The Ascent of the Product Coach
Introduction
Product coaching is steadily gaining traction and awareness with companies.
This review explores the role of a Product Coach according to the Blackblot PMTK™ Methodology.
Sports Coaching
The concept of coaching likely started with sports.
Coaching is ingrained and prominent in all sports, particularly athletics, swimming, and ball sports.
There are schools, associations, and alliances dedicated to sports coaching.
Sports coaches are a fixture of American culture and have been for over a century.
In the USA, some football and basketball coaches enjoy celebrity status.
Given such visibility and acceptance in American society, it was only a matter of time before the coaching concept would migrate from sports to life/personal coaching and business coaching.
The Essence of Coaching
Coaching is a multi-faceted approach to help individuals fulfill their potential in life, business, or sports.
The coach is an authoritative, experienced, and knowledgeable figure who guides individuals to fulfill their potential.
Relative to business, there is a distinction between a Contractor (hired short-term to complete a specific work-related task), a Consultant (aka Advisor, a specialist who provides expert advice), and a Mentor (an experienced professional who shares their knowledge and experience).
In the business context, the coach, in addition to acting as a consultant and mentor, may also challenge individuals and organizations to alter their behavior, reactions, and thinking in a positive and meaningful way to better handle workplace situations, relationships, and challenges.
Accordingly, coaching’s multi-faceted approach will often demand the coach act as a consultant, mentor, instructor, and motivator/counselor.
Product Coaching
The fundamentals of product management, as outlined in PMTK, are universal.
There is always a market problem, a defined solution, and development work to build the chosen solution.
Furthermore, PMTK’s stance on product management’s universality applies to all product types and is not confined to software development.
Product management remains unaltered irrespective of the product, company, industry, or market.
Similarly, there are no specializations in product coaching based on products, industry, company type, or a component of the product management domain.
There is only product coaching, and a Product Coach is expected to be astute in all aspects of product management.
There is no compartmentalization in product coaching.
A Note on Agile/Scrum
Agile is the name of a modern commercialized service to elevate a company’s business agility via a coaching process referred to as a journey of transformation.
The Agile Coach helps impart agile manifesto values to the organization and its employees.
Scrum, a software development method modeled after American Football, was promoted in the early 2,000s as a practice to encourage agility in software development.
Neither Agile nor Scrum is related to product management.
Unless they possess credible product management skills and experience, Agile coaches and any of Scrum’s roles are unsuitable candidates to be product managers or product coaches.
Becoming a Product Coach
The talent pool from which product coaches are drawn is experienced and senior product managers, with some having product leadership experience.
Product coaches are competent product management professionals who regularly validate their skills, demonstrate commitment to their profession, and set themselves apart from others in the same work.
Becoming a product coach starts with working as a product manager, gaining experience, and learning how product management is applied and how companies operate.
One must be an actual product management practitioner to consider a transition to product coaching.
The Product Coach
According to Blackblot PMTK™ principles, Product Coaching is a multi-faceted approach to achieve better integration and more structure and consistency in applying the product management discipline.
In PMTK, the Product Coach is an authoritative, experienced, and knowledgeable figure who guides the product management team to achieve better integration and more structure and consistency in applying the product management discipline.
The Product Coach acts as a consultant, mentor, instructor, and motivator/counselor in all areas related to product management and its practitioners.
This encompassing charter means the Product Coach is versed in the fundamentals of product management, product planning, product marketing, and using tools and executing techniques, processes, and tasks that create winning products.
The profile of a Product Coach in PMTK comprises four areas, all with a bearing on product management:
- Education — Academic degree/s, training, and certification.
- Experience — Solid work record in product management.
- Soft Skills — Profound comprehension of psycho-social behaviors.
- Strategic Aptitude — Formulating a strategy mix and converting it to actions.
The Product Coach is a subject matter expert in product management who helps product managers and product management teams grow professionally.
A dominant trait of a successful Product Coach is being a great communicator.
The Product Coach identifies individual and team skills gaps, engages in remedial education, selects and sends product managers to training, and defines professional competency goals and plans for individual and team development.
Product coaches are retained as company employees or contractors (external contributors).
The Product Coach does not necessarily have industry experience or technical skills. Product coaches are not experts in the product or technology. Specifically, the coach is not the product’s top product manager.
Also, product coaches do not replace product executives and product leaders. These are different functions.
However, product coaches are excellent candidates for companies’ product executive and product leadership roles.
Note: Blackblot does not provide product coaching services. Blackblot provides PMTK consulting and mentoring services and the methodology, training, books, knowledge base, and certification services supporting the Blackblot Certified Product Coach™ program.
Summary
Product Coaching is steadily growing and finding its place alongside product management consultants and trainers.
Unlike trainers and consultants, who are foremost external contributors, product coaches are internal contributors and often company employees.
Product coaches are the present answer for the growing need at companies for an authoritative internal figure to help teams and practitioners overcome strategic and tactical challenges in product management.