10 Tips to Make Coaching a Habit for Product Managers
Coaching your team, business leaders, and your co-creators
There are plenty of "product manager coaches" that are hoping to help you learn more about the discipline, help you land your first job, or teach you ways to level up your craftsmanship (see your favorite coach here) this post is not about that.
What I'm referring to is the day-to-day coaching you have to do as a product manager when working on a productive team, and how to make it a habit.
Coaching co-creators
It's so crucial for you to have this coaching mindset, really taking the time to coach co-creators on what you've learned about the customer, their quirks, and trends you are finding in the data.
Packaging it in a way that is concise, can be easily understood, and ultimately acted upon, like the best coaches can do!
Design Team- Their focus and value they add to the team is to be an inch wide and a mile deep when it comes to understanding design principles, approaches, style guides, and brand. Be the voice of the customer with your design team and fill in any gaps of understanding by coaching them through stories based in qualitative and quantitative customer data and engagement.
Development Team - Their focus and value they add to the team is rooted in their ability to build out, integrate, and test quality code that brings features and functionality to life. BTW if you only use your developers to code, you only get half their value. Their feedback on the roadmap, technical debt, and opportunities for the experience is invaluable. Coach them to speak up if they see opportunity and give them a safe place to do so.
Invite developers or designers to your next customer demo or analytical trend session so they can observe how much effort goes into getting that understanding and how you as their partner are willing to give them the cliff notes. Watch how their questions or commentary can help build new ideas or approaches for design work that really impacts the customer experience and thus, business value.
Think about the best coaches you've had in your life, and how they made the "game" feel easy or how certain moments stuck with you until this day (body over ball!). These coaches find ways to know exactly where you are and to only feed the information you need to know in the moment to make the best next step, but also taking time to reflect on where we've been but also where we'd like to go.
Coaching within your product team
Product management coaching also involves partnering with your own product team.
Whether you oversee associate product managers day-to-day or hold a higher position like Lead Product Manager, your role often involves guiding your team to adopt efficient and effective methods, enhancing overall performance.
You'll need to provide coaching to your collective team, to give them a play-by-play on how you thought through a particular part of the E3 framework. It's always good to coach not only for the benefit of the team member being coached but also for your benefit as a product manager. Your peers get to witness how you think about certain situations that they can potentially adopt, or give you feedback that will increase your receptiveness to other perspectives.
You may one day want to manage product managers, and what better way than to offer to coach more junior folks on the team to better outcomes. This rapport you will build with these individuals will become critical when it comes time to understand if you are ready to manage a team. Bonus tip - if you coach enough people, you'll know who has the most potential, who stands out, and if you are ever asked who you want on your team - easy decisions!
Coaching your management or leadership team
This is also extremely important. When you have face time with leadership teams, you want to take time within your presentation to also have a coaching moment. Coach your leadership on how to think about your capability. This won't come without debate, commentary, or even a stance where they don't agree. However coaching habits can help you get better at offering your guidance, perspective, and how you tell your story. They may adopt the points of your story and include it in their next update.
The higher you get up in your organization, the more you will need to coach your leadership (they don't have time to think as deeply as you do, so tell them what they need to know, how you speak about it, and help shape their perspective - sounds like a coach to me!)
The higher you get in your career as an individual contributor or manager of product folks, the more you will need to coach product folks to be as effective and efficient when delivering business value, customer value, and culture value!
Let’s talk about how to be a better coach
In reading the book "The Coaching Habit" by Michael Bungay Stanier, here are my top 10 favorite quotes or things I found most interesting. If you find these interesting, you should definitely pick up a copy; it is one that I plan to revisit often. Pair this with BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits and you’ll be ready for any new habits, including coaching.
"What's on your mind?" - This simple yet profound question cuts straight to the heart of coaching by inviting open, focused dialogue. Consider being in a design review, and as a designer is about to present their high fidelity comps, ask them,
"What's on your mind as you show us this portion of the design?" It's a great way to get a sense of how they've incorporated the coaching you've provided on the customer, or if they mention how this ties back to the team's roadmap/epic/strategy.
