Giving something back through mentoring
It’s extremely pleasing to write that we are now mentoring two talented entrepreneurs in the London startup scene.
It’s always been a passion of mine to help others achieve their potential. I regard it as a point of personal pride that the chap I hired into his first product manager job at Experian later took over the running of my team once I’d decided I wanted to go and start up Product People. One of the aspects I’ve always enjoyed about managing people is that I need to put myself in their shoes to figure out what makes them tick and adjust my coaching style and their goals to achieve the best possible performance from them.
It therefore made perfect sense that we should include a mentoring service in Product People’s portfolio. After all, most people who find themselves in a product role tend to have the latent abilities, if not necessarily the hands-on experience to do the job. In other cases, the experience is there, but it’s more a case of having someone to provide some objectivity, motivation and sometimes to suggest different ways of looking at a problem.
I’m very proud to be mentoring these two people. I’m also looking forward to one day being able to point to their success and say that I helped them in some small way to achieve it.
Jock is a freelance head of product, author and speaker with over nineteen years' experience working in technology. He helps startups and larger organisations to improve their product management practices, including Unmortgage, BBC, University of Cambridge, and the UK's Ministry of Justice and Government Digital Service (GDS).He is the founder of Product People Limited, which provides product management consultancy and training. He is also the author of the popular book The Practitioner's Guide to Product Management and the blog I Manage Products.