Looking back to look forward
How a retro of past work helped me shape my new year
Illustration by artinker.com for Kate Leto
Happy 2023!
I hope you had a wonderful, restful, and healthy holiday.
For many of us, the holidays are a time of reflection and introspection. For me, that time really hits in January. This year, like many, I’ve spent the first days of the year revisiting work and writings from the last few years to find a strong connection and clarity about what excites me for the year ahead.
In this post I’ll share how key insights from looking back have helped me to shape my work and coaching offerings for 2023.
I started by looking back to work from 5 years ago
Early this week, I spent time looking back at an outline that I had put together for Mind The Product in January 2018 for a new Product Leadership workshop that I would go on to facilitate. The workshop would be my first official foray into an offering for Product leadership and I was extremely excited by the opportunity. Looking at the documents that I produced, it was both surprising and comforting to find that five years ago I was advocating many of the core ideas about leadership that I still hold true and that lay the basis for my coaching practice, including:
Leadership isn’t about what you do - the strategy you advocate, the frameworks you use, or even the metrics you hit. It’s about how you do it.
While the idea of being a “leader” may be exciting for some, it’s also overwhelming and vague for others. Many feel unprepared for leadership roles.
Leadership, like product management, is a craft. It’s something you continually learn, experiment and iterate on.
As a leader,yourbehaviours and actions have a direct impact on your team, organisation and even customer. To truly lead, you need to better understand yourself.
My early attempts at a Product Leadership framework from 2018, showing relationship between individual and customer. It all starts with the inividual.
Looking back 6 months ago
After closing the workshop outline from 2018, I opened a document from last summer that was a retro for my first six months of 2022, capturing insights and patterns from client session along with my own personal reflections and client feedback.
I found that the essence of the four points listed in 2018 were still very much present in my work. My coaching practice is built on the idea that leadership - be it in product, design, engineering or beyond - isn’t easy to understand, define or embody. That leadership skills can be developed, and that the foundation of the learning comes from a strong understanding of yourself.
From my summer retro, I also found that what was helping to create change and building confidence for my clientswas offering a safe space for them to really discover what leadership means to them. Not what leadership means to me or a leadership guru or even super successful business person, but what it means to them. Then to help them build a way of working, behaving and leading that reflects their own authentic style of leadership.
How were we getting there? My 2022 retro showed that there wasn’t a specific framework or approach that was resonating more than another. Instead, our work was based on building awareness and understanding of actual day-to-day experiences at work; learning moments in the every day. These are “trigger points” or “moments that matter.” They might include things like working on OKRs, doing a presentation, giving/receiving feedback, hiring, figuring out priorities, building strategy, handling tension and conflict, having 1:1s, speaking with stakeholders … the list goes on. Identifying your authentic approach to leadership lives in all of these moments and in my coaching sessions we dug into them by asking questions, challenging beliefs and going deep on experiences, emotions and actions.
Outcomes of client work then and now vary greatly by client. In feedback, clients said they were able to create new confidence and clarity in leadership, grow relationships with team members and stakeholders and in some cases, even became more clear on the type of leadership roles that felt right and those that didn't.
There was also some very helpful growth feedback for me, in that some clients at times felt the need to have more of a directive approach with feedback based on my experience vs. coaching. This is always a tricky one for coaches - as I default to coaching vs. advising and directing. But I also appreciate at times there is a need to strike a balance and that’s something I want to experiment more with in the new year.
So what does this mean for 2023?
Looking forward to 2023
First of all, I’m really excited to carry this work and learning into 2023. Leadership coaching for product people energises and challenges me. I truly, truly love the work I do and seeing people evolve and grow before my eyes.
For that reason, the core of my offerings in 2023 will continue to focus on working with Product leaders and executives - that includes those in product management, design and engineering.
I’ll continue to offer 1:1 coaching through my personal coaching practice as well as working with individuals and teams in organisation-wide engagements. I have limited availability for individual coaching in Q1, so please get in touch if you’d like to learn more.
I’m also leaving space in my practice to explore and try out a few new things. Top of my list this year includes:
Group leadership coaching offering - This is something I’ve been asked about for quite some time. I’m exploring different options, partners and formats for a group coaching offering. If you’d like to be the first to hear about my offering, please send me a note here.
CPO Coaching offering: Focusing on the unique leadership challenges and opportunities that Chief Product Officers face in different phases of a company’s maturity. I’m at an early discovery phase with this concept, so again, if you’d like to hear more about the offering as it comes together, please get in touch.
To round out my year, I’m also prioritising learning about supporting Neurodivergent clients, and of course, working with my own coach to continue to explore how I can grow as a leader, coach and business owner.
Thank you for strolling down memory/retro lane with me. Looking back and writing about it has helped me to draw a line between where I’ve been and where I want to go. To my surprise and delight, it’s a more consistent and aligned path than I expected. I hope you’ll take time to do something similar and share your findings with me.
Here’s to a healthy and well new year for all!
-Kate
Subscribe to Product Leadership Essentials
Sign-up to my email newsletter to learn more about how to better understand and build your authentic Product Leadership skills.