FUNDAMENTALS OF PRODUCT LEADERSHIP: COACHING

A four-step guide to coaching and developing talent for [product] leaders

Coaching and developing talent is a leader’s number one priority. The number of leaders, a leader, has coached and gotten promoted is a symbol of his/her performance. Coaching and developing talent is difficult. It requires patience and consistent monitoring of developmental habits between product leaders and their product managers. To succeed, leaders need to:
1. Build the right mindset in themselves and their employees
2. Identify skill gaps
3. Develop a coaching plan
4. Build a feedback loop to monitor progress

Photo by Ian Stauffer on Unsplash

1. Building the mindset

— An effective leader’s mindset

A [product] leader’s foundation of intent shapes his/her principles and frame of mind in acting on and making decisions about coaching and guiding his/her team members.

While each product leader should build his/her specific principles, here are some that should be at the core of them:

• Developing people should be a leader’s number one priority: while all leaders claim that their team is important to them, few truly act accordingly and most treat teams as a means to an end for output delivery. Leaders that focus on developing people expend real effort in 1) assessing teams, 2) creating coaching plans, and 3) actively helping their teams improve and develop individually and collectively
• Leaders build trust by being committed to people: effective coaching requires interpersonal trust that needs to be demonstrated through continuous demonstration of actions and genuine commitment of leaders to the success and development of team members privately and publicly. Trust is built through public praise of achievements, private criticism, non-sugar-coated feedback, and genuine interest in people’s personalities
• Empowered teams produce the best results: effective product teams are missionaries and not mercenaries. Teams that drive a manager’s task list rarely reach their ultimate potential and have low employee retention rates. Empowering teams requires creating an environment where teams can own business outcomes and not just tasks and outputs. This will in effect create leaders that are better managers. For this to happen, product leaders need to step back and give people the space they need to solve problems and only intervene to remove impediments, clarify context, and provide coaching and guidance for progress
• Let go of your insecurities: the success of a team is not a threat to a leader but a reflection of his/her leadership abilities. Controlling how a team works and its visibility to leadership is truly bad management and undermines the team. Such behavior and management styles come out of a lack of competence. If a leader finds him/herself lacking the competence and confidence of empowering and coaching his/her team, then they should seek training and leadership coaching to overcome their skill gaps and insecurities
• Cultivate diversity: great leaders know that they don’t have a monopoly over ideas and great ideas can come from anyone. Therefore, great leaders nurture diversity during their hiring process and recruit to build on a portfolio of varied strengths and backgrounds and go on to create a space where alternative points of view can flourish and be built on collaboratively
• Challenge people beyond their comfort zone: many people are unaware of their potential and leaders are in a unique position to help them see it and work through adversity. This requires product leaders to consistently look for opportunities that stretch people and teams beyond their comfort zones for growth. Challenging comfort zones is about understanding gaps, developing plans for improving them, and realizing strengths and building on them. However, leaders also need to be aware of limitations and not burn their teams out
• Be courageous with correction: if at any instance the conclusion is that a team member is not developing and progressing, then it’s the responsibility of the product leader, for the sake of the team and the individual, to move the team member out of the team and help them transition to another opportunity and take another shot at success and growth. This does not mean that leaders should be firing people on an ongoing basis but that when they have concluded that a partnership is not working out, then they need to act quickly and responsibly

— Coaching a mindset of ownership in product managers

No coach can be successful if the minds of their direct reports are not ready. For coaching to succeed, product leaders need product managers that have a sense of ownership toward themselves and the ecosystem of stakeholders they are creating value for and with.

The four levers of product management: succeeding as a product manager

Strong product leaders, managers, and people have effective mindsets and consistently demonstrate good judgments in their decisions and interactions. To foster such a mindset, competent product people need to think and behave like an “owner” versus an “employee”.

This means that competent product managers must have a sense of ownership over their products and it’s the responsibility of product leaders to empower their teams and develop, coach, and inject this mindset into their reports

The attributes of product managers who behave like owners include:

• They feel a real sense of responsibility to their customers, team, stakeholders, shareholders, investors, and collaborators. They understand that others judge their words and actions and act accordingly and as examples
• They consistently communicate the business and strategic context of their products with designers, engineers, and other partners to ensure optimum solution discovery and delivery. This is a more effective method of communication than providing details of features to be delivered to collaborators
• They are consistently on top of their data and trends. This is because the designers and developers on the team need the product manager to provide them with direction for solving the problem that minimizes value creation, usability, and feasibility risks
• They show resilience and grit. Discovering and delivering amazing and inspiring technological solutions is never easy and will present several challenges and obstacles along the way. And while there will always be reasons to not ship the product, product managers with a sense of ownership figure out ways over, around, and through obstacles
• They are result oriented. Product people with a sense of ownership are focused on business outcomes rather than shipping out features that other business units have asked them to and are obsessed with meeting corporate and business objectives
• They build meaningful relationships and work hard to maintain them. Across marketing, sales, finance, legal, etc., many people work to ensure the health of their assets within the company’s value creation ecosystem and their interests need to be presented and reflected in products. Competent product managers that have and maintain relationships with partners, ensure that products work for the business
• They take responsibility when things don’t go well. Because they have professional maturity and are great leaders with a sense of ownership
• They spend time motivating and evangelizing teams. Because they are on a mission and are not mere mercenaries
• They share success. As they understand that any success is the result of respectful collaboration between design, engineering, and product, and without that collaboration, no product could be shipped

While product leaders must recruit product managers with intrinsic motivation and coach them towards a successful set of behavior and mindsets, the organization also needs to build a system of extrinsic motivations including equity ownership in the form of stock options and grants to spread ownership at scale. Talks and lectures are not enough and true product owners need to be compensated accordingly.

