A Product Mindset for Manager Development
Shifting your L&D strategy from one-time projects to a continuous cycle of growth and impact.
Your managers complete leadership training, score well on assessments, and walk away energized. Six months later, they're still struggling with the same delegation issues, team conflicts, and decision paralysis. What if the problem isn't the content?What if it's the approach?
What if we stopped treating manager development like a set of disjoint projects and started thinking about it like a product?
The Product Mindset
Applying a product mindset is useful here. We can understand a manager’s core goals through the lens of their three key ‘customers’. Each customer has unique needs and expectations, and a successful manager development program must serve all three.
🏢 Customer 1: The Organization (“Are we there yet?”)
This customer loves to see things getting done that have a positive impact on the company’s mission. The organization needs managers who can prioritize effectively, make sound decisions, and drive results.
L&D Focus: Core management skills. Introduce frameworks like the Eisenhower Matrix to help managers balance immediate needs with long-term value. Similarly, expose them to tools like Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis when navigating complex decisions. These tools help managers make good decisions quickly and, more importantly, empower their teams to do the same, fostering organizational scalability.
🙋🏼Customer 2: The Team (“Will we make it?”)
This customer wants to flourish while they pursue the goals of the team. They look to the manager to provide services that accelerate that flourishing. The team needs a manager who fosters a positive, productive environment, provides coaching and support, and helps them reach their full potential.
L&D Focus: Building a strong, supportive team environment. Equip managers with coaching skills, including active listening and effective question construction techniques. Creating a culture of open communication and psychological safety is crucial. Offer resources on how to foster trust and open dialogue, empowering managers to build a cohesive and productive team.
🧑🏼💼 Customer 3: The Manager Themselves (“What about the future?”)
This customer is the voice inside the manager that craves growth, development, and self-actualization. This manager needs strategies and tools to become more efficient, adapt to change, and learn continuously.
L&D Focus: Instilling a growth mindset. Encourage managers to embrace challenges as opportunities for development. Instead of a generic training plan, work with them to co-create a customized development plan that aligns with both their career goals and their team's specific needs. Leadership development opportunities like shadowing senior leaders or participating in peer mentorship programs can all contribute to a manager's long-term growth.
Tune And Measure
Investing wisely in managers is a direct investment in the future of your organization because of their potential to force-multiply everyone around them. But it's not enough to simply provide training; we need to evolve our L&D approach from simply delivering content to partnering with managers to drive strategic impact.
This means we must focus on two key areas…
Customization and Partnership: Move beyond a one-size-fits-all training catalog. Partner with managers to understand their specific challenges and create learning paths that are truly relevant. This might mean targeted micro-workshops or curated resource libraries where managers choose their own learning path. Active participation drives both buy-in and results.
Measuring What Matters: To prove the value of your programs, it's crucial to connect development to tangible outcomes. Instead of just tracking attendance, measure the impact on key metrics. For example, are team engagement scores improving? Is turnover on those teams decreasing? Equip managers with the tools to track their own progress through 360-degree feedback or by tying their development goals directly to their team's performance metrics. This not only validates the program but also gives managers concrete evidence of their growth.
Iterate And Accelerate
The biggest revolution in product management in the last couple of decades was the normalizing shift from waterfall-style development to rapid iteration. High performing teams configure themselves to try things quickly, measure what works, learn from what doesn’t, and try again.
When this concept is applied to professional growth, we get the familiar ‘1% continuous improvement’ mindset. We go incrementally faster as our gains compound upon each other.
But what could be more iterative about your suite of ‘learning products’?...
How many experiments are conducted each year around the best ways to help people grow?
How are individual learners encouraged to ‘play’ with their own learning programs to unlock new gains?
What hasn’t been tried yet?
We often find ourselves helping teams explore these questions and, in doing so, discover unexpected value hiding in plain sight. Drop us a line if you’d like to kick around some ideas.