My approach to developing others
Accelerate your digital ambitions
AND Digital is a hyper-growth digital agency with the mission to close the digital skills gap.
The Challenge
AND Digital excels at embedding a people first culture with a strong emphasis on coaching, mentoring and training.
During my time at AND I experienced for myself the transformative power of high quality coaching and coaching others has become an important part of my practice.
I coach from a place of authenticity, empowering people to take action to define their values and challenge their limits. I take a tailored and structured approach to hold my coachees to account and empower them to take control of their careers.
I also provide training and mentoring on modern product practice.
The Process
- Coaching and mentoring: I have coached dozens of people both on client and within AND Digital.
- Customer Centricity Program: I designed and led a 10 month hands-on program to build skills in continuous discovery, experimentation and customer research.
- Product Management academy course: I run this course to teach the fundamentals of product management.
- Discovery leadership: I helped to shape AND Digital’s approach to discovery which is now a formalised training module being rolled out across the company.
- Thought leadership: I run sessions and workshops on product and design both within AND Digital, on client and at meetups.
- Innovation: I run workshops for clients and the club on innovative product methods like Jobs to be done, Design Sprints and lean UX.
The Outcome
One of the great outcomes of coaching and mentoring is seeing people you’ve worked with in the past do great things in their product management careers. I’ve found it’s also a great way to build relationships that go extend beyond the workplace.
I have a number of coaching testimonials from people who have gone on to product leadership roles.
Provided innovative approaches to client engagement
Secured work through successful product discovery and client bid work.
Developed a culture where the focus is outcome focussed with measurable business value.
Nick Simm
Squad Lead - AND Digital
I’ve worked with Simon over the last 4 years at AND Digital on a variety of projects. He’s a fantastic person to work with!
First and foremost he’s an innovative product leader with extensive knowledge across the product life cycle and gets results.
I have experienced his styles as a diligent co-worker, an effective product and user experience lead and as a supportive coach.
Simon is excellent at: building strong, authentic and long lasting stakeholder relationships; finding routes through complexity; connecting and building teams to buy into a vision and guide them to outcomes; understanding and sharing a wide range of product principles so that they are usefully applied in practice.
A stand out quality is Simon’s genuine passion about supporting other people’s growth and championing their successes.
I personally have thoroughly enjoyed working together over the years. I would highly recommend Simon as a senior product leader, with authentic values who would inject high quality outputs and positive energy into and team.
Key takeaways
As my career has progressed, developing others has become increasingly important to me as a product leader. I’ve personally experienced the benefits that an amazing coach can have on a career. (Big shout out to Nate Williamson-Walsh!) Coaching is one of the most rewarding aspects of my craft and I believe it is also a key ingredient to company success.
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Product Strategy
I help business leadership teams define their product vision and ambition, and translate these into objectives and metrics to inspire, guide and track progress of product teams.
Empowering teams
I help companies to build product teams that can meet their digital ambitions. I have led two product transformations at large corporates, shaped the product culture at AND digital and developed successful start ups.
Product Delivery
I have delivered many products from idea to conception and I love being hands-on to put products into the hands of customers. I know how to get the most from agile teams and what is required to ship an enterprise product.
Business Development
During my time in consulting I have developed skills in business development, pitching presentations to C-suite executives to win business.
Developing Others
An important part of my role as a product leader is developing the next generation of product leaders. I do this through coaching, training, mentoring and thought leadership.