Furthermore, it’s important to have evergreen equity strategies that retain true owners after their vesting periods are over so that they feel they would be leaving substantial compensation if they were to exit.

— A note on working through self-doubt and lack of confidence

Healthy people should have self-doubt and feel insecure when asserting their opinions or embarking on new and complicated tasks. It’s normal, healthy, and necessary to have social fears and insecurities which are signs of our mind warning us of the risks in the tasks we are taking on due to lack of preparedness and competence.

Fears normally termed “The Imposter Syndrome” are indications that we need to do our homework when taking on serious and complicated challenges

When product managers and teams suffer from the infamous “Imposter Syndrome”, it is an indication of their leaders not having done their job well as hiring managers and coaches.

Empowered and effective product teams are predicated on trust and when a member is suffering from low confidence, an indication of a lack of competence in a skill area (and in rare cases a major mental and psychological problem that can’t be resolved quickly, a tough situation to be in as a leader and employee), then the whole team will suffer.

Effective product leaders and their teams are only as strong as their weakest employees and it’s important that the product leader picks up on signs of lack of confidence and addresses them maturely and with patience through coaching and development plans and programs.

Competent product leaders understand that there is no reason for a team member to feel like an imposter! Such leaders create environments of trust so that those feeling anxious can reach out for feedback and help so they can gain competence and grow

— A note on the importance of having integrity

Empowered product teams are based on the foundation of trusting your team to go and work independently on solving difficult problems and holding themselves accountable to that end. To build such teams, product leaders need to hire competent talents of character, and at the heart of a good character, lies integrity.

While acknowledging that developing, demonstrating, and maintaining integrity is not easy due to the many needs of internal and external stakeholders and partners, effective product leaders need to have the coach and help product managers steer their careers with integrity by:

• Identifying and avoiding professional landmines
• Continuously communicating priorities and the larger context
• Navigating the various personalities in the organization

To develop product managers of character and integrity, product leaders need to work on three key behaviors of their reports:

• To always be dependable: competent product managers need to understand that their words and commitments are taken very seriously. Misleading any stakeholder, even with the best of intentions, is unacceptable. Any promise made to any stakeholder should be made upon sound judgment and when a promise is made, all efforts must be made to deliver it. This will mean that any commitment should be grounded in sound and collective product discovery and delivery acumen of the entire team, as a collaborative effort
• To always cater to the best interests of the company: while equity-based incentives can help align individual behavior towards the saying: “no one wins unless the entire company does”, competent product managers need to always work for the best interest of the entire organization and not a specific team or political side. This requires that product teams understand the corporate mission and vision and their respective objectives and consistently align themselves with the needs of the customers to create value for the company
• Having a sense of accountability: in empowered product teams, competent product managers will need to sign up to achieve business results, and with that, they will be held accountable for failures and wins. And they must show the willingness of taking responsibility for mistakes and mishaps even when the fault lies with others. At times of failure, well-coached product managers will look at their performance and question what they could have done to prevent mistakes and how to improve going forward

The attitude of a high-integrity product manager: if a product team succeeds, it’s because everyone on the team did what they needed to do, but if a product team fails, it’s the product manager

When failures happen, only those product managers will survive who are committed to their promises and are dependable, have worked in the best interests of the overall business and its customers, and are willing to take responsibility and learn from mistakes.

— A note on Ethics

While most product teams normally consider ethical risks under the business viability bucket, recent events and outcomes have shown that ethical considerations, such as mental health and environmental impact, deserve more attention with dedicated resources in the organization.

It’s also normal to witness the role of the Chief Ethics Officer in progressive technology firms these days. The need for this role is felt as our economies transition from shareholder capitalism, where the well-being of a minority of the stakeholders’ is the bottom line, to more conscious capitalism that thinks long-term and concretely about its impact on a wider range of stakeholders than the immediate shareholders with most decision making rights.

While ethics hits all the members and employees of a company, product teams are the front-facing and the leading edge of organizations in delivering conscious products and services to the marketplace. Therefore competent product teams need to be aware of the implications of their solutions on their communities.

Furthermore, ethically competent organizations should have product leaders that enable and develop a culture where everyone feels comfortable asking uncomfortable questions to help protect the organization from disastrous ethical failures. This will manifest itself in scenarios whereby product teams can speak in thoughtful ways that aim to protect the best interests of their teams and the larger organization.

