The Purpose

The primary purpose of the 1:1 is to help the product person develop and improve. Yes, you will get an update. Yes, you will be able to discuss work. But this is first and foremost about helping the person to first reach competence, and then to reach her potential. If you lose sight of the purpose, the real value of this session is quickly lost.

The Relationship

This is a relationship that depends on trust. The product person must understand and believe that you as the manager are genuinely and sincerely committed to helping her reach her full potential. That is your primary job as the manager. If the product person is effective and gets promoted, you did your job. Likewise, if the product person is not able to reach competence, you have failed. And the product person needs to understand that for you both to succeed, you'll need to be able to trust and depend on each other, and most important, to be able to speak honestly and frankly.

The Onboarding

With most new product people, there is a necessary and critical onboarding period where the person acquires the skills and knowledge required to get up to speed (reach competence).

Every person is different, bringing different experience and knowledge to the job. In Chapter 8, The Assessment, I discussed a tool I use to quickly assess a new product person to determine which areas to focus on. But, until the product person is strong enough to be considered competent, it is your responsibility to ensure the person is not doing harm to her team and is making reasonable decisions.

Normally, this period of close oversight lasts on the order of two to three months, and it is a much more intense coaching relationship than the ongoing coaching that happens once the product person is deemed capable.

The Frequency

This is one of those areas where there's a range of opinions out there, but I feel strongly that the 1:1 should be no less than 30 minutes, once per week, and that this session is sacred and not to be another one of those “You okay with skipping this week?” kind of meetings. You may need to occasionally reschedule, but don't cancel. Please consider the message this sends.

For new PMs in the onboarding period who are not yet competent, it may be two to three times per week, or even daily.

Once the trust between manager and employee is established, 1:1 coaching works well with video calls. The key is to establish an environment conducive to developing the relationship and having honest, constructive discussions.

Sharing Context

If you are to empower your product person to solve problems in the best way her team sees fit, as a leader and manager you must provide her with the strategic context.

This means making sure she understands the company's mission and objectives for the year, the product vision, the product strategy for the broader product, and the team objectives for her particular product team.

The bulk of this discussion happens during onboarding, but each quarter you'll need to discuss the upcoming quarter's specific team objectives. Sometimes, those are fairly complicated discussions.

Homework

There's simply no substitute for the product person doing her homework. It is the foundation for competence, and it's the main activity during the onboarding period. You can guide the product person to the right resources, and answer questions about the material, but it's on the person to spend the time and effort to do her homework and gain this knowledge.

What does homework really mean? For a product manager, it means learning the product inside and out. Learning about the users and customers. Learning the data. Learning the capabilities of the enabling technologies. Learning the industry. Learning the various dimensions of the business, especially financial, sales, go‐to‐market, service, and legal.

Thinking and Acting Like a Product Person

Beyond doing homework, coaching is mainly about helping the product person learn to think and act like a strong product person.

What does it mean to think like a product person? It means focusing on outcome. Considering all of the risks—value, usability, feasibility, and business viability. Thinking holistically about all dimensions of the business and the product. Anticipating ethical considerations or impacts. Creative problem solving. Persistence in the face of obstacles. Leveraging engineering and the art of the possible. Leveraging design and the power of user experience. Leveraging data to learn and to make a compelling argument.

What does it mean to act like a product person? Listening. Collaborating. Shared learning. Evangelizing. Inspiring. Giving credit and accepting blame. Taking responsibility. Knowing what you can't know and admitting what you don't know. Demonstrating humility. Building relationships across the company. Getting to know customers on a personal level. Leading.

Holistic View

Also known as “connecting the dots.” You can't expect every product person to be able to stay on top of what all the other product teams are doing. One of the important benefits of the 1:1 is that you are aware of what activities and issues are occurring in the various teams, and you may very likely be the first one to see an issue brewing or duplication occurring. It is your job to point out these potential areas of conflict or impact and encourage the product person to collaborate with the relevant colleagues to resolve, and if necessary, for you to make a decision to remove the conflict.

Providing Feedback

Also known as “tough love” or “radical candor,” honest, constructive feedback is the main source of value you provide as manager. Feedback should be frequent and as timely as possible (at the first opportunity to discuss privately). Remember to praise publicly but criticize privately.

