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Impactful startup support through product coaching

Summary

Product coaching can be a powerful support tool for startups as it helps a key startup function – product management – flourish. It requires a humble, coaching-oriented mindset to create sustainable impact based on the startups' abilities. To support a startup, focus on product, structure, process and culture to ensure covering all angles. Start with the founders and expand the circle to product leads to create the next wave of evangelists that can champion change for the organization, going in with a small core team, extended by on-demand experts.

Introduction: Coaching is the nourishment of the startup "body"

If a startup was a body, one could argue that brains and brawn are made up by team and talent, the lifeblood running through its veins consists of capital, cashflow (and data), and the nourishment comes in the shape of network and coaching.

To become a high-performing athlete, nourishment is the key element. The right people at the right time, the right coaching at the right time can propel startups to new dimensions. In this article, we'll look at the specific role of product coaching as part of impactful startup support (or nourishment, to stick with the metaphor). This is, of course, assuming that the startup gets its other life functions checked and improved, as well.

To achieve product-market-fit, or outmatch the competition, any startup needs to get Desirability, Viability, and Feasibility (DVF) right, in other words, it needs to build something people actually need, a way to make money with it and some way to actually build it in a scalable way.

Product management is the key role in achieving not one these components, but to build the best strategy to reach all three (the nexus of the DVF-Venn diagram, so to speak). Bad product management looks like task-oriented project management without concern for all three DVF dimensions, good product management is about fostering an empowered organization that focuses on customer problems while catering to all three DVF dimensions.

In consequence, supporting a startup from a product perspective is not about improving some processes in discovery or execution – true impact is about providing the holistic support required to build an empowered, efficient product organization that takes responsibility for customer and business outcomes and thereby delivers on all aspects of desirability, viability and feasibility.

A humble coaching mindset is the key driver for lasting impact

Before we dive into the approach, a few thoughts on mindset: We are convinced that any sustainable change and improvement of the product organization must be implemented based on the organization's resources, abilities and willingness to adapt (vis-à-vis consulting projects, which result in sleek slide decks and, often enough, without sustainable change). As such, the coaching mindset should based on two key elements:

• There's no one-size-fits-all.
• You don't know better than the org.

Even though the product org in question might be trying to ride horses backwards, swooping in with a solution might actually backfire: Any change requires trust, which has to be gained first – through active listening, humility and open communication – not just credentials. And any lasting change – meaning what happens when you're not looking – will have to be based on the org's abilities. So knowing better is one thing, actually adapting it to the needs and resources of the org is the other.

Assessment: Surface problems vs. actual problems

No product leader of a startup wakes up one morning thinking "I think my team lacks psychological safety". Being able to separate the visible part of a problem from underlying causes is not only a key skill, it also requires distance to the problem and experience. Simply put, you don't know what you don't know. As such, assessing the situation of the product org requires looking beyond the vanity metrics of discovery and execution to gather a holistic picture. Some ideas follow in the next chapter.

Approach: Product, Structure, Process, and Culture

Product

Assessing the product itself is a reasonable starting point to ascertain the org's status quo. How well does the current solution solve their customers' problems? How does it compare to its industry peers?

Of course, these insights need to be contextualized into the product org's ecosystem – the startup around it, most notably, its leadership. How are major product decisions being made – is it "highest paid opinion" or are metrics being considered? How does the product org get input from other parts of the company? How well does the product strategy align with the overall company vision? And is this strategy realistic, ambitious and achievable on the existing tech stack and the team's resources? Answering these questions should give first indications for further coaching.

Structure

Many startups experience "growing pains" of having scaled up a horizontal organization (Marketing, Product, Ops, eCom, etc.) that is harder to navigate with more and more complex goals on the roadmap. Horizontal structures that are working in silos produce handover issues at interfacing processes, e.g., product launches that marketing never even knew about. Implementing company-wide cross-functional structures makes sense to foster collaboration, learning through cross-pollination, and efficiency between organizations in the startup. In essence, structure should follow strategy, and not vice versa.

Process

The most common issue in many startups is looking at activities instead of (business) outcomes. Rather than demanding agile processes, it's important to look at the value of the process itself: Is it iterative to deliver quick, small product increments? Is the prioritization of activities coherent with the product strategy towards the vision? How long does it take for the team to iterate on product failures? Good processes create clarity through structure, ownership and accountability. Bad processes get in the way and provide ample opportunities to hide behind.

Culture

Lack of psychological safety is a common root cause in many startups. This lack can manifest in behaviors, e.g., risk taking and the associated failure culture: A fast way to assess this aspect is to check if a "vehicle" for risk taking exists. Google's OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are famously bad at capturing risk, sandbagging, i.e., setting conservative key results, is a common response. The solution can be simple: Implement strategic bets, a set of actions aiming to achieve the business outcome, as a vehicle to test and de-risk.

Of course, there are many other factors influencing culture, such as dealing with conflict, giving feedback and praise or encouraging the team to bring their whole self to work. A meaningful assessment of culture (and its change) requires regular 1:1 interviews with staff from all levels over a period of at least a few weeks. It goes without saying that any improvements on culture are strongly linked with leadership behavior – there's no light version of showing appreciation through pizza nights if clear growth paths and promotions are lacking in the company.

Start with leadership, follow up with evangelists

Coaching a startup needs to begin by coaching its founders and leaders, in this case, its C/VP-level product leaders. Their influence on the team through values, beliefs and actions is by far the biggest predictor for overall performance. Additionally, they provide background, expectations and the first assumptions to dig into.

While rounding up the assessment through a 360° view early on is often useful, the next cohort to start coaching consists of the product leads that work hands-on in the trenches with their respective product teams. They shape the day-to-day of the teams and therefore both collect valuable insights as well as influence others through daily touch-points. They can adopt and champion new approaches and become evangelists for change in structure, process, and culture. Given they are headed towards product leadership roles themselves, receiving coaching is often seen as a major career benefit helping to take a big step upward on their journeys. Through this process, leads will learn to become coaches to their team members to assess their skills and provide meaningful growth input.

Any coaching of the product organization must be mirrored with coaching on other leadership functions, most notably business and people. Structures, Processes and Culture is interdependent with the overall company and cannot be changed meaningfully without working with the organization as a whole. To make this workable, however, a good approach is to build a lighthouse, e.g., a product discovery sprint, that involves a small, yet cross-functional share of the organization. This lighthouse can then serve as a learning and growing opportunity and incentivize further involvement of the organization.

Work with a small core coaching team, scale up with network

Impactful coaching of a startup depends both on size and the situation of the startup, but it can start as simply as with one senior coach per business function, the core coaching team. Depending on the assessment, coaching needs of leadership and leads can be handled by the same small startup support team. If further coaching needs, e.g., around process or conflict coaching emerge, it's a good idea to work with a small network of coaching experts.

Eventually, the coached startup needs to adopt the coaching method (as the core team coaches the coaches). By using this method with multiple startups, a powerful network of coaches that help and learn from each other, is created.