— A note on happiness

While a leader is not entirely responsible for the happiness of an employee, they can contribute to someone being miserable. To prevent such situations, product leaders need to invest time regularly to understand whether the team is a) doing meaningful work, b) progressing in career aspirations, and c) building the necessary relationships with teams and executives. To achieve these, product leaders need to consider the following principles to bring professional happiness to the workplace:

• The largest factor in work-related happiness is for people to feel they are doing meaningful work. Therefore it’s important to very clearly and explicitly discuss and reinforce these conversations with the team privately and publicly
• Professional relationships are built on personal ones. While teams need to feel that they are helping each other develop and progress, it’s important to build personal relationships. And the leader plays an important role here by sharing outside the work information such as stories about their family, friends, and interests and encouraging socialization among colleagues
• While promotions, compensation, and equity are key for employee loyalty and motivation, public recognition, especially by people the team respects, is key for employees to feel valued. Product leaders need to take the lead on public recognition and their product managers to do the same for their teams
• Members of empowered product teams can get wrapped up in work for long hours, which can have negative implications. They must be educated that burnout can happen easily and that it’s best to play the long game and recharge frequently as product management is a cognitive and creative problem-solving game. Furthermore, if the product leader works long hours, they need to communicate transparently that it’s their choice and not the expectation so that the team does not get wrapped in social pressures and biases
• Product leaders need to help to the extent possible for product managers to achieve their career aspirations. This requires building a coaching plan and helping them grow. But it also means clearly understanding their passion and if the role or the organization is not their main choice, helping them exit to a role of their competence and passion

Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash

2. Identify skill gaps

When the product leader and managers are set correctly, it’s time to build coaching plans. Effective coaching plans are about:

• Outlining the skills and criteria employees will be assessed on
• Identifying and measuring competence gaps
• Building plans to develop and cover those gaps

2.1 Coaching criteria

Empowered product teams need product leaders that feel considerable urgency toward raising the level of performance of their teams through people development and the provision of growth opportunities.

To get to this point, leaders need to correctly assess their teams, in this case, product managers, as a foundation for building successful coaching plans.

This assessment will be of the gap analysis form that assesses a person’s current level of competence across the following skills and dimensions of their role:

• Product knowledge
• Process know-how
• People skills

2.1.1 Product knowledge

Product knowledge is table stakes for product managers and they need to ramp up their knowledge in this area as early as possible and stay on top of it as they grow.

This is where a new product manager will spend most of his/her time in the onboarding process which could take 2–3 months with an aggressive focus. To gain product knowledge, product managers need to be educated on various dimensions and topics including:

• User/customer: knowing the users/customers and their behaviors
• Data: being deemed an expert and knowing the data the product organization has and works with to analyze the health of the product
• Industry/Domain: being on top of the trends in the ecosystem and competitive landscape
• Business: knowing what the various internal teams do to create value and understanding their concerns and constraints
• Operations: knowing how the product works through and through and managing to pitch the product to prospective customers and resolve their issues

2.1.2 Process know-how

Like any other occupation, product managers need to constantly improve their skills and understanding of the processes and techniques that help them create and deliver value. These include:

• Product discovery: understanding product risks and addressing them before building features through collaborative decision-making techniques that are focused on business outcomes
• Product optimization: using data and analytics to optimize a product after it has gone live through supporting delivery and collaborating responsibly with developers and product marketers
• Product development and delivery: while the primary responsibility of every product manager is to discover products, they should be well-versed in product development and delivery processes such as agile project management and able to effectively support developers and project managers in delivering products

2.1.3 People skills

Product managers can not survive without people skills and all need to consistently work toward developing and improving them. While aspects of the criteria to work on for people skills can vary based on the nature and context of a business, the following constitute the core skills needed to become an effective product manager.

• Team collaboration: working with the developers and designers requires mutual respect and structured communication processes that help all members leverage each other’s know-how to create and deliver value for users/customers
• Stakeholder collaboration: working as true partners and gaining mutual respect with various functions and units across the organizations such as marketing, sales, analytics, legal, finance, etc.
• Evangelism and influence: effective product managers need to share the product vision and strategy across the organization to motivate and inspire partners and stakeholders and gain their alignment and buy-in in helping the product reach success
• Leadership and persuasion: while product managers do not manage a lot of people, they need to persuade and lead the organization through effective communication and sound planning across stressful moments

2.2 Current capabilities versus expectations

With the criteria outlined, product leaders must assess the skills gaps of product managers and develop a S.M.A.R.T coaching plan.

The initial step is to assess where the employee needs to be in a skill or is A) expected to be, based on his/her tenure, experience, and the nature of the product, business environment, and organizational culture and promotion requirements, and B) where the employee currently is

• This could be, for example, a rating out of 10 for each criterion/skill
• The expectation is set by the direct manager of the employee
• Employees could be given the chance to conduct a self-assessment of where they land on each criterion, however, it is not uncommon for the product manager to have higher ratings than his/her manager and such differences will need to be discussed and managed appropriately, despite it being uncomfortable for sides at times

2.3 The coaching plan

With the gaps identified, areas for development will need to be prioritized and a maximum of three areas to be focused on in the coming quarter. Leaders will provide the trainee with training, coaching, reading, and/or exercises to help develop skills.

With the completion of developmental tasks and usage of the acquired skills at work, product leaders and managers will need to reassess gaps and if needed, they can spend another quarter covering the same skill or reprioritize areas for development.

