight, not in a dramatic explosion—just in a slow, quiet slide into disengagement.
I’ve seen this play out in multiple product teams, and it always follows the same arc: when trust fades, commitment evaporates.
People shift from owning outcomes to just delivering tasks. The difference?
One is a team of investors—fully engaged, pushing to create the best possible outcome; whereas
The other is a team of executors—clocking in, doing what they’re told, and moving on.
Great product teams don’t just comply with decisions—they commit to them. And that commitment? It doesn’t happen by accident. It’s deliberately built.
Trust is the Prerequisite for Commitment
Google’s Project Aristotle, a massive internal study on high-performing teams, uncovered a crucial truth: psychological safety is the single most important factor in team effectiveness. Teams thrive when people feel safe to speak up, challenge ideas, and take risks without fear of blame or retribution.
Patrick Lencioni, in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, elaborates further on the concept of pyschological safety: without trust, teams avoid conflict, which means they don’t engage deeply enough to feel committed to a decision. Instead, they nod along, then quietly disengage.
And the kicker? commitment isn’t about agreeing on every decision. It’s about people feeling like their voices were heard, their input mattered, and the final direction makes sense—even if it’s not what they personally would have chosen.
So, how do you build trust that fuels real commitment? As a leader, I would advocate for four deliberate actions:
1. Create Psychological Safety
Teams can’t commit to work if they don’t feel safe to challenge it. The best teams debate hard before aligning—but that only happens if people believe their contributions won’t get shut down.
Amy Edmondson, a Harvard professor who coined the term psychological safety, found that the best-performing teams actually report more mistakes, not fewer (source). Why? Because they feel safe admitting problems early—before they become real failures.
The worst thing that can happen? A quiet team that never pushes back.
There are three simple ways ways to ensure an environment that is psychologically safe:
1. Set the norm for dissent:
Artificial harmony kills good decision-making. When teams don’t feel safe challenging ideas, they disengage. Instead of “Any questions?”, ask:
“What’s wrong with this idea?” – Encourages critical thinking.
“What’s the biggest assumption here?” – Uncovers risks early.
“If this fails, why will it fail?” – Makes it safe to discuss flaws.
2. Kill the Fear of Mistakes
Postmortems Should Focus on Learning, Not Blame. Blame kills innovation.
If mistakes lead to punishment, teams play it safe instead of solving real problems. High-performing teams don’t fail less—they just learn faster.
Shift from “Who’s responsible?” to “What can we improve?”
Failures = data, not disasters. Test results guide better decisions.
Publicly share learnings. Normalizing mistakes prevents repeat errors.
Every mistake is tuition—if you paid for it, make sure you learn from it.
3. Leaders Go First – If You Want an Open Culture, Start by Admitting Your Own Missteps
Teams mirror leadership. If leaders never admit mistakes, why would anyone else? The best way to build psychological safety is by going first.
Own your failures. Saying “I underestimated this” builds trust.
Ask for feedback—and act on it. If you get defensive, trust breaks down.
Lead with learning, rather than a “know-it-all” culture.
For example, Satya Nadella transformed Microsoft by shifting from a “know-it-all” to a “learn-it-all” culture, emphasizing curiosity over expertise, collaboration over silos, and customer focus over internal competition.
A leader who says “I was wrong” earns more respect than one who pretends to be infallible.
2. Align on Shared Narratives and Outcomes
People don’t commit to tasks—they commit to missions.
Teresa Amabile’s research in The Progress Principle found that the strongest driver of motivation isn’t perks or even pay—it’s making meaningful progress on work that matters.
Yet, in too many product teams, work feels disconnected from impact. Teams are handed a feature roadmap and told to execute—no context, no north star. Then we wonder why engagement drops.
Creating Shared Narratives is a deeper topic, encompassing storytelling techniques that resonate emotionally and intellectually. But at its core, a shared narrative does three things:
Links work to a real user problem, not just a feature. Instead of “We need to build X,” reframe it as “We need to increase conversion by 15%—how do we get there?”
Passes the ‘So What?’ or ‘5 Whys’ test. Asking “So what?” or “Why?” repeatedly helps uncover the deeper impact behind any initiative.
Incorporates real customer stories. Data is powerful, but nothing is more compelling than direct user feedback that shows why the work matters.
Once you've established these foundations, craft your unwavering cause and compelling problem to solve—a story that captivates your company’s attention and pulls them into the journey. Make them feel the stakes, the urgency, and the shared purpose of solving the problem together.
3. Give Teams Real Outcome Ownership
If a team is just executing someone else’s roadmap, don’t expect deep commitment.
In Drive, Daniel Pink highlights autonomy as one of the three core drivers of motivation. People do their best work when they feel ownership over it. Yet too many product teams are structured in ways that kill autonomy:
A roadmap packed with pre-defined features.
Leadership making all the key product decisions.
A focus on outputs (features shipped) rather than outcomes (problems solved).
How to Fix It:
Focus on problems, not just features. Instead of dictating what to build, provide teams with clear problem statements and let them determine the best solutions.
Empower teams to propose product bets. Move away from rigid, top-down roadmaps—encourage teams to identify and pitch the highest-impact initiatives.
Define clear ownership. Use frameworks like RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) or DACI (Driver, Approver, Contributor, Informed) to clarify decision-making roles and ensure accountability.
Establish high-level metrics while reinforcing team ownership. Set clear top-level goals, but expect teams to define and map the underlying success metrics that drive measurable outcomes.
When teams own the problem, they care about the outcome. And when they care about the outcome, they bring their best thinking to the table.
4. Make Trust Visible Through Actions
Trust isn’t built through memos or slogans—it’s reinforced through consistent, observable actions. Teams trust leaders who listen, follow through, and protect their autonomy, not those who simply talk about trust in all-hands meetings. When teams feel micromanaged, ignored, or deprioritized, trust erodes quickly, leading to disengagement, slower execution, and a culture of second-guessing.
Paul Zak’s research in Harvard Business Review found that teams in high-trust environments experience:
76% more engagement
50% higher productivity
40% less burnout
The key takeaway: Trust isn’t about words—it’s about what teams actually see. When leaders demonstrate trustworthiness through tangible actions, teams respond with commitment, confidence, and ownership. But when trust is broken—through lack of transparency, unkept promises, or shifting priorities—motivation plummets, and teams become reactive rather than proactive.
How to Apply It:
Protect team focus. Cut unnecessary meetings, reduce context-switching, and shield teams from non-essential work distractions. Let people spend their time solving problems, not navigating bureaucracy.
Follow through. If leadership asks for feedback but ignores it, trust erodes fast. Acknowledge input, take meaningful action on key insights, and close the loop by sharing what changed.
Make support a habit. Regularly ask, “What’s one thing I could do to help you?”—then actually follow through. Small, consistent actions compound over time, reinforcing a culture of trust.
Trust isn’t built overnight, but it can be lost in an instant. To create a high-trust environment, leaders need to prove—through actions, not just words—that they genuinely value their teams and their expertise.
The Holy Grail? A Commitment Flywheel
Commitment isn’t something you demand. It’s something you build.
Trust fuels ownership. Ownership fuels engagement. Engagement fuels commitment. And the cycle repeats.
When teams feel safe to challenge, aligned on a mission, empowered with ownership, and backed by real trust, they don’t just do the work—they invest in it.
So, here’s my challenge for you: What’s one small move you can make this week to increase trust in your team?
Drop it in the comments. Let’s build better product teams—together.