The value of product management expertise, business strategy and digital transformation is often released via ‘soft skills’ such as mentoring and teaching, coaching and facilitating. Delivery Managers may often be the experts in these skills within our teams, but the skills remain important for product managers too.
Teaching - The ability to offer the right knowledge, at the right time, taught in the right way, so that individuals, teams and organisations use the knowledge for their best benefit.
Mentoring - The ability to impart your experience, knowledge and guidance to help develop other product managers.
Coaching - The ability to act as a non-directive coach (with the coachee’s interest determining the direction, rather than your own expertise or opinion).
Facilitation - The ability to act as a neutral process holder, guiding and individual’s/team’s/organisation’s process of discovery, holding them to their purpose and definition of success.
There are many resources out there to help with developing our expertise when it comes to teaching, mentoring, coaching and facilitating, but these are particularly valuable:
Building Successful Communities of Practice by Emily Webber contains the model on which many government departments have designed their communities of practice - you can see a recent summary here. Emily’s community maturity model can measure improvements in the strength of our profession.
Everyone needs a coach by Kate Leto and Barry O’Reilly is a useful article for those new to coaching and mentoring; it provides and introduction to the difference between a coach, a mentor, and a consultant, and the possible value of each.
Executives and safety (get it done individuals can be toxic in agile environments) by Chris Matts
Hard skills vs. soft skills Kate Leto and Martin Eriksson