It’s best to have a sit-down once a week or bi-weekly to cover employee progress and gather feedback for pivots or adjustments

Successful leaders aim to coach and develop their teams toward promotion. Promotion is a sign of the success of a leader. However, product leaders need to communicate the conditions of getting a promotion to employees which incorporates the feedback of other senior stakeholders and their opinions. While any leader will fight for his/her employee, there is limited leverage that they have and expectations need to be managed.

Leaders need to communicate with employees that they will make every effort to develop and prepare the employee for promotion and advocate for them, but a promotion and its timing can never be guaranteed due to the organizational procedures and various stakeholder involvements

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

3. Build the coaching plan

With the mindsets ready and skill sets to develop outlined, it’s time to go into the details of what needs to be put on the coaching plan of product managers.

3.1 Product knowledge

• User/customer: effective product management needs a 360 understanding of what internal stakeholders know about the users/customers and also getting out of the office and meeting them in person if in a B2B business setting or conducting and having access to user research and analytics in B2C settings. It’s best to start with internal resources available and when internal insights have been understood, it’s time to meet and interact with users/customers upfront. Internal teams that can help ramp up and educate product managers on user/customer knowledge include analytics, engineering, design, customer success/service, product marketing, and the founders if you are in a startup environment.
• Data: product managers will need to understand and use three types of data set: 1) user analytics that contains information on how users/customers interact with the product, 2) sales analytics that contains data about the product’s sales cycles, and 3) data warehouse analytics which stores data across time and shows change across time. A competent product manager needs to know what questions he/she can answer with each dataset and how to use the data to tell stories. To get trained, educated, and equipped on using this data, product managers will need to collaborate with the analytics team. Furthermore, product managers must understand the KPIs that they need to be handling as early as possible and stay on top of them.
• Industry/Domain: product managers will need to identify industry and market dynamics sources of information early on. This could be internal primary sources of market research and external secondary sources that publish insights. At times, the organization might have domain experts or consultants employed that could be a massive source of intelligence and insight for competency training. The goal of such acquaintance is for product managers to identify industry-wide and macro trends that are relevant to the product and help develop a competitive product strategy that overcomes risks and creates value. A simpler starting point for new product managers could be competitive analysis that helps identify key insights into what is supplied in the marketplace and its drivers.
• Business: the difference between competent and average product managers is related to how well they grasp the business context and ecosystem within which their product operates and creates value for users/customers and shareholders. A starting point would be for new product managers or those who need the training to fill out a business model canvas as a quick and easy way to understand the business ecosystem and to deep dive gradually into areas that are more complex for example the legal aspects of the business.
• Operations — Sales, Marketing, and Business Development (or GTM): product managers must get a comprehensive understanding of how their product is sold which can vary depending on the nature of the business. Product managers need to understand the entire sales funnel of their product and incorporate decisions based on those insights to ensure business viability.
• Operations — Finance: competent product managers need to have a deep understanding of their product’s financial standing on the revenue and cost sides. This will require understanding the financial KPIs and goals for every product, what they mean, and why while also working toward finding meaningful ways to deliver on those goals.
• Operations — Legal: all products need compliance with privacy, security, and ethical rules and regulations and competent product managers need to understand the boundaries of their gameplay and discover and build products accordingly.

— A note on customer centricity

Customer centricity is a massive buzzword! Everyone talks about how much they care about their customers, especially the senior executives. But when you look at the processes they have set up and how the organization goes about creating value for its users/customers such as the frequency and urgency with which they communicate and have meaningful contact with true customers, you realize that they really aren’t customer-centric and are mainly driven by market irregularities that have resulted in economic monopolies that seldom gives them the need to truly care about users/customers.

And this is very much related to 1) the market structure the organization is set up in, and 2) the culture the leaders of the business are preaching in action

In organizations where the leadership is not demonstrating sincere customer care, it’s going to be very hard to develop a mindset of customer-centricity in the product team.

Customer centricity comes from the very top!

However, in truly customer-centric organizations, product leaders need to develop this focus in their teams. Product leaders need to:

• Clearly and specifically define their product’s true customers. For example, in consumer media organizations, while businesses place ads and that’s how money is made, the true customers are the users who are giving their attention to the platform; if their attention is lost, then the businesses will not advertise either
• Develop a sense of empathy in their teams toward true customers
• Remove any sense of arrogance and cynicism toward customers
• Set up a minimum of 3–5 one-hour 1:1 customer interactions per week for the product designers, managers, and engineering leaders and have them report their stories and insights to the larger team(s) — these interactions are not to solicit what solutions to make/build for the users/customers but to get a sense of their pains and problems for collaboration and critical thinking

A culture of sincere and consistent customer centricity will take time to develop and there will be mistakes in judgment and execution along the way; it will require patience, consistent preaching, coaching, and the deployment of embedded processes to instill such culture in product teams.

