The Manager as Coach
If you take one thing from this domain, take this: coaching is the job. Not a part of the job, not the soft side of it, but the central work of managing PMs. Everything else, the planning and reviews and hiring, exists to serve it.
#The Cagan claim I build on
Marty Cagan, in EMPOWERED, argues that coaching is a manager's number-one responsibility, and that, done right, coaching and staffing together take up the majority of a first-level manager's week (Cagan puts it near 80%). When I first read that I thought it was an exaggeration. Having run teams, I don't anymore. For anyone with junior reports, it really is the job. Cagan splits the manager role into two halves: management (coaching plus staffing) and leadership (strategic context, vision, strategy). The coaching half is the one new managers neglect, because it is invisible, slow, and doesn't show up on a roadmap.
Cagan's logic is that your team's results are capped by the capability of the people on it. You can't out-strategize a team you haven't grown. The highest-leverage thing a manager does is not making better decisions, it is creating more people who make better decisions. (Marty Cagan, SVPG / EMPOWERED.)
This is also the moment Team Leadership stops being abstract. Its first behavior, Coaching & Performance, is this note. And the transition from doing the work to making the people who do the work better is the entire jump into management (The IC vs Manager Decision).
#How I coach
Coaching is not feedback (that is Giving and Receiving Feedback), and it is not the annual review (that is Running a Performance Review). It is the continuous, individualized work of growing a specific person.
- The 1:1 is their meeting, not my status update. The fastest way to ruin coaching is to turn the 1:1 into a project check-in. Status has other channels. This time is for them: their growth, their blockers, and the stuff they are avoiding.
- Tailor it to the person. The model is explicit that coaching is tailored to each person's strengths and goals (Coaching and Feedback). A confident senior PM needs me to be blunt and get out of the way. A shaky APM needs scaffolding and reps. Identical coaching for everyone means I am really just talking to myself.
- Coach to the gap, not the symptom. A slipping launch looks like a delivery problem. Underneath, it is often a prioritization or stakeholder gap. I trace the symptom back to the competency (Identifying Growth Areas) and coach that.
- Model the practice. The Coaching & Performance behavior includes modeling strong practices yourself. You cannot coach a spec standard you don't visibly hold. Hypocrisy is the fastest way to lose a team's trust.
- Create a safe space to learn. People grow by trying things slightly beyond their reach and sometimes failing. If failure gets punished, they stop reaching, and coaching dies. My job is to make the stretch safe.
The competency matrix and self-assessment aren't just for review season. They are the map a coaching conversation needs. Petra Wille makes this explicit: the PMwheel is built as a coaching and career-conversation tool, not a grading instrument. As she puts it, great product leaders make strong product people. Use the rubric to find the conversation, not to deliver a verdict.
The worst coaching I have seen is a senior PM telling juniors exactly what to do. That builds dependence, not capability. Real coaching is mostly questions. What are the risks here? What does the data say? What would you do if I were on vacation? Questions like those grow the person's own judgment. If your team can't function without you, you have been delegating tasks, not coaching people.
#What coaching is not
It is not therapy, it is not friendship, and it is not lowering the bar to be liked. The kindest coaching holds a high standard and gives people the support to reach it. Niceness that costs someone their growth is not actually kind (Giving and Receiving Feedback).
#How AI changes it
Almost not at all. This is the competency AI touches least. AI can summarize a quarter of 1:1s or surface team-health signals (Competencies AI Commoditizes vs Elevates), but the core of coaching does not commoditize: knowing what a person needs to hear, reading whether they are ready to hear it, and holding the relationship that makes a hard truth land as care. If anything, as the mechanical PM work gets automated, growing the humans who do the irreducible work becomes a larger share of what a leader is for.
#Continue Reading
- Giving and Receiving Feedback for the core mechanic coaching runs on.
- Building a Growth Plan for the artifact a coaching relationship produces.
- Team Leadership is the competency this note is the heart of.
- The IC vs Manager Decision for choosing whether coaching becomes your job.
- Coaching and Feedback is the gateway skill, for ICs and managers alike.