18F/18f.gsa.gov

---
title: "Building product management capacity in government part 1 – Our coaching philosophy"
date: 2019-08-22
authors:
- nikki-lee
- kara-reinsel
tags:
- best practices
- product
- culture change
excerpt: "This is the kick-off post in a series about
building product management capacity in government agencies. The series
explores the process of helping agency staff transition into product
management roles, from both an 18F and partner agency perspective"
image: /assets/blog/product-guide/product-manager.jpg
---

*This is the kick-off post in a in a series of posts about building
product management capacity in government agencies. The series explores
the process of helping agency staff transition into product management
roles, from both the 18F perspective and [partner agency perspective (part two)](https://18f.gsa.gov/2019/11/19/building-product-management-capacity-in-government-part-2/).*

While standard practice in the private sector, product management is
still in its infancy in the government. We believe that [government needs product managers](https://medium.com/the-u-s-digital-service/the-importance-of-product-management-in-government-b59933d01874)
to bridge many disciplines and lead diverse teams to identify and
deliver the right outcomes for stakeholders and end users. We believe
that everyone in government has the capacity to become a product manager
with the right training and coaching.

Product managers ensure the government’s mission is supported by the
technology; ownership of the product vision, roadmap, and strategy
should never be outsourced to a vendor. In an environment where a lot of
technology work is done by outside vendors, in-house product managers
help vendor teams understand the big picture and drive day-to-day
trade-offs. Without someone managing both the strategy and execution,
software development all too quickly turns into a game of telephone.

At 18F, we work with partners to develop product management capacity in
their existing teams. This series is all about how we do that, from both
our perspective and our partner’s point of view.

## Finding our product managers

At the beginning of a project we ask our partners to play the role of a
product owner. While we take on the bulk of the responsibility for
managing software development, we need them to help us figure out what
we should build. We don’t know enough to understand whether what we’re
doing is good, and what good even means in their context. We also find
that they can explain the value of the product far better than we ever
could – because they’re living in the problem space.

In the long run, we need our partners to become full blown product
managers. We’re going to leave at some point, so they need to be able to
take care of the product on their own. After all, products are never
truly done. They grow and shift as the context around them changes, and
our partners are the best people to manage that evolution. Plus, it’s
their mission! It makes sense for them to take complete ownership of the
vision of their products.

In our experience, the best PMs generally come from the program side.
They deeply understand the mission, and all of the context around it,
which is key to making good decisions. It’s not hard for us to bring in
people who know UX design and software development; finding someone who
really understands the problem space is much more difficult. We’ve also
seen that it’s often a lot easier for our partners to learn the basics
of digital product development than for our team of designers and
developers to learn the ins and outs of their agency.

## Learning product management

Because most of our partners have never worked in product management
before, and generally still have day jobs, we’re very intentional about
teaching. We take an [experiential learning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiential_learning) approach
to training product managers. We don’t believe that you can truly learn
product management in a classroom – you have to build something.

That said, we don’t want to overwhelm people by asking them to run the
entire product development process right out the gate. Instead, we start
small and gradually increase responsibility as their skills and comfort
grow. We call this process the Model - Pair - Coach cycle.

**Model:** In the beginning we focus on introducing new concepts and
building comfort. We take the lead on all of the technical work and
project management, modeling modern software development practices as we
go. We help our partners set a vision and initial strategy, mainly by
asking questions, and use our expertise to make sure that we arrive at a
reasonable plan. We continuously explain our decision-making process so
that our partners understand what we’re doing and why.

**Pair:** As our partners become more familiar with the process, we
begin to involve them more directly in day-to-day work. We’ll start to
divide work more evenly, splitting up tasks (like adding new work to our
project management tool and taking notes during user research sessions)
and working side-by-side on a single task (like drafting a vision
document together). Our designer and developer teammates act as a test
audience for our partners, and we give feedback (and reflect) regularly.

**Coach:** Eventually, we get to the point where our partners are
confident enough to take sole responsibility for pieces of the project.
We fall back into an observation and coaching role. We watch how our
partners interact with the team, as well as talking directly to the
designers and developers, in order to give constructive feedback. We
also introduce more advanced topics, like user research methods or agile
development frameworks, now that our partners have the hands-on
experiences to make sense of this information.

## Owning product management

Once our partners are able to fully own the software development
process, we migrate the project to their agency and ramp down our
involvement. After 18F’s departure, the partner product managers
continue to grow and deepen their skills so they can best support the
needs of their agencies and users.

Ultimately, our goal is to make sure they are empowered to evolve their
product management practices to fit their agency so they can deliver
great outcomes to their end users.