3.2 Process know-how

• Product discovery: competent product managers should understand the value, usability, feasibility, viability, and ethical risks of their products and the tools and methods used to tackle them qualitatively and quantitatively. This is where product managers need to excel to create value and their leaders need to help them develop a rigorous training syllabus to cover all the various aspects of the discovery process.
• Product optimization: with products that are already in the market, competent product managers need to incrementally experiment and A/B test new solutions, features, and ideas to continually optimize their UX and value offering. Product optimization will also play a major role in transforming a legacy business and competently hired product managers need to be ready for such circumstances
• Product development and delivery: while product development and delivery is the main focus of the engineering team, it’s important that product managers understand the delivery techniques and routines that the engineers employ including continuous delivery, scrum, Kanban, or release planning, and have an active role during the product’s delivery lifecycle to help manage the health of the product’s business and communicate priorities and vision. It’s extremely useful if the product manager takes a short CSPO course to understand his/her responsibilities and learn to adequately use the project management and delivery tools that the organization uses.

3.3 People skills

While the previous two skill sets can be acquired rapidly through the investment of time and effort, a truly effective and competent product manager shines when they have the appropriate people skills and responsibilities when they have the self-awareness, willingness, and commitment to attaining people skills. Product leaders need to note that those who lack people skills and are unwilling to improve need to be moved to another job and a different organization.

• Team collaboration: modern product management is about acknowledging the role of product design and engineering and collaborating with them appreciatively and respectfully. Therefore competent and effective product managers establish and build relationships with their peers based on respect and trust. The best coaching style here would be to observe a product manager's interaction with peers and to provide feedback with little delay to improve on the course of action immediately — annual reviews are not helpful.
• Stakeholder collaboration: while it’s easier to build relations with immediate peers as product managers work with designers and engineers daily, other stakeholders including senior leaders and executives can be somewhat more challenging as they feel that they have significant authority at their disposal. To develop respect and trust, product managers need to place the time and effort needed to understand each stakeholder’s constraints and priorities and build viable solutions, and showcase the solution before launch. Building trust across the organization and with senior decision-makers takes time and many interactions and will need to be injected and coached to product managers across time and based on opportunities that arise.
• Evangelism and influence: competent product managers need to influence various stakeholders. Therefore a combination of influence, sales, communication, and presentation training programs need to be developed to help them grow and sell their convictions.

— A note on team collaboration

Collaboration has become so much of a junk word used in the office, that most people have forgotten what it truly means, and very few people call themselves anti-collaborative. Understanding the true meaning of collaboration is key for empowered product teams and is of special importance when teams have remote workers because strong and effective product teams outperform others by doing the following:

• Tackling risks (value, usability, feasibility, viability, and ethics) early on
• Solving hard problems collaboratively
• Hold themselves accountable for outcomes

To define the meaning of collaboration, let’s start with what it’s not:

• Collaboration does not mean having a consensus. Product teams that manage to agree on everything and seldom challenge each other on concepts and actions to be taken are not healthy ones
• Collaboration is not about producing artifacts. Effective product teams do not produce vast documents of requirements and user stories. Most often, these artifacts get in the way of effective collaboration.
• Collaboration is not to compromise. Collaborative product teams do not produce mediocre user experiences, with inept technology and dubious value propositions for their users/customers.

Effective product teams are mission-driven and focused on producing solutions that users/customers will love and that work for the business and each team member is there to bring an expertise and skill set to the table to help tackle the challenging problem. To deliver such solutions, the product management, design, and engineering team need to truly and intensely collaborate.

True collaboration manifests when product teams sit around prototypes and story maps as a team and consider the consider and discuss proposed solutions with the design team discussing the user experience, engineering contemplating the enabling technologies and feasibility, and product management considering the impact and consequences of the options on the users/customers and the business ecosystem.

Prototypes and story maps are critical to collaboration and the act of producing them facilitates true collaboration

In such scenarios, no one is telling any other party how to do their job but contemplating and working together to solve a challenging problem and each member is counting on the skills and expertise of others to succeed. This is true collaboration! And its impact is felt even more strongly when teams are employed with motivated and competent characters in each discipline.

Effective collaboration is the heart of strong product teams and is a combination of skills, character, and mindset and requires active coaching by product leaders to help new product managers to develop these skills.

— A note on stakeholder collaboration

Feature-driven product teams dread input from stakeholders as they view such inputs as dictatorial, debilitating, and obstacles to performance and value creation, and rarely do they appreciate the top-down view that treats the product team as hired resources to serve the business.

In empowered product teams, however, the team is inspired to serve the users/customers by building solutions they love and also that work for the business. For this to happen, empowered product teams need a healthy and trust-oriented relationship with various stakeholders, otherwise called their business partners.

In such conditions, product managers are not there to gather requirements from stakeholders and build a laundry list of features to develop. Rather, competent product managers in empowered teams aim to listen diligently and understand each stakeholder’s responsibilities and concerns and to create value for them also. And granted, this is not easy and requires patience and empathy, but when done correctly, is a true indication of a competent product manager.

To build this mindset, product leaders need to coach reports on the role of each stakeholder, what they do, their concerns, and what they need to succeed at their jobs.

— A note on building trust

Modern product work is all about relationships and therefore a product team’s effectiveness depends on its ability to work competently with a range of personalities and their agendas. This means that product leaders need to coach their teams on understanding the importance of deliberately building trust with various stakeholders and partners.

