The Benefits of PM Career Coaching
Product managers are responsible for making a variety of high-impact decisions for a wide range of stakeholders. While this decision-making position can be a lot of fun, it can also feel frustrating or isolating at times, especially if you don’t feel well-equipped to tackle the situation.
But, you don’t need to go it alone. One of the fastest ways to deliver more impact, solve problems more effectively, and have more fun on the job is to work with a product management career coach.
In this guide, we’ll cover the kinds of problems that product management career coaches can solve for you, as well as how they help you succeed on the job.
We’ll also discuss the kinds of clients that PM career coaches work with, and we’ll wrap up with a framework for how to decide which PM coach is right for your needs.
Let’s jump in!
What kinds of problems can product management career coaches tackle?
The best product management career coaches are the ones who understand the challenges that their clients face. So, what kinds of problems do product managers face on the job?
Well, product managers play the role of both leader and janitor for their teams.
As a leader, they need to set the strategy for their product development teams, and they’re responsible for helping their teammates level up in their careers.
And, as a janitor, they’re responsible for making sure that nothing falls through the cracks, whether it’s a meeting, an email, or a deadline.
The PM is ultimately responsible for the success of their product, and they have many levers they can pull to improve their product’s success. They own both strategy and execution, and they constantly coordinate between customers, developers, and business stakeholders.
As ex-PMs themselves, product management career coaches are well-versed in the day-to-day struggles of product management. Therefore, they tend to be highly flexible, and have a large repertoire of topics that they can handle on your behalf.
Here are some examples of topics a product management career coach can help with:
Assessing and accelerating your career trajectory
Breaking down communication barriers at work
Improving product processes within your team
Establishing and refining product processes across stakeholders
Drawing out the best in your teammates, including engineering and design
Managing imposter syndrome and establishing self-confidence
Securing executive approvals, buy-in, and support
Determining your product management philosophy
Designing your roles and responsibilities as a product manager
Clarifying your values as a product manager
Identifying and resolving disconnects between your values vs. your org’s values
Gaining influence, respect, and gravitas at work
Developing a growth mindset and getting comfortable with confident humility
Bringing your authentic, genuine, and vulnerable self to work
Achieving balance between work, life, and other pursuits
Integrating your various identities in life to work together in harmony
In general, no matter what kind of problem you might run into as a product manager, a PM career coach can help guide you through actionable next steps.
After all, the best PM career coaches have lived out past lives as product managers themselves, so they understand the kinds of problems that you’re tackling at work!
How do product management career coaches work with clients?
Because product management is a discipline that encompasses dozens of responsibilities, there’s no “single” good answer for how to tackle a particular problem.
That’s why product management career coaches will come to the table with a framework, or a set of steps, to break down the problem and move you towards success.
Different coaches will have different frameworks. As an example, this is the coaching framework that we use here at Product Teacher:
Articulate and frame the problem
Leverage an unbiased third party perspective to assess the context around the problem
Prioritize this problem vs. other problems that the client might currently be facing
Identify “unknown unknowns” and manage uncertainty
Draw on deep firsthand experiences to provide real-life examples and perspectives
Compare against the collective experience of hundreds of past clients to find parallels and best practices
Identify a practical and actionable solution for the client, personalized to their specific situation
Plan out next steps and timelines to establish accountability
One of the most valuable outputs that you receive from coaching is that you gain a structured method for attacking various problems. So, you’ll want to work with a PM career coach who is thoughtful and highly structured. That way, you maximize the learnings that you get from each session, and you develop a toolkit for tackling future problems.
What kinds of clients do product management career coaches work with?
Because product management spans so many different industries and geographies, product management career coaches have a variety of clients that they work with.
As an example, Product Teacher’s clientele includes professionals from all over the world, including Kenya, Nigeria, Ukraine, Britain, Brazil, India, Japan, and more. (That said, most of our clients come from the United States and Canada.) And, we’ve served a variety of seniority levels, including both undergraduate students and heads of product.
