Is it #7FFF00 or #DFFF00?
I've lost count of the meetings where someone finally throws up their hands and says "I don't care, call it chartreuse! Just let us get back to work!”
That frustration is two forces grinding against each other. One is the pressure for the project to look green, because the color carries political weight the moment it leaves the room. The other is the people doing the work, who want to report where things actually stand. They haggle over the color because that’s the thing folks see. It’s a lag measure though, one that comes after the fact. Shifting the conversation to the lead measure, confidence, heads off that chartreuse slide.
Every product manager and product owner, technical or otherwise, knows this conversation from both sides. Some days you're the one who says you're not sure a project will deliver on time. Other days you're the one who hears it.
The hard part, on both sides, is the why. You can feel a delivery is shaky long before you can explain what's making it shaky. You know the date is at risk, and when someone asks you to defend that, you reach for reasons and come up with a shrug.
What do you have in common with Shohei Ohtani?
That gap, feeling something before you can explain it, shows up everywhere people build expertise. Take professional baseball player Shohei Ohtani for example. He knows the difference between a clean swing and an off one, but ask him how the physics work and he probably can't explain it to you. The knowledge lives in his body before it lives in words. Confidence about a timeline is the same. The feeling comes first, and building the language to describe it is a skill, which means it's a skill you can practice and get better at.
I built a confidence score to give people that language.
Every project starts at 100%. 100% confidence your project will deliver by the target date. Then you take points off for the things that put a delivery at risk. There tend to be five areas that are the source of most confidence issues, so they're where I start deducting:
- Scope: how much there is to build, and whether we know where to stop.
- Technical complexity and unknowns: how hard the thing is to build, and how much of it is new. Something we've built before can still be genuinely complex.
- Requirements: how clearly we know the details of what we're building, whatever the size.
- Dependencies: how much of the delivery rides on people, teams, or systems you don't control.
- Team capacity: whether the team has the people, the skills, and the time the work needs, or is already stretched thin.
You land on a number and you show your work. "I'm at 65. I took 20 off for scope, and 15 because the requirements still have big open questions." The number is the easy part. The deductions are where the real information lives, and saying them out loud is what turns a gut feeling into something the team can work with.
Having a target date sharpens the score, but it isn't required. If the requirements aren't defined, adding a target date won't make it any clearer, and confidence that's already low without a date only drops further once you add one.
How does this change the conversation?
Most teams report confidence as a RAG status, the red, amber, green health flag. The trouble with a color is that it puts everyone on the defensive. The conversation becomes about moving the status instead of understanding why confidence is low, and it splits into us against them. You have one side pushing to get the color to green, the other defending keeping it at amber. Neither is talking about what needs to change to improve confidence in delivering on time.
A number with its reasons attached shifts the conversation. You're at 65 because the scope has no clear stopping point, so the question becomes where you draw the line. Nobody's defending a color anymore. You're on the same side of the problem, looking at the same list of deductions, deciding which one to attack first.
There's a name for this kind of conversation. Neil Mercer, an educational researcher who studies how people think together out loud, calls it exploratory talk. It's when people put the reasoning behind their positions out in the open, and the group builds on that reasoning to reach a solution together. Mercer contrasts it with disputational talk, where people just defend their own positions and don't surface their thinking. The RAG conversation tends to lean disputational. A confidence score with its deductions laid out is an invitation to exploratory talk. The 20 points off for scope is a claim with a reason behind it, and everyone talks about the reason rather than the color.
The confidence score is just one of the systems we use at Understory when we build technical product management capability inside a team. If you want to grow into the technical product manager role yourself, or grow your product owners and product managers into it, subscribe below or ask us a question.