To help the team build the foundation for trust and smooth out professional interactions:

• List the stakeholders and partners that the team needs to work with regularly
• Identify the top 3–5 people that the team’s success would depend on them
• Identify the top 3 people that are difficult to work with due to personality or interest clashes
• Have the team set up 1:1 (bi)weekly calls and meetup schedules with these people and stick to them even if they have no work agendas and get to know each others’ interests outside of work

While some may not be comfortable with this, it must be insisted upon and executed with rigor and a focus on building trust for collaborative growth. If a team member is uncomfortable with such an arrangement, then they may just be in the wrong job and function.

— Coaching technique suggestion: Amazon’s written narrative

Effective and competent product managers often need to argue for costly and risky asks such as large projects and significant new efforts, and this will mean that various people in the organization will have questions and thoughts that need to be answered.

The answer is that Amazon has fundamentally innovated in how to scale the process of bringing groups of people deeply up to speed in new spaces and making critical decisions based on that insight quickly. Speed and scale are weapons and Amazon has already told everyone its secret… if only they have the discipline to implement it — Brad Porter, VP of Engineering at Amazon

To master the skill of making arguments, Amazon uses a written narrative technique that happens before any presentation, meeting, and discussion meetups where the writer of the document explains their arguments and recommendations in a minimum of 6 pages of narrative form. The details covered could entail the problems being solved, their value to the business and customers, and the strategy for solving them. A well thought and written narrative should consider the concerns of all relevant stakeholders and partners and inspire and convince them as they read.

The Anatomy of an Amazon 6-pager

The 6-pager written narrative can be a great tool for product leaders to coach product managers on their negotiation, influence, and evangelism skills.

• Leadership and persuasion: product managers don’t have too many direct reports, so their span of authority is little, and need to persuade and lead others through their excellent leadership skills. Most often, effective and competent product managers earn their leadership through consistent and effective collaboration, evangelism and salesmanship, and soft influence. This is the ultimate indicator of a product manager’s readiness for promotion.

— A note on coaching time management

Competent product managers need to produce quality product discovery work that finds and delivers meaningful solutions to difficult problems. This will require a minimum of ~4 hours per day spent on product discovery and if product managers are scrambling from one meeting to another and complaining about not doing real product work, that comes down to either a bad product culture where room for development is very limited for product leaders and managers or weak time management abilities. If it’s the latter, then the product leaders need to coach reports on time management.

Product discovery related work should entail 50% of a product managers daily work

A starting point would be to break down the time the burdened product manager into hour blocks of the day and track their activities to understand the drivers of his/her pain. Most often, in these situations, the product manager is spending most of his/her time on project management rather than product management. This is driven due to several reasons including:

• Delivery priorities and urgencies that have the team mentally imbalanced and worried
• Lack of resources and quality of output on the project management side of work
• Lack of product managers understanding of what true product management is about and its difference from project management and delivery
• Comfort in operating on project management work to it being relatively more tangible compared to product discovery

While every role will entail some portion of project management, this should not define a product manager’s job. Product managers need to be coached to know that their priority is to suggest solutions to the engineers that will be deemed valuable by users/customers — and this risk management effort will need ~4 hours of focus per day.

To help product managers attain this standard, they should block the 4 hours per day on their calendars and protect that time for dedicated product discovery work. If this does not happen, then product managers will need to extend their work hours beyond daily standards to meet true discovery expectations and will eventually burn out or the organization will not consistently and continuously deliver value to its users/customers and demise.

Additionally, product managers need to become more effective in their output and productivity in product discovery and it’s the responsibility of the product leader to coach product managers on what that means and how to achieve it. Product leaders need to consistently and continuously coach product managers on the fundamentals of being effective and competent product managers.

— A note on the art of critical thinking

When hiring product managers, rather than using terms such as “smart” for a candidate, it’s important for product leaders to be clear about the critical thinking abilities in reports. Product leaders need to note that :

• At the core of product management lies problems solving skills that require critical thinking, and
• Intelligence and knowledge do not translate to critical thinking competence

Product managers solve problems by finding solutions that are:

• Valuable for the users/customers
• Viable for the business
• Usable (with the help of the designers)
• Feasible (with the help of the engineers)
• Ethical

This requires a generalist approach to problem-solving and requires critical thinking to create value. Therefore it is important to identify candidates with high critical thinking abilities during interviews and to consistently and continuously develop their competence in the area. The written narrative can be a massive training and coaching tool for product managers that need to improve their critical thinking abilities.

Solving problems by thinking critically

— A note on the art of decision making

While in feature-driven product teams, most of the meaningful decision is made upstream by top management and stakeholders, in empowered product teams, all decisions are pushed down to product teams. Consequentially, empowered product teams are expected to be making “good” decisions.

