How can a mentor or coach help you manage your time and prioritize tasks as a product manager?

Coach won’t do things for you, but will help you get better at what you do. Coach will help you focus and keep your goals in mind. They can teach and guide, but you will still need to walk the path.

A mentor or coach is a guide, product confidante. They are strong subject matter experts, empathetic listener, provide constructive feedback, adaptive and current. With their strong track record and passion for mentoring, they help product managers up skill and up-spiral their strategic thinking and provide tailored guidance.

Time management as a skill while seemingly basic can often be overlooked as a continuous improvement goal. A mentor would start off with an assessment to raise awareness about the pitfalls.They would guide on goal-setting, become outcome focused instead of task-focused. A mentor can also help guide you on prioritization and delegation of tasks to increase the scalability of your product leadership,

A coach can help with assessment and raising awareness of the current situation, help prioritize tasks. A mentor also helps understand the different prioritization frameworks available and what might be the most relevant. They also help you understand trade-offs and outcomes and help you learn from their experience as well from the collective knowledge they have gathered from other's experiences.

There are multiple ways to find a mentor. Besides the usual platforms that are out there, what I suggest to my mentees is to reach out within their network or outside and follow coaches or mentors that they look up to. Another advise that I give to my mentees is "who would they like to be when they grow up?" "who do they look up to and want to become?" It is worthwhile to reach out to such experts and learn from them. A product manager can have a network of mentors instead of a sole mentor.

I think many industry experts will be happy if you approach them with a sincere interest and ask if they can help you as mentors. I help people, especially here in LinkedIn where I can do it asynchronously in my own pace.

Honesty and candor is the most important thing- to be honest with oneself as well as your mentor. Rationalizing and internalizing what is the intended outcome of the mentorship is super important to set the basis of the mentor-mentee relationship. Being proactive and reaching out to the mentor is very important. Keeping an open mind about leveraging the network of the mentors help immensely.

We will be starting up our next session of product manager mentorship soon. Sign up at https://TheProductMentor.com And, yes, it's all free and for people of all levels of product management.