What I’m Dedicating 2022 to: A Look at the Year Ahead
The end of the year is almost here, which means it’s a good time to take a moment to reflect and look to the future. If you’re curious about what 2022 holds in store for me and my business, here are a few of the key themes I’ve identified for the year.
I’ll keep beating the drum of “people development is important”
Developing people is an IMPORTANT topic, but not enough product leaders and organizations are on board with this. Until it becomes more widely accepted in our industry, I will keep saying this, I will keep talking about it, and I will keep promoting my book so that it gets into the hands of as many product leaders as possible. I firmly believe reading my book is one of the best ways to discover helpful, hands-on advice on product leadership and people development topics.
I will also continue to offer the coaching formats and book clubs so many product leaders have already benefited from. Learn more about my coaching options here.
I would like to dedicate more time to the topic of communities of practice
Over the last few years, I've seen many companies that either don’t invest in people development at all (with time or money) or focus solely on trainings and sending people to conferences.
But learning from product people in your own organization, understanding what works best for them, sharing learnings, and celebrating success together is such a powerful thing that I think more companies should put an effort in building such communities of practice.
And as community building is hard, I would like to provide them with tips, tricks, and stories from other organizations that have created such a community successfully.
If you have been busy creating a community of practice within your organization and would like to share your best practices, I’d be super grateful if you sent me an email to let me know!
I will focus on working with product leaders, product coaches, and product ops professionals
Given the topics mentioned above, it makes sense to focus my work on people who have an influence on a product organization, people development, and communities of practice. I therefore will focus on working with Product Leaders and Internal Product Coaches or Product Ops folks and stop working with individual contributors and product managers entirely—at least for the time being. I am working closely with Shaun Russell and Tobias Freudenreich who are excellent coaches for product managers and I absolutely recommend working with them if you’re a product manager in need of one-on-one coaching!
I will change a few aspects about the way I do coaching
A trainer is responsible for making sure you have learned a certain thing once the training is over. A consultant uses their experience to provide you with the answers to your most pressing questions. And a coach is somebody who asks the right questions at the right time to help you gain clarity on a certain topic and reveal your full potential.
This means that ideally, coaching conversations are not directed by the coach. The coach has no agenda and the coachee is in the driver’s seat. In way too many situations, coaching can veer into training or consulting territory. Sometimes this confusion originates with the companies that are booking the coaching, and sometimes it’s the coachees themselves who misunderstand. I would like to invest more time and energy in explaining the difference. This hopefully will attract people who are happy to put time and energy into their self-progression journey and it means I need to listen more than I talk!
I’m also thrilled to announce that I have been accepted into the University of California Berkeley’s Executive Coach Program, which will start in the summer of 2022. I look forward to developing my own coaching skills and expect to shift to undirected coaching, with the coachees guiding our conversations, as I described above.
I would like to work with the following types of customers
My areas of focus include companies that are dedicated to education, healthcare, and sustainability. I will continue to prioritize working with these types of customers.
I will also keep working with corporations to help them through agile transformation. I believe small changes can have a big impact there.
I will focus on some things that make me happy
One of the best aspects of being your own boss is designing your work life around the projects you really enjoy doing. Here are a few of the things I’m excited to spend my time on outside of my regular coaching activities.
Content production: I love writing blog posts, coming up with tools and templates, and speaking at conferences and meetups, so I will keep making time for these activities!
MTP Engage Hamburg: Earlier this year I wrote about why I love being involved with this conference as an organizer. I can’t wait to gather with the local product community when we have our event next summer.
Lectures - Executive MBA Program Hamburg Media School (Summer Elective): I’ll be teaching this short course where students will have the opportunity to come up with their own product idea, do some discovery, and build and test a prototype.
Making time for the things I love—my family, kitesurfing, and roaming around Europe.
If any of the topics I’ve covered here have resonated with you and you’d like to stay updated about how it’s all going, sign up for my newsletter. I’ll email you once a quarter with the latest in product leadership content (both my own and curated from other sources), links to upcoming events, and much more.
Hopefully 2022 holds many exciting topics for you, too, and you are looking forward to the year as much as I am.