"If you're saying yes to this, what are you saying no to?" - Highlights the importance of strategic choices and prioritization, a crucial skill for product managers balancing multiple demands and limited resources.
When you say yes to something, you are inherently saying no to something else, and the difference in value between these two things is the opportunity cost.
"The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has already taken place." - Reminds us of the common pitfalls in communication and the importance of clarity and confirmation in coaching conversations, epics, user stories, strategy decks, or really any communication method. It’s all about ensuring that all parties are on the same page.
"Change is a process, not an event. Your coaching isn't about the big revelations; it's about the small shifts that lead to a great impact over time." - This underscores the iterative nature of product development and personal growth.
As a coach, a product manager's goal should be to facilitate continuous improvement, both in the product and the team, through consistent and thoughtful guidance.
"What was most useful for you?" - Encourages reflection and learning, reinforcing the value of the coaching conversation and ensuring continuous improvement. This question is particularly valuable in helping product managers and their teams internalize lessons and apply them in future scenarios.
This is also very helpful in a refinement session when you've reviewed epics/user stories; you can ask your co-creators which approach or content style was most useful for them to understand (the feedback I usually get is - more whiteboard, please).
"The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do." - Emphasizes the importance of focus and the need to make tough decisions in order to achieve success, a crucial reminder for product managers navigating the complexities of development and team leadership.
Whenever possible, when communicating about tactical and the minutia of a project, remember to align it to the bigger strategy at play. Great coaching habit!
"Building a habit of curiosity can be a life-changer." - Adding curiosity within your team encourages a culture of continuous learning and innovation. For product managers, fostering this mindset can lead to more creative solutions and a deeper understanding of customer needs, driving product success.
Also, when telling your story to whoever you are coaching, a great sentence starter includes curiosity. "I was curious, so we started analyzing XYZ data..."; "Out of curiosity, in what ways do you think this feature will help and hurt our customer experience?" Curiosity is usually looked at as coming from a good place.
"Leadership is not always about getting things right, but about being brave enough to get things started." - This quote speaks to the courage required in product management to initiate projects and make tough decisions, even when the data isn’t clear and there is no precedent. It highlights the role of product managers as leaders who inspire action and drive momentum within their teams.
While some projects require heavy discovery work, I always bias toward action. Please don't take 6 weeks to survey customers without building anything. Instead, build a mock-up or prototype, use the features yourself, use the data you have and intuition to get it to a specific basecamp on the mountain of success, and then show customers where you are at through demos, surveys of actual prototypes, or watch them use it.
"The real skill of coaching lies not in answering questions but in questioning answers." - This highlights the importance of critical thinking and inquiry in coaching roles. For a product manager, it's about challenging the status quo and encouraging teams to think deeply about the problems they're solving, ensuring that solutions are not just immediate but sustainable and impactful.
Remember, you only get 2 out of the 3 (Scope, Quality, Time), so if Time is of the essence or you have technical limitations, questioning until extreme clarity may not be the best approach in these low-time situations or in situations where technical limitations would make the level of effort extremely high for the team to achieve.
"Your role is often to be more of a mirror, reflecting back what you hear, rather than a window offering a new view." - This emphasizes the importance of active listening and empathy in coaching, particularly for product managers. By reflecting and validating the thoughts and concerns of your team, co-creators, and leadership, you foster trust and open communication, laying the groundwork for effective collaboration.
BONUS .."No solutions, only trade-offs." - This one was on a recent podcast I was listening to and it stuck with me. This perspective encourages a realistic approach to problem-solving, recognizing the complexity and constraints inherent in product management, and the need for strategic compromise. This also ensures that as you are coaching others, you recommend the "trade-off" mentality instead of everyone focusing on a win-win situation.
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Embracing the coach's mindset in product management not only elevates your team's performance but also enriches your personal growth and leadership skills—here's to fostering a culture of continuous learning and improvement, one coaching moment at a time.
Until next week!
Product Protégé
