COACH vs. CONSULTANT

Have you also noticed that there are a lot more people with the title "COACH" than before? I certainly have, and I don't think it's Frequency Bias. Because I spent time with every prospective client explaining what I do as a Product Leader Coach and I am a former consultant, it occurred to me that it was worth outlining what I think the differences are. Attempting to define the differences between coach and consultant, landed me in many larger conversations about what I now call "The Spectrum of Advisors". Like many other spectrums, it is continuous and it's probably rare to find any individual that doesn't blur the lines between the options I'm going to list below.

Let's start with the least involved of all of the types of people who you may engage with to provide assistance or guidance...

• Advisors: These are people, often unpaid, who provide you with their thoughts on what they would do in your shoes. They often don't have very much context about you or the details of your individual situation, but they do have a good amount of their own experience to lean on. Most often advisors engage with businesses not individuals and are paid nominal fees or small amounts of equity.
• Mentors: They are more familiar with you as an individual and your personal/professional goals and can provide guidance on next steps. Mentors are also known to make warm introductions. Similar to advisors they don't have very much skin in the game. It is important to collect mentors throughout your life who you can lean on to ask deep questions.
• Coaches: First of all, coaches get paid whereas mentors generally do not. The main role of a coach, just as it is in sports, is to be on the sidelines and see things you as the player do not. They bring an experienced outside perspective about the whole landscape and provide targeted advice which YOU must implement as the player on the field. Coaches come in a variety of shapes and sizes, SVPG covers the types of product coaches here , but the basic they are NOT going to do the work for you remains true. Personally, I specialize in Product Leadership Coaching, which means that I guide product leaders at tech companies to make better decisions and sharpen their skills to drive results. I act as a sounding board for your ideas which aren't refined enough to show your boss and show you the potholes in your current path that you don't see.
• Consultants: This is the category which probably has the largest number of people who have the title, and also the one with the most outside opinions about why they are good or bad. A consultant should be someone who you hire to provide advice on something which they have theoretically more expertise than you do. They should be investing time to research the problem space and may also be engaged to implement the chosen solution alongside your actual employees. There are consultants for pretty much everything, and they can be independent or part of incredibly large firms (IBM, Deloitte, McKinsey, Bain, BCG, etc.) Unfortunately, consultants also have a bad reputation because often they are only hired to provide a deck readout which assesses the situation and then it's up to the company to see through the changes. While I was at Pivotal Labs, we were product consultants who saw ourselves as a "Player/Coach", we would work with our clients to improve their product development processes by both teaching and doing. This hybrid approach is better than consultants who do 100% of the job for you and leave you beholden to them forever for maintenance.
• Contractor: There are many terms for this, 1099 (an IRS term in the US), "interim X" has become popular in the past few years, but the bottom line is that they are a temporary employee who works for you to do a job at your direction and discretion. They execute on tasks as if they were a full-time hired employee, but they are not on your payroll. Engagements can range from months to years, and often the lines become blurred when it comes to authority and responsibility. Often these individuals are referred to as "hired guns" as you are employing them to get a job done in lieu of doing it yourself. One big sign that someone is a contractor and not a consultant is that they will be issued an email address from your company which correlates to their psuedo-employee status and access.

There you have it, my personal thoughts on what the different non-employee sources of advice are. I've tested them out with clients and colleagues and iterated on them a little, so I hope they encompass some solid definitions. If you have something to add or would redefine, I'm all ears!

Hi! I’m Tami, the founder of?The Product Leader Coach ?where I work with product leaders and teams to realize their potential by focusing on their strengths.

If you enjoyed this post, I am available for product leadership coaching or team training. Learn more about?my services ?and upcoming?children’s book .