How can your Product Management skills help you be a great mentor?

The product manager's analytical mindset will be instrumental in this endeavor. Additionally, possessing essential skills such as goal setting and problem-solving will contribute to their effectiveness. Furthermore, strong social skills, including active listening and effective communication, will further enhance their ability to excel as a mentor and leader.

The initial step for the mentee involves dedicating time to self-reflection, gaining a deeper understanding of their improvement goals, learning objectives, and the specific areas they seek mentoring in. It's important that mentoring have a purpose, with well-defined goals and success criteria.

Understanding your mentee's goals is a bit similar to understanding the desired solution of your product users. Try to understand what problems, difficulties, blockers they are having, why this solution would be crucial to them and why right now, what kind of attempts to solve the problem they've been trying out and why it didn't bring expected results.

As a Product Manager, I mentor by first establishing clear goals, aligning them with my mentee's ambitions. Sharing my experiences, I guide on navigating complex product landscapes. I ask probing questions to stimulate critical thinking, akin to unpacking user needs. My feedback is always constructive, mirroring how I'd refine a product feature. I encourage autonomy, holding them accountable just as I do my team, fostering a relationship of mutual respect and trust, which is fundamental in both product management and mentorship.

I’m mentoring young entrepreneurs here in Canada since a few years now. What helps the most my young entrepreneurs is to share my real life experiences such as how to better manage their cash-flow, how to define their market entry strategies, and to help them not to rush as soon as they start seeing good results.

I always had a great experience being both a mentee and a mentor. Mentors always have great knowledge and experience about situations mentees might be facing the first time. Next time you get into a situation you think is really bad try reaching out to someone with more experience in that field. Take the words of wisdom, re-analyze your situation and take better steps than you could have taken before. Mentors should always share their life experiences and try to help the people new in the role or industry. The more you share the more you learn is my Mantra.

Often times, open ended questions in mentorship help in learning multiple other surrounding topics. This opportunity helps in overall learning and end to end coverage.

Encourage asking open-ended questions to help the mentee think deeply and consider different points of views. Good mentoring goes beyond a single path, fostering a better understanding of motivations and purpose while promoting varied ways of thinking.

In my practice, I often apply the SBI framework: Situation, Behavior, and Impact. Additionally, I include expectations to outline future steps. Since mentors are typically not part of the mentee's daily routine, it's important for the mentee to actively seek feedback from peers, manager and colleagues. This helps discern what is effective and should persist, as well as what adjustments might be beneficial.

A quote that resonates with me is that “I can have anything I want, but I can’t always have it all right now.” As product managers, we’re accountable for delivering value in the face of ambiguity by defining goals and identifying constraints to optimize for a specific outcome. Careers can be very similar. Career choices can be ambiguous and it’s often important for mentees to define which “metric” they want to optimize for in their career or next chapter. One way that I like to foster autonomy is to ask targeted questions to help clarify thinking and to share frameworks to help with decision making. In these ways, great mentors can help mentees build conviction behind their own point of view and take greater ownership of their career.

As a product manager, fostering trust and respect is crucial, skills that are vital in mentorship too. From managing diverse B2B teams, I’ve learned the importance of valuing different perspectives, a practice that helps in mentoring by respecting and understanding mentees' viewpoints. Transparency about challenges and successes in projects, a key aspect of product management, also builds trust with mentees. Sharing these experiences encourages open communication, creating a safe space for mentees to express themselves, fostering a mentoring relationship grounded in empathy and mutual understanding.

1. Prioritization and Road mapping are 2 important skills, which should be initiated as part of Mentorship.. 2. Communication skills need to be monitored closely all through the journey.

Sometimes, you won't have a dedicated mentor, but you can arrange sessions with colleagues in your company. In my experience, these sessions with experienced and senior professionals have helped me better understand and learn from their experiences. I've also received valuable recommendations for specific situations.

Product Management is more of soft skills, leadership, stakeholder management than that of hard skills. Hence, PMs shape out as great mentors to junior PMs due to their great story telling and leadership skills.

As a PM, you have an holistic view to everything. There are many experiences that a PM comes across when they interact with different team & from these experience there are take-aways. Sharing this in a non-confusing way can be of great help. I believe these real life experiences is something they can relate to & connect faster if the mentor & mentee are from same industry. Also while sharing these experiences, the mentee might have a POV, discuss the same & understand the points they are trying to put forward.

Some core competencies that make a good product manager include obtaining customer testimonials & UATs, feature prioritization and roadmap planning, resource allocation, performing market assessments, pricing, or setting up and tracking success metrics. These skills are a natural for being a proficient mentor as these competencies are instrumental to the aspect of Emotional intelligence which is key to identifying with the customer and for managing relationships internally within the team and the company. Product management has different challenges & needs. The beauty of mentoring is that it’s a personalized approach to development where you can address specifically what YOU need to focus on. Mentoring is a two sided relationship though.