How Can Coaching Help You?

While your goals in coaching will be unique and personal to you,  there are a few common focus areas clients bring to coaching with me. In all of these cases, our work is highly collaborative and my role is in helping the client reflect on the situation, take incremental actions, and learn from their outcomes. While this list is far from exhaustive, here are these common focus areas and how coaching helps clients in each of them.​

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Build executive presence 

You are a GPM or a (Sr.) Director of Product, but somehow you still don't feel like your seniority comes across in your self-presentation. You don't feel like your voice is heard and your opinions are recognized. Working together, we can find the root cause of this effect and, more importantly, find ways to raise your confidence and let it shine through your self-presentation. Spoiler: oftentimes, it comes down to remembering what you bring to the table. 

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Improve team engagement

The PMs on your team do their work — just like you ask them. But you don't see real ownership and enthusiasm. You want your product managers to be invested in the market, know the competitors, know the customers, and proactively come up with innovations, but so far, they are being quite reactive, and you feel like all the work is on you. Let's fix it by redefining your leadership style and finding ways to motivate and inspire the team!​

Delegate & give feedback

If you think it is a basic management skill, you will be surprised to know that this is the number one area product leaders struggle with. If you find yourself hoarding important work and doing it on weekends, know that you are not alone. If you shy away from giving candid feedback and just quietly hope that one of your PMs eventually figures it out, you are not alone either. The good news is that feedback and delegation are simply skills, just like anything else. We can work on these skills together.

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Stakeholder influence

One of our core responsibilities as product leaders is to build consensus. Cross-functional leaders around us have their own priorities and opinions about product vision and strategy. Engineering, Product Success, Marketing, Sales, and others — all of them look at the product from different angles and see something else. It can be challenging to harmonize all these voices without compromising on what is important to you. But by working together, we can find a way to do it. 

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Taking distance from work​

You know that feeling when every issue at work hits you really hard? For example, when one of your initiatives starts going sideways, when someone criticizes your decision, or—better yet—when your team is not doing as well as you hoped for. I see many product leaders who let these situations take over their lives. This anxiety ultimately stems from identifying with the results of your (and your teams') work. Let's work on that and find some distance from work.