PRODUCT MANAGER COACHING
Product managers face an often-bewildering range of challenges in the role.  Selecting which challenges need to be addressed first and the best way to address them relies heavily on previous experience.  Whilst product leaders are expected to provide this depth and breadth of experience to their teams, they often have their own set of challenges to address within their role that makes this difficult.  Product management coaching is there to offer guidance on the priority and methods to address their issues that they can evaluate and agree with their leadership and better progress towards the success of their products.

The typical areas of product management that coaching addresses in this service are:

• Product Strategy – How to interpret an organization’s vision, Mission, and strategy and align a corresponding product vision and strategy.
• Problem Discovery – What is discovery? How to adopt a continuous discovery mindset.  Product discovery vs project discovery.  Being outcome-focused to maximize value.  Structuring your discovery findings.  Defining markets and targeting them.  Adapting to changing market conditions
• Product Delivery – Aligning discovery with strategy. Mapping product discovery to delivery.  Delivery operating models and the product manager’s role in them.  Agile and Waterfall.  Road mapping approaches.
• Product Promotion – working with Marketing. Features and benefits.  Common product collateral.  Product and release launches.  Working with Sales.
• Stakeholder management – Engaging with different stakeholder groups. The Involvement/Authority matrix.  Internal and external communication.  Stakeholder action planning.
• Product Commercial measurement – Product business/revenue models. Product commercial forecasting.  Pricing and licensing approaches.  Key commercial metrics.
• Progress measurement – OKRs. Key metrics for products.

PRODUCT LEADER COACHING
Great product management people continue to acquire new skills, knowledge and experiences throughout their entire career.  In my 30 years as a product management professional with over half of that time in product leadership roles, I have been lucky enough to be exposed to a wide range of products, markets and experiences and can offer leaders alternative perspectives to consider along with contextual experience of the impact of those perspectives.

Some of the key areas I can address in product leadership are:

Portfolio vision – Market segments and market adjacency.  Cross-selling/upselling/Bundling.  Monetization approaches.  Competitor analysis.  Portfolio growth matrix.   Analyzing your organization’s strengths and opportunities.  Proposition testing.

Investment Planning – Build/buy/license.  Optimizing product team investments.  Tactical planning for unexpected performance.  Managing product and portfolio risk.

Zero To 1 products – Getting to first customer acquisition. Stages of customer value delivery.

Seeking enough product-market fit – Repeating customer acquisition to achieve consistency and predictability.

Scaling products – Maximizing customer acquisition consistency and predictability.  Adapting for market segments.

Standardization vs. Innovation –

 
PRODUCT TEAM COACHING
I have worked within and led many product teams at organizations of different sizes, at different stages of their lifecycle and in a wide array of target markets.  This breadth and depth of experience can be valuable in accelerating product initiatives particularly at the earlier stages.  The dynamics of getting teams to be great is both subtle and complex and this kind of coaching requires engagement with the leaders of team functions, individual functions and the whole team.

The typical elements covered in this coaching service are:

Structuring a successful product team – Key functions and disciplines.  The operating model.  Key roles and responsibilities.  Hiring processes.  Permanent/temporary/full-time/fractional staffing.

Discovery processes – Qualitative/Quantitative research.  Primary/secondary research.  Prospect/customer interviews.  Win/Loss analysis.  Competitive research.  Team involvement in discovery.  Opportunity evaluation.

Delivery processes – Waterfall/Agile. Backlog management.  Product demos.  Evaluation and improvement processes

Defining and measuring progress – Key metrics by stage.  Where, when and how to measure metrics.

Aligning with senior leadership – Roadmap reviews.  QBRs.

Roadmapping – Format options.  Target audiences.  Roadmapping objectives.  Roadmap revisions and communication.

https://www.pragmaticinstitute.com/resources/vertical/filtered/?jsf=jet-engine:filtered-widget&tax=content-format:9004111223037711

https://productschool.com/resources

https://www.pendo.io/resources/

https://www.productcompass.pm/

https://videos.producttalk.org/?

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https://www.coachpms.com/blog

https://json-knight.medium.com/

https://www.sjohnson717.com/