Product Development Mentorship

You learned this job on the job

Most of us did. Product is a craft you pick up by doing it — often with no one around to learn it from.

Maybe you are a new product manager finding your feet. Maybe you are senior and wondering what comes after senior. Maybe you are leading a team for the first time, or you are the only product person in the room with no one to check your thinking against.

You don’t need another framework. You need someone who has been there.

Mentorship for product people

I spent fifteen years in product — as a product manager, senior product manager and head of product in start-ups and scale-ups, and nine years at Booking.com, where I moved from product manager to leading product craft, community and learning for product people.

I have written the strategies, cut the roadmaps, run the discovery, managed the stakeholders, and hired, grown and had the difficult conversations with the people on my teams.

Mentorship is where I bring that experience to your work directly — not to tell you what to do, but so you have someone to think with who knows the terrain.

What we can work on

Product craft Discovery, problem framing, strategy, roadmaps and prioritisation — and which of them your situation actually calls for.

Stakeholders & influence Communicating a product vision, handling competing priorities and earning trust without authority.

Engineering & design Building the kind of working relationship in which good products get made.

Career & progression Understanding what the next level really asks of you, and whether you want it.

Stepping into leadership Moving from doing the work to growing the people who do it.

Confidence in your decisions Making calls on incomplete information and standing behind them.

Mentorship, with a coach’s training

Most mentorship is advice. Advice is useful, and I will give it — but advice alone tends to produce someone else’s answer.

I am a coach as well as a product leader, so I work in both modes. Sometimes you need a straight opinion on your roadmap. Sometimes you need the question that shows you already knew what to do.

Knowing which one you need is most of the value.

How it works

Sessions are one-to-one and built around what you are working on right now — a real problem, a real decision, a real conversation you have been putting off.

Bring your strategy, your roadmap, your performance review, your job offer, or just the thing that has been bothering you all week.

Sessions are delivered online and onsite on request.

Please find my full career experience as a product leader on my LinkedIn page.