How to structure your one to ones for maximum effectiveness

One to one are essential coaching opportunities - now you're on the other side, how do you support your team best

One to Ones (121s), done effectively, are the best 30 mins - 1 hour you will spend with your direct reports all week.

“Your career is your responsibility”

“These 121 meetings are for you”

While all of this is true, passing accountability for the growth of your team is not effective management. When your team isn’t growing, that reflects on you and the products you are building. Having effective 121s is really challenging, for both manager and report.

I’ve had some good managers and some others. Almost all followed the practice of scheduled One to Ones (121s). Even with the best managers, whom I owe a lot to my growth, I failed to get much out of these meetings. Now with management responsibility I’ve spent significant time in these meetings and the output here will hopefully help you have more effective coaching sessions with your manager and your reports.

Do not interrupt.

My only rule for effective coaching sessions is don’t interrupt when your Product Manager is talking to you. Not only will you stop the thinking process but you will infantilise your Product Manager. This breaks down the Coach/PM relationship and at best results in a dependency on you every time.

“Do not interrupt when your Product Manager is talking to you”

Tip: If you have a Product Manager who never stops, then consider a strict timed sections based 121 to help with coaching session (and perhaps with communication skills too!).

So when the Product Manager is talking, listen intently and do not interrupt.

Send status reports before the meeting.

If you don’t have a standard pattern for status reporting then firstly consider it. Some Product Managers like to talk status anyway, so ask them to send ahead of time. This session time is for coaching, there maybe challenges to work through, but the status should be clear before the meeting. As a manager, be sure to have enough context to support coaching.

Open positive.

You’ll always have more productive thinking in sessions where you start positive. Something about the human brain, it opens itself up more when things are positive. There are a number of techniques for this, I generally start with something like

“What has been your highlight of the week?”

Allow the Product Manager to follow their thought through.

Tip: If your PM is having a tough time, you may need to help them find the positives, or ask a different question such as “what did you learn about your customers?”.

Start the thinking broad.

Now the coaching can begin. This is where the quote from the top of the post comes in. The Product Manager’s career is their responsibility. So let them decide what the coaching will be on. Self Assessments, your assessments, feedback provided can guide the Product Manager so they are aware of their development needs - but in this session it’s their choice.

“What would you like to talk about today?”

And then listen again.

Allow the Product Manager to work through their thinking. Ensure that they progress thinking about the topic. Use those customer interview techniques to dig deeper, “what else?”, “anything else?” and finally as they work their round to their topic ask them to repeat it. From this point on you’ll use their words to describe the topic. If they call feedback a feature request, use their words.

Set goal of the session.

Now you have listened to the different things that your Product Manager has to say, it’s time to find and set the goal.

“In this session, what do you want to achieve?”

This might be quite short, although if your Product Manager has talked for a length of time, or is unused to going further than “just talking” you might find it harder to get to one thing to achieve.

Identify and help remove any assumptions.

Assumptions stop your Product Manager achieving their goals. In this case your Product Manager’s product is them. They have assumptions that are impacting that product’s success. These assumptions might be facts (“they are the VP of Sales and I’m a Product Manager”), or fears (“I don’t think my team will like my idea as I’m not technical enough”). Keep asking the same question (repeatedly).

“what assumptions (what risks) are preventing your from [session goal]”?

When you’ve identified the most important to work through, pick those assumptions out and work through them. Don’t do the parent (again infantilising) thing of dismissing the assumptions, especially the fears. Instead help work through them them, each one.

One way to approach this is by turning the assumption into a positive question “what if the team do think you’re technical enough and they like your idea, how would you talk to them”?

When you’ve got this question (there possibly could be more than one), write it down. Then underneath each question, capture the ideas that your Product Manager came up with based on that question. Again - using their words.

Finish positively

Thinking, giving the space to talk uninterrupted, exploring like this is challenging for Product Manager (and coach, who can be desperate to give their answer!). Make sure to finish the session positively.

A growing trend I’ve seen in Product management track roles is to hire subject matter experts or other department leaders into Heads of Product roles. Would you ever hire a head of sales who couldn’t sell? My premise is that these manager roles, must have experience building products and have a solid foundation in a product skillset. If you can’t provide intense coaching for your team then you need to find someone who can fast.

If either person doesn’t look forward to these meetings, then the opposite result will happen. Not having, missing, cancelling these coaching sessions is like an athlete skipping training.

I hope this makes you think about One to Ones differently and look forwards to uninterrupted thinking time. In my next post I’ll look at a hypothetical one to one around a common product management challenge.

As always, enjoy the journey.