How to Decide What Type of Product Coach is Right for You
So you’ve decided that you’re interested in product coaching? That’s great! But it’s a very broad ecosystem and it’s easy to get overwhelmed by everything that’s out there. So my goal is to help you navigate the different offerings and figure out what’s right for you.
Because this is quite a lengthy post, here’s an overview of each section so you can skip ahead to whatever is most relevant to you.
Coaching in general—what coaches do
Different settings for coaching
Different types of coaches for product people
When does it make sense to hire a coach?
Find the coach that’s right for you
Coaching in general—what coaches do
Let’s start with a definition of coaching: Coaching is the practice of having ongoing, quality, one-on-one conversations to help someone reach their full potential. It involves at least two parties, the coach and the coachee (the person being coached).
Coaching tends to focus on asking questions vs. giving advice or telling you what to do. Check out the illustration below. I believe that the majority of coaching needs to occur on the right-hand side of the chart, where the coachee’s thinking is being challenged in order to promote long-term growth.
You can look at coaching as a four-part cycle with a clear beginning point that progresses from step to step during the course of the quality conversations coaches have with our people. This cycle is ongoing—people continuously improve as they pass through the cycle, over and over again. This is what coaches do if you hire one to work with you.
Step 1: Gain clarity. The number one thing coaches do is help their coachees to gain clarity. This is usually accomplished in the first couple of coaching sessions where the coach and their coachee get to know each other, decide if they can work together, and then define the topics and goals of the coaching.
The cycle usually starts with feedback: feedback you got from your team, peers, or stakeholders, or information you’ve shared with your coach. This could be anything from a career-development topic to a learning goal to any other improvement you need to make. Your coach will likely ask you to answer these questions (or similar ones), so it helps to spend some time thinking about them before your initial session:
What’s important to you right now? (Example: Getting some to-dos off my list.)
What’s this really about for you? (Example: Too many moving parts and no one to delegate to!)
What needs to change? (Example: I need to identify people who could take something off my plate and I want to get better at delegation.)
Step 2: Create a strategy for success. Once you’ve agreed on the goal for your coaching, the next step is to work with your coach to come up with tactics to put it into action—a strategy for success. Your coach will help you see what success looks and feels like and get new perspectives and fresh possibilities.
Step 3: Act. Now that you have a strategy for success, it’s time to put it into action: first steps, next steps, commitment, and follow-up. A coach doesn’t do the work—they help their people find ways to take steps toward reaching their goals. A coach provides the guardrails that help keep their coachees on track.
Step 4: Evaluate progress. A good coach will hold you accountable, often through follow-up meetings and checking results. You will evaluate your progress, adjust your tactics if necessary, and perhaps move onto a new coaching topic or goal. Good coaches ask the right questions at the right time—that’s their superpower. They ask questions that challenge their coachees, that initiate action, and that ultimately foster change. And a good coach will help their coachee reflect on the whole process to make sure the coachee’s personal growth toolbox gets an upgrade as well.
Good coaches ask the right questions at the right time—that’s their superpower. Tweet This
If you’re looking to explore the topic of coaching in more detail (especially who needs a coach and why), I highly recommend this blog post by Barry O’Reilly and Kate Leto.
Different settings for coaching
You can choose different settings for your coaching depending on your needs and preferences. The most common coaching settings are:
Individual. This is great if you have very specific—maybe even personal—challenges you want to work on. The coach will help you optimize your professional and personal potential.
Group of people with the same task (AKA “a team” like a product trio tasked with solving a customer problem together). This is ideal if you want to learn together and take advantage of your different backgrounds to help you gain a new perspective on what you do. The coach’s focus is on optimizing the team’s performance as a whole and on the connections between team members. Your team needs to be willing to go through this coaching together and your company will likely be the one who is organizing this type of coaching.
Group of people with the same role (e.g. a Group of product leaders or PMs from various companies or parts of one company). This approach is recommended if you want to learn from others while a coach is challenging new ways of thinking for all of you. In this setting, it’s not just about answering the questions yourself, but listening to how others answer the coach’s questions and the problems and challenges they share. And it is a great way to align across the board. Imagine all product leads from your company participating in group coaching together. They could discuss some of the hard challenges they are having while someone facilitates the discussion and asks thought-provoking questions.