“Good” decisions are defined as decisions made where the rest of the executives and stakeholders including users/customers understand and support, even if they disagree with

To make good decisions:

• Good product teams realize that their decisions need to be embedded in a foundation of integrity meaning that they a) are perceived to be based on dependable commitments, b) are based on the best interests of the organization, c) the product team holds itself accountable to the expected results
• The parties and stakeholders involved need to feel respected and heard and understand the outcomes these decisions will strive towards

To coach and develop good decision-making in product teams, leaders need to instill these behaviors in their teams:

• Performing risk and consequence analysis: not all decisions are equal, such as the decision to perform a bug fix vs. launching a new experience. The consequence of the decision for a failure, if it involves a mistake or unforeseen failure can be huge. Therefore, competent product managers need to collect all critical information needed before making a decision and if they are to make decisions based on imperfect information, then appropriate communication with relevant people and how they will be impacted should be made. Any good plan of action, especially for high-risk and high-consequence decisions, should involve risk mitigation and quick-fix solutions. This is an area where novice product managers struggle, especially when they have ambitious career aspirations
• Having impetus for collaborative decision-making: competent product managers know that they depend on others’ expertise and delegate design/usability and feasibility decisions to their colleagues and their colleagues expect product managers to make decisions related to value creation and business viability. Good decision-making is not about having complete consensus, democracy, or a benevolent dictator providing answers but about a collaboration that depends on people’s expertise.
• Resolving conflict through evidence: when decisions are made collaboratively, disagreements are bound to surface between designers, product managers, and engineers. Such disagreements are normal and healthy for empowered product teams to remain mission-driven. However, the critical skill needed is to professionally resolve these conflicts. Competent product managers need to know how to run tests through low-expense discovery and validation techniques such as prototypes and story mapping. Although there will be circumstances whereby data and evidence might not be enough for alignment and disagreements could pursue, which is still fine and an indication of a healthy interaction in product teams. However, people need to feel that their thoughts and perspectives were heard and considered.
• Demonstrating transparency: good decisions require the entire team to be brought along during the decision-making process and the rationale for it and competent product managers do not want others to think that they are making uninformed decisions, ignoring important concerns, or pursuing personal agendas. In addition to full transparency, especially with major decisions, product managers need to have strong reasoning to back their decision for which the written narrative can be extremely helpful.
• Committing fully: at all times, especially when there are disagreements, competent product managers need to indicate a full commitment to the decision that is made, even when they disagree with it and to show that they will do all they can to help it succeed. Communication needs to be made transparently with full deliberation of the context and to have the impetus to action with constructive intentions. Product managers need to surface all opinions and while empathizing with concerns, push for alignment to get the decision over the line.

Great decision-making is not easy and will develop over a product team’s career. However, competent product managers need to be coached to:

• Identify issues that require critical decision-making early on
• Do not revisit decisions you’ve made and have an impetus for action when decisions are made
• Remember that all life-altering opportunities are initially tough decisions that require courage and collaborative wisdom

— A note on running effective meetings

Poorly set up meetings can prevent people from doing important work. On the other hand, effective meetings that are well-prepared with clear stories, logic, and information flows and perfectly communicated can lead to effective problems solving sessions and stakeholder buy-ins.

Product leaders need to develop meeting management skills in product managers. However, the meeting discussed here is not daily routine project management sessions such as standups or retrospectives. The scope of a “meeting” discussed here is when a session goes beyond the immediate product team and involves other stakeholders, executives, partners, or members of other teams.

One important note to consider is that if there is a way to serve the purpose of the gathering asynchronously, meaning that you don’t need to hold a meeting where people need to drop all they are doing, then take that option — such is the case you need to communicate a status update or feature release.

However, if you must hold meetings, the purpose of it will fall under the following categories:

• To communicate information: this is when the product manager needs to communicate nontrivial information that is deemed to be too complex to be shared asynchronously such as when the product strategy is to be explained.
• To make decisions: this happens when a decision needs to be made which is beyond the power of the product team because it will have implications that impact others in the organization with substantial risks and consequences. To help better prepare for such meetings, it’s best to write up a written narrative.
• To solve problems: this is when the product team doesn’t know the best course of action, otherwise, it would have become a decision or alignment/communication meeting and requires input from others. This could be a postmortem after a failed launch or an outage.

To have effective meetings, competent product managers need to know how to organize them. There are 5 components to organizing effective meetings:

• Purpose: to be clear and specific
• Attendees: with a list of must-be present otherwise the meeting will get canceled and optional
• Preparation: having clarity on the content, the right medium, images, visuals, and presentations, the reviewed written narrative, a clear explanation of the context and situation, relevant data, and a list of FAQs to ratify before the meeting
• Facilitation: the meeting organizer is not there to police the meeting, but to ensure the right conversations are made and necessary decisions are made
• Follow-ups: when a conclusion is made, which could be that there is no conclusion and another meeting is necessary, this will require notifying each stakeholder of the items they will need to follow up on and deliver

To reiterate:

• Don’t hold meetings if you don’t have to
• Organize meetings with purpose and readiness and follow them up until they accomplish their intended purpose

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

4. The feedback loop: ‘1-on-1’s

While the 1:1 should be at the foundation of proper coaching and ongoing mechanism to help product managers reach their human potential, seldom do leaders utilize it well. The are 10 core principles to running effective 1:1 sessions with reports, in this case, product managers:

