I try not to overuse click bait titles, too much.

For this particular topic, however, it was just too tempting.

As I mentioned in a previous newsletter, there were several reasons I went to Agile2024 after a six year hiatus. One was to get a sense of the current state of agile.

There’s been a bit of chatter about the decline in agile coaching opportunities as well as trends in agile transformations in general.

I certainly caught some inklings about what’s going on, but I didn’t want to rush to judgement. So I thought I’d do a little research to find out the motivation behind people choosing to become agile coaches and/or product coaches.

I put a couple of polls out on LinkedIn to get an initial sense. I must have done something to displease the LinkedIn algorithm, but some data is better than nothing.

We’re Moving

We interrupt this potentially incendiary look at product and agile coaches to let you know that InsideProduct is taking the rest of August off.

No, I’m not going on vacation. I’m moving InsideProduct over to Substack and want to make sure I do the move right.

I’ve been part of enough migrations to know that it’s best to take your time and do it right. So in the hopes of avoiding any big snafus I’m going to pause publishing the next few weeks so I can focus on making the move feel as seamless as possible for you.

You’ll probably hear from me once or twice during the move with logistics.

In the meantime, keep an eye out on LinkedIn in case anything catches my eye that may be of interest to people who work on software for their own organization.

Survey Says

I’m pretty sure I know why I became an agile coach and then a product coach. And I also know why I switched back to actively product managing instead of coaching.

I also realize that I’m only one data point so I wanted to hear from others who are doing it.

I started by doing a little literature research with Perplexity AI. I used the word salad I got as a result to identify three most likely choices to include in my LinkedIn surveys.

Here are the results of this initial research.

Why be an agile coach?

Here’s a word cloud summarizing the results from my perplexity powered literature search.

And here are the results from the survey.

Why be a product coach?

Here’s the corresponding word cloud for product coach.

And here are the results from the product coach survey.

Surveys are OK. Personal interviews are better.

So I have some data points here, but I’d like richer data. So if you are, or used to be, an agile coach or product coach, I’d love to talk to you about why you became a coach, and any advice for others who would like to enter that field.

Why ask why?

You’re probably wondering if I wanted to look at the state of agile coaching and product coaching why I’ve mostly talked about what motivates people to become coaches.

Here’s why.

Is agile too prevalent?

I suspect as organizations look to slim down they look at the people who aren’t directly associated with building products as opportunities for cost cutting.

I also suspect that more and more organizations expect makers and managers to inherently adopt an agile way of working (or at least say they are). So why have people focused explicitly on agile. Everyone should know that.

It doesn’t matter whether that’s a reasonable expectation, it’s how organizations act, which means that they are less willing to invest in a team of internal coaches.

So what should agile coaches do? Well most coaches were, at one point in time, makers. So they could go back to those roles and perhaps even have an advantage.

Except there’s probably a reason they went into coaching which has as much to do about what they could start doing (help people and teams improve) as well as what they could stop doing.

I wanted to dig into why people became coaches to see if their preferred type of work precludes them from moving back into maker roles.

What about product coaches?

And now you’re saying “Why are you lumping product coaches into this discussion?”

I’ll admit, there does seem to be a growing number of opportunities for product coaches. Well, at least a growing number of product coaches.

In fact, there’s a significant number of agile coaches who are switching to product coaching, regardless if they’ve ever done product management.

So is painting agile coaches and product coaches using too broad of a brush?

I don’t think so.

I’ve been around the agile community long enough to see it traverse almost the entire technology adoption lifecycle.

source: https://www.evolveagility.com/technology-adoption-curve-and-the-chasm/​

And I’m seeing a lot of similarities between product coaching now and agile coaching about 15 years ago. I’m also not the only one to notice it.

I have to believe those parallels are going to continue.

There’s something for product coaches to learn from agile coaches’ experiences. Perhaps there are things that product coaches can do differently.

Perhaps history is doomed to repeat itself in the product coaching world such that it may not be a good idea to become a product coach in the first place.

And perhaps people go into coaching because they’re more attracted to that kind of work than being an active product manager or maker.

I honestly don’t know, and even if there are no answers, I think there’s value in asking the questions.

If nothing else, people going into coaching careers will go in with their eyes open, not only to the appealing aspects, but also the downfalls.

Thanks for reading

Thanks again for reading InsideProduct.

If you have any comments or questions about the newsletter, or there’s anything you’d like me to cover, let me know.

Talk to you next time,

Kent J. McDonald
Founder | KBP.Media