What if they stay
“What if we train our people, and they leave. What if we don’t train our people and they stay.”
Jack of all trades master of none, connected to all units but part of none, a PM is in a unique position that enables them to get glimpses of the right direction for your product.\n They do it, in part, by interacting with many functions in the organization, using their horizontal knowledge set.
For this to remain effective, they needs to keep multiple skillset (Engineering, Design, Data, Marketing, Sales, Business, …) up to date. Not at an expert level, but one should understand how things work for each area and they do work that way.
On top of this requirement, one usually strives to constantly grow in Product Management hard and soft skills. That’s a lot to manage, if added to the main work activity.
To tackle the problem, many solutions.
- Trainings: Plenty of courses exists, multiple product schools and certifications have popped up in the past years
- Conferences/Social media: Learn from the most successful PMs on the planet, get inspired by their success
- Reading/audiobooks: Same as conference, get inspired by the successes and the learnings of the Product Management greats
- Working: Make your own mistakes to learn not to make them again :-)
- Coaching/Mentoring/Teaching: Get someome who has been there done that to give you a lift
In this article I want to focus on Coaching/Mentoring/Teaching as this is an area that I feel is way under-exploited.
Why a mentor
For me it simply started because I need someone to challenge my thinking.
It is very easy to get biased, stuck in your ways, taking some things for granted when you are focusing on your product(s) work.
Without someone to remind you of that, to challenge you to think twice, you’ll just have to hit the walls, one after another, to learn. For me, a mentor is there to make you aware of the presence of walls, and train you to deal with them.
In some companies, the line manager will happen to be the person taking that role. If your culture is so that:
- Your line manager’s role is to grow the people they manage
- You have good psychological safety
- Your line manager is more experienced in your field than you
Then it could work.
Otherwise, I would recommend looking into mentors.
Mentoring, coaching or teaching
There is usually a clear distinction between the 3 roles.
- A mentor is usually a more experienced person, sharing their learning and advices to help the mentee to reach their objectives.
- A coach is usually someone with domain knowledge (sometimes not), who will get the person to think through a problem/situation and keep in impartial stance.
- A teacher is usually someone with domain knowledge, who is going to expose the student to information to get them to learn something new.
I’ve had a 3 clear mentors over my career, and many more who take the role at least from time to time. I call them mentors but in reality they have been actually using the 3 techniques presented above when we have been interacting.
Personally, I have most grown when the person interacting with me adapted their technique to the situation at hand.
- Sometimes, I need to dig my way through a problem and my mentors have taken a coaching attitude.
- Sometimes they feel I lack critical domain knowledge and they will take a mentoring approach.
- Sometimes they feel it’s completely new to me, and they will give me a lesson to get started. Maybe I have been really lucky with my mentors but that has worked very well so far.
(In the coaching training sessions I have been in, it has been really clear that the coach should rarely, if ever, propose their opinion, remaining impartial to the coachee. I understand that it is required to let the person find their own answer, however right the coach think it might be, as otherwise, the coachee would not progress.
So I see how combining the 3 technique may be hairy to some.)
Coffee table or Meeting room?
Usually for me, it’s been “and”.
I am lucky enough to work with 2 of them (now only 1 anymore :( ) so I regularly challenge them, as I encounter them, to get their thoughts on a topic I find interesting.
I also have been having a regular session with each of them once every 2 week.
This comes down to me simply not always realizing when I actually need help, when I’m going towards a wall. This is a good moment to take to stop the work, take a step back and analyse. A bit like a personal retrospective, done with a fresh view and more experience.
Oh and sometimes the meeting room turns out to be a walk outside, which is a great way to think things through in a more refreshing setting (Especially in the Finnish winter).
Why multiple mentors?
I have had multiple mentors because each one of them has had a different set of skills, a different mindset, a different approach.
When one couldn’t help me with a problem, the others could. When I couldn’t understand well a topic with one, the others turn the right cogs.
Another point is that you don’t need to have multiple regular mentors permanently.
Many people jump in my life to intensively help me with an issue and moved on afterwards. It’s just a matter of choice of what do you feel you need.
But one thing is for sure, I have remained close to all my mentors.
Even if one has been further for a while, it’s a great pleasure to start meeting them again. Mentors over time turn into something very close to friends, if not directly friends.
So start searching today, if you haven’t already one. A mentor, even one, will equip you well for what’s to come.
Finding giant steps
But where do you find these treasured mentors?
Personally, I got to know Sonja at my wife’s christmas party, Antti at the Product Tank Helsinki meetup and Harri at my current workplace. I had met 2 of them before but only got to know them more personally in those occasions.
You may be able to find someone in your work organization already, with the bonus that they are already familiar to your context.
Networking events might be a good place to get to know people further down the experience path than you (For PM, look Product Tank for example).
There are also programs to meet mentors (For PMs, I know there is one in Mind the Product Slack, ProductBoard has one also, and there are probably plenty more).
One thing I absolutely recommend is that you ask the people for mentorship directly. Mentorship is a trust game, and if you fell you cannot entirely trust the person mentoring you, it will not work out.
I have long be worried about asking my mentors to take one the role as I didn’t want to waste their time for me. But surprisingly, each of them (literally) has told me that they also benefit greatly of our interaction and it also gets them to think about their own ways of working .
Preparing the next generation
When are you ready to jump sides?
To be honest, personally, I haven’t done it yet. I don’t feel that I would have enough learnings to be able to give to someone. I am sure that it will happen though. It is very important for me to give the way I have been given, to prepare the next generation. I am already seeing places where I could start mentoring juniors, so who knows, it might come faster than expected :) .