• Helping the product manager reach his/her potential. While work and task updates are discussed in 1:1s, the foremost goal of these meetings is to develop the personnel’s competence and to help him/her reach his/her potential.
• Developing the relationship and building trust. The product manager or employee must understand that the leader is sincerely and genuinely committed to helping him/her reach full potential. The employee needs to understand that his/her promotion is the leader’s success and an indication that they have done their job well. And the employee needs to understand that by speaking honestly and frankly, they can get promoted and fulfill their potential. And only then will effective development take place.
• Onboarding and transitioning smoothly. With new employees and until they are deemed competent and effective, it’s the responsibility of the leader to ensure output and decision-making effectiveness. With proper planning, this period should not last more than 3 months. Developmental coaching should kick off after the new product manager has been onboarded.
• Once per week and no less than 30 minutes. 1:1s are trust and relationship-building touchpoints and while they can be rescheduled now and then, they should never be missed. For new employees, these touchpoints could be more than once per week in the initial phase.
• Communicating the business context. Developing empowered and inspired product teams that solve difficult problems requires transparent communication of the business and strategic context which can consist of understanding the company mission and objectives for the year, product vision and strategy, and the team objectives for the year.
• Reviewing progress and updating the coaching plan. 1:1s are meeting where the leader and employee go over the coaching plan and the progress made reviewing insights learned and further refinement the plan for the months to come.
• Role modeling to think and perform professionally like a product person. Becoming competent at any task requires humans to perform mimesis and find role models that show them the way in action. Product leaders need to use 1:1s as modeling sessions that show product managers how to think and act like a product manager across the range of skills categories discussed earlier.
• Providing feedback. Honest and constructive feedback is the main source of value a leader can provide to his/her reports. Feedback should be timely and well thought out with praise in the public and criticism in private. Feedback can come both directly from the leader and indirectly from other peers and collaborators. Furthermore, criticisms should be delivered in an empathetic manner and with constructive mechanisms to develop and overcome weaknesses.
• Fostering continuous improvement. New technologies and changing market dynamics requires all employees, product managers, and their leader to continuously invest in their skills and competencies. If conducted to develop each other, 1:1s are there to serve people and the organization to develop and continuously improve.
• Being open to bilateral feedback. While it could be tough on the ego of most leaders, they should always be open to feedback from their reports. 1:1s should always include the question: “do you have any feedback for me?” so that leaders can also improve their relationship and leadership style with reports to help them develop their leadership traits.

— A note on communicating the business context

Proper coaching can not happen if the team does not have the necessary understanding of the broader business context, otherwise referred to as the strategic business context, in which it’s operating. Understanding this strategic context empowers teams to make better decisions. Normally, strategic context coaching is part of the onboarding of any new product person and needs to be communicated with and kept in the loop whenever needed. Every product team member needs to understand the strategic context within which they are operating and demonstrate that understanding in statements, actions, decisions, and contributions — and it’s the responsibility of the product leader to train and coach product managers on this topic.

[Product] Leaders should provide strategic updates and information to their team in the following six areas:

• Mission: this is the purpose of the organization and aims to communicate why everyone is at the organization. A company mission is a simple and durable statement and can hold for decades. If employees do not know their corporate mission, then there is something seriously working with their culture and leaders.
• Business [Health] metrics: otherwise referred to as the company scorecard or dashboard, is the set of KPIs that help provide an overall understanding of the state and health of the business and the performance of the various business units and their business dynamics.
• Objectives: these are devised every year as performance targets and selected by the senior leadership team. They could be related to various factors including growth, expansion, profitability, customer satisfaction, etc. The product team will set its quarterly Key Results based on the objectives that the leadership has devised.
• Product vision and principles: product teams deliver on their corporate mission by aligning and developing their product vision and principles that outline how they will develop products and services for users/customers. The product vision is generally a 3–10 year outlook that describes the future to be, providing a tangible roadmap toward fulfilling the corporate mission. The product vision is what the product team will be working on for several years and is considered their North Star and a hiring hook for new talent. Product principles complement the vision by stating the intended values and beliefs that inform the team’s decisions, especially when prioritization and trade-off decisions are needed.
• Team topology: product teams need to know what each team is responsible for, why they are set up the way they are, how they related to each other, and how they fit into the bigger organizational picture.
• Product strategy: while the corporate mission and product vision are usually high-level and at times vague, the product strategy is a specific roadmap with action plans that pave the path as to how the team will meet its objectives. When a team knows its product strategy, it’s time to set up its OKRs

Photo by Magnet.me on Unsplash

Reasons your 1:1s are not effective

To feel great in a new role and to grow in the organization, you need to understand how dedicated your new leader is to coaching. To understand this, all you need to do is to ask him/her how he/she conducts 1:1s. If you feel your leader’s 1:1s are not conducted effectively, the following could be the reasons:

• The leader just does not care
• The leader is an egotistic micromanager and treats the 1:1s as a task-based reporting session than a personnel development session
• The leader is not a great listener and lacks the psychological maturity and empathy for the employee and their time
• The leader is incapable of providing feedback, especially criticisms that are accompanied by their coaching action plans
• The leader lacks the competency for the role and has insecurities
• The leader is unable of making the hard decision of letting go of an employee that will never reach his/her potential at their organization

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