How can you help your mentee manage product risks and trade-offs?

Product management mentor needs to coach mentee on finding the "what" first. Understanding what you are doing, researching the market and then mapping the user journey and risk points will enable mentee to identify risks. Evaluating risk and mitigating risk by prioritising it, is necessary but what is even more critical is to learn to identify that.

Prioritizing risk needs to include impact assessment. You must validate the impact of risk based upon your mitigation options prior to performing risk prioritization.

The 1st thing any product management mentor should assist their mentee is with - ways to do effective market & user research - one framework to help them prioritise both problems & ideas This will help them dive deep into first principles and minimise product risks.

Consistently guide your mentee to excel in communication, ensuring they comprehend the importance of honesty with stakeholders to avoid fostering unrealistic expectations. Encourage them to openly address potential risks and elaborate on their mitigation strategies. Effective communication remains a potent tool for nurturing trust with stakeholders.

Some might argue that not all risks need to be communicated to all stakeholders. It's important to understand the implications and decide who needs to know what. Over-communication can lead to unnecessary panic, while under-communication can lead to loss of trust.

Communication is one of the highly underrated skills for a product manager. The 2nd thing a mentor has to assist the mentee is with building strong relationships with all the stakeholders. This can happen only through over communication in the form of weekly updates, well written documentation and monthly sync ups.

Prioritisation is a skill that evolves over time. But as a mentor it becomes very important to handhold the mentee on how to do product trade offs by referring to simple prioritisation frameworks such as “effort vs impact” or weighted average matrix.

Product Management as a role involves lot of experimentation. The only way to become a better product manager is to learn by navigating through product risks and trade offs. Mentors have a crucial role in supporting the mentee - to build a growth mindset - learn from failures - adapt to changing requirements

Constructive Feedback is a very important step in mentorship. Mistakes do happen while scoping products but embracing them and learning to evolve is a skill that has to be cultivated by mentees and it’s the responsibility of the mentor to ensure this happens!

One important factor here is - talk to people! And even while doing that, it's important that we ask the right questions. One great example is the Mom's Test. Following its principles really helps figure out the right way to ask questions and structure feedback as well!