We can further divide this category into three sub-categories. Public group coaching is when participants come from a range of companies (and therefore a range of industries and geographies, too). Within one company, you might also have internal group coaching, where participants come from random parts of the company and don’t necessarily work together on a regular basis. Finally, within a company setting, you might also have internal team coaching, when all of the members of the group are working together on a product, portfolio, or are part of the same leadership team.
By the way, if you’re wondering if I’d be the right fit for your needs, I now exclusively offer product leadership coaching in a 1:1 setting or in a team coaching setting where participants share the same task (like run the product org) and same role (like Product Director or Product Team Lead) within the same organization. Learn more about my coaching packages and availability here.
Important question: Who pays for coaching?
Whenever possible, I encourage you to ask your company to pay for your coaching. If you have a learning & development budget, you may be able to put that toward coaching instead of attending a conference or course, for example.
If you’re looking for some support to make the case to your manager for coaching, here are a few arguments you can make:
Coaching helps me learn/grow/develop for a longer period of time rather than the one or two days I’d spend at a conference. The coaching format also gives me accountability and will help me follow up on action items to apply what I’ve learned.
Coaching is easier to fit into my schedule. Rather than traveling somewhere and taking a few full days off, I can schedule my coaching calls for an hour once a week or every other week.
Finally, keep in mind that as a leader, you may feel like you should be devoting all your time and energy to helping your team grow. But this will actually hurt you and your company in the long run. To put it simply, when leaders develop their own skills, they can have an exponential impact on their team’s work. To explore this concept in more detail, see my blog post Why Leaders Shouldn’t Eat Last.
Different types of coaches for product people
What type of coach do you need? It all depends on your particular needs and goals. Here are some of the most common types of coaches for product people.
One quick note: As we are focusing on product people, we will not be diving into broader roles like public speaking coach, agile coach, OKR coach, or meeting facilitation coach.
Leadership Coach / Executive Coach: A leadership coach works with clients to maximize performance and increase their leadership skills in the workplace. Their actionable guidance, advice, and support regularly transform the leader's personal life in a positive way. But—and this is very important—they don’t necessarily have ANY product management background. Since their focus is more broad, they tend to coach people from various backgrounds and they won’t necessarily be familiar with the specifics of product leadership.
Product Discovery Coach: They are typically former product managers or product designers (or former leaders of these areas) who have usually worked for, or with, leading product companies. They are able to work side by side with actual product managers and designers, and not just recite Agile platitudes, but actually show the team how to work effectively. They focus on the product work and over time help these teams or product trios to execute and apply product discovery themselves. Read more about product discovery coaches here.
Product Coach: Product Coaches help individual contributors to get better in their product craft. They have worked as product managers themselves and are therefore a great partner to talk to if you want to work on skills and competencies like storytelling, roadmapping, planning in iterations, running experiments, and upping your interview skills, to name just a few. Many of them use an initial assessment (like my PMwheel) to help you find your coaching topic. Whatever topic you want to focus on, they can help you to gain clarity and create your strategy for success. But generally their sessions won't be focused on the “acquiring know-how” bit—it’s more about helping you find the way you learn best and accompanying you on this journey. They will hold you accountable to the actions you picked and help you find the content (books, talks, articles, templates, etc.) that will be relevant in your particular context.
PM Career Coach: A PM Career Coach will help you to transition from an individual contributor on a product team to a product leader or coach you through the process of landing a new product job. They can review your résumé and coach you on the interview process. They may also help you identify the type of role and company where you’re likely to succeed.
Product Leadership Coach: A Product Leadership Coach focuses on people that are managing the product organization. These people hold titles like: Product Team Lead, Head of Product, CPO, and Manager of Product Management. Product Leadership Coaches have led a product organization themselves and know a good bit of the things executive coaches usually focus on. They help product leads get better at what they do. Sessions tend to fall into three main buckets:
People: How to get better at people development, 1:1s, performance reviews, hiring, onboarding, outplacement
Process: How to build a better “shipyard,” how to structure teams to operate efficiently without losing flexibility, how to create a culture of sharing learnings and best practices
Product: How to know if you’re building the right things, how to create enough alignment and directional clarity across teams, how to stay innovative
Product Leadership Coaching is what I’ve been focusing on over the last two years (in addition to writing my book, STRONG Product People). If you’d like to learn more about my work and my offerings for product leaders, you can find that information here: https://www.petra-wille.com/coaching-packages
When does it make sense to hire a coach?