We’ve also served both fast-growing startups and Fortune 500 companies, and we’ve served companies ranging from 5 to 500,000 employees. We’ve helped product managers in B2C companies in areas like social media and ecommerce, and we’ve helped product managers in B2C enterprise companies in areas like fintech, martech, real estate tech, and edtech.
Different product management coaching providers have different specialties, so you’ll want to check whether your provider covers your particular needs.
As an example, some coaches are better at B2C products, while others are better at B2B products. As another example, some providers might have specialized expertise in a specific industry (e.g. fintech), geography (e.g. the European Union), or product space (e.g. ML/AI).
How to pick a solid product management career coach
Once you start looking for a product management career coach, you’ll find that you have lots of potential options at your fingertips. But, that doesn’t mean that each coach is equally good!
In fact, product management career coaches are distributed on a power law basis. That is, the best coaches are exponentially better at coaching than the average coach, and the average coach is exponentially better at coaching than a below-average coach.
Here’s a diagram to illustrate the power-law distribution of product management career coaches:
The x-axis represents skill level, with the left-hand side being less skilled and the right-hand side being more skilled.
The y-axis is “how many coaches are at this skill level”, where a tall bar means “lots of coaches” and a short bar means “this is pretty rare to find.”
What the power law says is that it’s pretty easy to find lower-skilled coaches, but that there are only a handful of coaches who operate at the cutting edge of the industry.
Therefore, it’s worth making sure that you’ve selected a stellar product management career coach. It’s one of the most impactful decisions you’ll make in your career!
Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to vet potential coaches.
First, you want to ensure that the coach has an empathetic, caring mindset. You can quickly determine whether this is true by looking at testimonials and reviews. The best coaches get rave reviews, because they make their clients feel seen, heard, understood, and respected. They empower their clients to move mountains, and they don’t steal the spotlight from their clients.
What you don’t want is a coach who belittles you, or who refuses to listen to your pains. Imagine if you went to a doctor who diagnosed you without letting you speak a single word - you’d be furious!
Similarly, the best coaches spend significant time up front to listen to your situation and to ask clarifying questions before providing a diagnosis. Don’t be surprised if your coach asks you lots of questions - it’s all part of the discovery process!
Second, check to see that the coach has deep prior product management experience. Without this experience, the coach is likely going to provide you advice that isn’t relevant to your needs.
You want to aim for a coach who has at least 4 years of experience as an individual contributor product manager. And, you want to make sure that your coach has shipped multiple multimillion dollar products, so that you know that they’re legitimately skilled and have real battle scars from their working experiences.
Third, determine whether the coach has breadth of experience. The more perspectives they have, the more thoughtful and valuable their advice will be. Make sure you select a coach that has worked at different companies in the past and has tackled a variety of products.
Fourth, look up the coach’s published content, and evaluate whether their content provides you with actionable insight.
If your coach has written books, taught courses, recorded videos, spoken on podcasts, conducted workshops for companies, lectured for student organizations, and published dozens of articles, then you’ll generally be in good hands.
Summary
A product management career coach can help you break through bottlenecks and accelerate your product management career.
They’re worth the time and the money, and this is especially true if they’re deeply experienced, well-published, and are covered by money-back satisfaction guarantees.
After all, you want someone whose incentives are fully aligned with your interests. You deserve to get a full refund if you’re not satisfied with their services.
A core tenet of product management is that “you must first create value for your users before you can capture that value for yourself”, and that applies to product management career coaches too!
The best coaches will create value for you and make sure you’re 100% satisfied, because they treat themselves as products.
We encourage you to do your research and to consider which product management coach is right for you. If you decide that Product Teacher best fits your needs, we’d be honored to serve you!
At Product Teacher, we seek to increase the diversity of perspectives in product management. If you come from an underrepresented background, we’d love to hear from you and find ways to help you succeed in product!
