Being a good product coach
I am often inspired by what Marty Cagan (godfather of modern product management and my unofficial mentor) writes about. But yesterday’s post on his well-trafficked Silicon Valley Product Group blog particularly hits home.
He writes about “good product coach, bad product coach" and since I obviously aim to be a GOOD product coach, I have lots of thoughts.
First off— it’s past time for me to say a few words about my own journey into the seat of “product coach” as a profession.
When I left the product company I helped grow from startup to market leader a few years ago, I started out thinking I would do freelance/fractional product leadership. CPO-for-hire type gigs. What I quickly learned was that many roles can successfully be outsourced/supplemented through consulting but “head of product” for a product company ain’t one of them.
Why? For a product company (companies who build tech products for a living), it’s hard to come up with a more jugularly strategic role than head of product. It’s like if a heart hospital decided to outsource their cardiology services… or a professor decided to hire out their primary research. It’s too close to the ribs to outsource comfortably (for me or the hiring company).
I found that the best way I could help those companies was to advise on how to structure themselves and successfully hire and onboard a great head of product to fill the primary gap. To help them cut to the chase for long term health of the company. (See * note below— there are great reasons why a company might need to hire an interim product leader. This is me musing about my own career preferences.)
About the time I figured that out for myself, Marty Cagan issued a first-time call for product coaches and I immediately applied. I’ll admit a bit of “who… me???” syndrome because, while I had ardently embraced role as coach for my own product team as Chief Product Officer, the only external product coaches I knew then were Marty himself and Jim Morris (a freelance coach I had briefly worked with in my last full time role… and Jim was GREAT).
I was delighted to be accepted and made my way to New York in December 2022 where I sat in a room with 50 other Cagan-style product coaches from around the world and Marty led us through a few days of career-changing insights about the need for good product coaches and how we could help bring the tech industry forward, collectively.
That gathering changed a lot of things for me. In addition to feeling like my career had suddenly opened an exciting new chapter where I could scale-out my years of experience leading product development, I also found a kindred tribe of likeminded entrepreneurs who not only lived Cagan’s ideas about building tech products like I did, but also were busy building themselves as “products,” using dogfooded tools to build their own entrepreneurial coaching businesses.
Being tied to Marty’s group (both philosophically and —through Marty’s generosity— directly to him and the wisdom of the SVPG partners) provides us needed insight into the evolving field of tech product management as well as what the larger tech “industry” is doing.
Collectively, across Marty and these 50+ coaches all working with companies globally, we pretty well know what’s going on in the technology landscape overall— with hiring, with the economy, with trends, with destructive anti-patterns— and importantly, how to help companies successfully avoid pitfalls and better swim in the fast-moving current of tech today.
What Marty writes in yesterday’s post (below) epitomizes my own aims as your product coach.
“Good product coaches define their success by your success in achieving outcomes. Whether that’s solving a tough problem in product discovery, or coming up with an effective product strategy that delivers the necessary business results, or preparing you for a successful promotion. Moreover, a strong product coach directs the recognition for the success to the people they are coaching. Bad product coaches try to define success as the completion of the set of activities that they can help with.”
— Marty Cagan in Good Product Coach, Bad Product Coach
Yet another reason I am much more comfortable with the title “coach” vs. “consultant.” Consultants are often there to drive output (and bill for it).
As coach, I am there unambiguously to help you achieve your own goals of success. Using my own experience and industry knowledge as guiderails.
A different approach with very different outcomes.
I’m proud to be a product coach and humbled to work with the clients I do.
This leads me to more thoughts about my own evolution as coach over these last two years. More on that in another post.
*Counter argument! Of course, there are many out there doing temporary CEO stints and other interim “heart and lungs” functions in a company (like head of product). I know some of them and they are deeply talented folks. And sometimes, a company finds themselves unexpectedly with a critical gap around the leadership table and must do something in-interim. I simply didn’t relish the deep end feeling of determining a company’s core product strategy without full market and company context (or frankly, without being held responsible for the outcome— that heavy mantle of responsibility is synonymous with real leadership). My personal preference for my own career.