When is the ideal time to hire a coach? There are a few milestones to look out for—and a few signs that maybe this isn’t the right time for you.
It’s the right time to hire a coach:
When you are on a mission. When you want to increase your influence in the organization and want to create an action plan for how to achieve that or if you are on a mission to change the culture of your product organization.
When you need some out of the box thinking. Sometimes it's hard to step out of your comfort zone or change perspectives. If you find that hard to do on your own, a coach might help.
When you are stuck: You know what your coaching goal is (e.g. "My team and I need to get better at product discovery"), you know the theory and have made the first attempts, but now you’re feeling stuck. This is the perfect time to get an outside perspective and help.
When you need someone to ask you the right questions. Sometimes all you need is the right question at the right time to unblock your energy, to refocus your attention, or to pick your next action item. Coaches are good at doing exactly that.
You should NOT start a coaching program if:
You can't commit yourself to it 100%. Coaching requires a big time investment. It’s not only the hours you spend with your coach—you should be ready to dedicate some additional time because you will either need to do some homework or prep work. In most cases this involves working on the action items you’ve created for yourself during the sessions.
You don't like to answer challenging questions. Coaches often ask challenging questions. Be prepared to answer questions like “What alternatives do you see in this particular situation?”, “What is your goal related to this issue?”, “Is that really something you want to change?”, and “When are you going to start the first action item?” If you don’t feel comfortable being challenged with questions like these, coaching might not be for you. If you want to investigate a bit more to see how you handle challenging questions, you could start a self-coaching MVP with my 52 Questions card deck. How do you react to these questions? Do they inspire you or make you feel uncomfortable?
All you want to do is to learn a new skill. If you know the specific skill you’d like to improve, like conducting user interviews, roadmapping, or writing backlog items, I recommend completing the basic learning cycle first. Start by reading a book, attending a meetup or training course, applying what you’ve learned in your context, sharing your learning with colleagues, and giving it another go before you reach out to a coach.
Find the coach that’s right for you
Unfortunately, there is no list of all available product coaches. People usually find out about coaches through word of mouth. If you know that you’re ready for a product coach and you understand what type of coach and what setting you’re looking for, start by asking your network. If you’re interested in working with me, please check out my coaching packages to see which one you think would be the best fit.
And if you’re looking for another type of product coaching that I don’t offer, please feel free to write me an email describing your situation and what you are looking for and I’m happy to recommend somebody.
But in general, the following checklist should help you to see if a coach is right for you:
Product background:
Has the coach worked as a product manager for a notable amount of time? I think at least 5 years is a good benchmark.
Has the coach worked in more than one company, in different positions and on different products? It’s even better if they have worked in different industries as all of this adds to their perspective.
Coaching background:
What do they know about topics like psychology, questioning techniques, reflection, ego development, coaching methods, and tools?
Have they taken any specific coaching program or certification?
Experience:
How long has the product coach been working as such? How many clients/coachees have they already coached?
Do you know anyone who has worked with the coach or can they give you a client reference?
Mastery:
Does the coach publish content that resonates with you? Many of us coaches are writing blog posts, books, or giving talks. Looking through some of the material might give you a better grasp of the coach’s perspective.
Dry run:
Does the coach offer a test session? Before you really commit to a coach, you should schedule an initial interview. Most of the time you will have to pay for this first hour. Nevertheless, the investment is manageable and you get an impression of whether you would like to continue working with the person.
After this session you could ask yourself: Have they been good at listening? Did they really try to understand my situation, challenges, my background, and the system (the team, department, tribe, company around you)? Have they been asking powerful questions? Do you have a clear understanding of how the coaching will be organized (tools they are using, cadence of the coaching sessions)?
And please talk to more than one coach before you decide on who’s the right coach for you!
Final thoughts
Coaching is helpful if you need an outside perspective, someone who asks you the right questions at the right time, and someone who holds you accountable while letting you take the lead on your own development.
Even within the world of product, there are many different types of coaching and different types of coaches. Start by defining your needs to find the one that will work best for you.
And finally, remember that you’ll only get as much out of coaching as you put into it. The act of hiring a coach alone will not lead to results. You need to be willing to do the hard work and deep thinking on your own.