Many managers mistakenly believe that the only time they should collect and deliver feedback is at an annual performance review, but in truth there are opportunities every day to collect feedback, both directly and indirectly. There is usually no shortage of meetings with the opportunity to observe the product person's interactions directly.

Moreover, as the manager, you should always be seeking constructive feedback on the person—asking the other members of the product team about their interactions and asking senior executives, stakeholders, and business owners about their impressions and suggestions.

After a while, giving constructive feedback moves from awkward to second nature. But until then, force yourself to come up with some helpful constructive feedback every week.

Continuous Improvement

Hopefully, it's clear to you that product jobs are very hard. It is a journey not a destination. You can have 25 years of hands‐on product experience and you will still be learning and improving. Every product effort has its own risk profile. New enabling technologies constantly emerge. Today's services are tomorrow's platforms. Markets develop. Customer behaviors change. Companies grow. Expectations rise.

The best product leaders measure their success in how many people they've helped earn promotions, or have moved on to serve on increasingly impactful products, or to become leaders of the company, or even to start their own companies.

Manager Just Doesn't Care

By far the biggest reason I see that people don't develop and reach competence is because so many managers either don't like developing people, or they don't view it as their primary responsibility. So, it's pushed off as a secondary task, if that, and the message to the employee is clear: You're on your own.

Manager Reverts to Micromanaging

It's actually easier for you to simply issue specific instructions and micromanage—to just give the person a list of tasks to do, and if any real decisions need to be made, to bring them to your attention and you'll make the call. It's beyond the scope of this chapter for me to list all the reasons why this results in disappointment, but in any case, it won't develop the people we need, and it's not a scalable solution.

Manager Spends Time Talking and Not Listening

While there's nothing wrong with preparing for the session by jotting down some notes of items to discuss, it's critical to keep in mind that this session is primarily for the product person and not for you. It's all too easy for you to talk for 30 minutes straight, and then you're out of time. Moreover, it's important to recognize that people learn in different ways, and you'll learn that by listening not talking.

Manager Doesn't Provide Difficult Feedback

It's true that learning to give frank, honest, constructive feedback is hard for many people. But if it's not done, the person doesn't grow and improve at the pace we need. This usually becomes very clear at the next performance review, where the employee is surprised by the negative feedback.

Just to be perfectly clear here, at the performance review, nothing should be a surprise—everything should have already been discussed in depth, likely for months. The performance review is discussed in an upcoming chapter, as it's the source of lots of grief and angst for all parties. But, for now, the important thing to keep in mind is that it is never the key tool for developing people—the weekly 1:1 is.

Manager Is Insecure and/or Incompetent

This technique is predicated on you as manager being competent yourself (otherwise, how would you be able to coach others to competence?), you are secure enough in your own contributions and value that you are happy to shine a light on others when they do well, and you don't feel threatened by their success. But sadly, we all know of managers where, for whatever reason, this is not the case. The person responsible for ensuring strong people managers is the head of product in a larger company and the CEO in a startup.

As we discussed earlier, if you don't personally have the necessary experience to coach and develop others, it will be essential for you to immediately find some product leader coaching for yourself. Please don't take this responsibility lightly.

Manager Doesn't Cut Losses

I hesitate to include this one because to me this is the last resort. But sometimes we have a manager that has been working sincerely, tirelessly, and capably for several months to coach the person, yet she can't seem to get the product person to competence.

It's important to realize that not everyone is cut out to be a product person. When I find this to be the case, it's usually because the person was simply reassigned from a different role at the company—maybe because this person used to be a customer and knew the product or the domain, or knew the CEO, or whatever—but she simply doesn't have the core foundation to succeed in the role.

Moreover, hopefully it's clear that the product roles of product manager, product designer, and tech lead are not “junior” roles.

Someone who needs to be told what to do every day is not cut out for the product person role. And this is also not scalable. You need people that can be developed into capable and competent product people—that can be given an objective and then counted on to find a way to get it done.

My view in this case is that you are responsible for getting the new product person to competence. If you're not able to accomplish this in a reasonable period of time (usually three to six months), then you need to take responsibility to help that person find a more suitable job where they can be successful.