Coaching & Multiplying — The Product Playbook

In March 2019 I had five reports and a handful of interns, and I thought I was on top of the world. The team was delivering. By every measure I used on myself, I was doing all the things a leader is supposed to do.

Then I ran a 360 through the Leadership Circle. 124 questions, answered by my reports and my peers, and answered by me about myself. The result was humbling. I had rated myself far higher than the people around me rated me. It stung.

I didn't complain and I didn't make excuses. I got to work on the exact thing the feedback pointed at. I started making sure my team members felt heard and valued, and went out of my way to make their jobs better. The team started delivering more than I ever could have imagined, and it grew from five people to twenty-six. When I ran the same 360 again that November, my leadership effectiveness had climbed from the low 40s to the mid 90s.

Nothing about my own talent changed between March and November. What changed is that I stopped trying to control everything and started making the people around me more capable. That single shift is the whole job, and everything I did to climb out of those low 40s is what the rest of this page breaks down: how you draw people out instead of running over them, how you teach them to decide instead of deciding for them, and how you hand over real ownership without losing the outcome.

Building the team as a unit is its own discipline, covered in Building a Product Team. This page is about the people on it. One at a time. How you grow each individual until the team is capable of things you could never pull off alone.

You scale through other people

No matter how good you are, there are only so many hours in your day and only so many rooms you can stand in at once. So you scale yourself through the people you lead. You teach them what you believe, give them a solid process, and let them make the call.

The decisions they make won't always be the ones you would have made. That's fine. If you've given them the tools and they've done the real due diligence, you can trust it even when it isn't yours. That's the line between managing work and multiplying it.

Multipliers vs. diminishers

Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown named the two kinds of leaders in their book Multipliers, and the distinction has stuck with me ever since.

A diminisher walks into a room and everyone gets a little smaller. They have to be the smartest person there. They make the decisions, hold the answers, and the people around them slowly stop thinking.

A multiplier does the opposite. Everyone gets bigger. They draw out the intelligence already in the room, ask the questions that make people figure it out themselves, and hand over real decisions.

The gap between the two isn't small. Wiseman's research, drawn from more than 150 leaders across four continents, found that a diminisher gets only about 48% of a person's capability out of them. A multiplier pulls somewhere between 70 to 100%. Same people. Different leader. Roughly twice the output from the exact same team.

There's a reason it works. People do their best work when they feel capable and trusted, not stressed and second-guessed. Shawn Achor's research, behind The Happiness Advantage, found a brain running positive is about 31% more productive than the same brain running negative. That's what a multiplier creates. Treat people like they're capable, and they grow into it.

Being a multiplier isn't a personality you're born with. It's a set of behaviors you can practice.

Teach how to decide, not what to decide

Your instinct, when someone on your team brings you a problem, is to solve it for them. Resist that. Every time you hand someone the answer, you make them a little more dependent on you, you make yourself the bottleneck for the next ten problems just like it, and you rob them of the rep that would have made them better.

So don't give it to them. Use empathy and open-ended questions to walk through the options together, and let them guide themselves to the call. The goal is that next time, they don't need you in the room at all.

This playbook is built for exactly that. It isn't a list of answers to copy. It's a way to see how the decisions actually get made, so you can make the next one yourself.

I've watched it work outside my own team. I shared this playbook with people well outside my product org, to help them make better, data-driven decisions with their own teams. At one company it led a group to kill large parts of their roadmap and their ideas backlog. Not because I told them to, but because they finally took the time to think through the problem first, instead of falling for a solution and rushing to build it. That's teaching someone how to decide.

Teach in the moment

Don't save your coaching for review cycles. Annual reviews are close to useless as a feedback tool. A year is a long time, and if you hold your feedback that long, the person probably won't even remember the moment you're talking about. How is anyone supposed to improve on something they can't recall doing?

So give the feedback immediately, while the details are fresh for both of you. The most powerful teaching happens right when something is live, when the lesson is concrete and the stakes are real. A correction in the moment sticks in a way the same point never will weeks later in a review. Hold it for the formal cycle and you waste the best teaching chances you'll ever get.

The five levels of delegation

Delegation is where multiplying goes wrong most often, and the reason is almost always communication. Communication is the number one struggle I've hit at every company I've worked for, regardless of size. A three-person startup, a hundred-thousand-person company. Same issue at both. Delegation is just where it shows up most.

So here's the rule that comes before any technique. When you delegate, you still own the outcome. If the result isn't what you needed, you don't get to point at the person and say they didn't do what you said, especially if you never gave them what they needed to get it right.

The fix is being explicit, up front, about how much latitude you're handing over. There are five levels, and naming the level out loud removes the guessing.

Do as I say. You've already done the research and made the decision. They execute exactly, no deviating.
Research and report. They gather the information and bring it back. You make the call.
Research and recommend. They bring the options, the pros and cons, and their best recommendation. You approve or adjust.
Decide and inform. They decide and act, and keep you in the loop so you're never blindsided.
Act independently. They own it end to end and only come back if they need support.

The same piece of work often climbs the levels as trust builds, starting at level one and ending up at level five on the same project. The point isn't to pick the "right" level once. It's to say which level you mean right now. And when a handoff misses, treat it as a signal about how you delegated at least as much as how they executed.

Decentralized command

The end state of all of this is what Jocko Willink and Leif Babin call decentralized command. When your people understand the mission and the constraints deeply enough, they make the right calls without coming back to you for every decision. You have to actually instill that trust and mean it. Give a person clear boundaries and the real authority to decide inside them, and nine times out of ten they'll make the call that moves the team forward.

Insist on making every decision yourself and you become the bottleneck. The team stalls every time it hits you. Push the decisions down and you're freed to operate at the next level up, while the team gets resilient instead of dependent on one person.

The best proof I have is something a tech lead told me on my last day with a team. He said he couldn't tell if I'd just had that much trust in him or if I was being lazy, probably a bit of both, but that he'd done more in six months working for me than in three years at his last company.

I didn't make that guy smarter. I learned what his natural talents were and put him in a seat where he got to use them. That's all multiplying is.

Underneath all of it is empathy

None of this works if you don't actually care about the people who report to you. That's the foundation the whole thing sits on. If you don't, the questions feel like a technique and the delegation feels like dumping work, and people can tell.

So before you can help someone, you have to actually understand them. What they actually want, what they're genuinely good at, and where they're trying to go. Then you shape a path that points their work at all three.

That's why I aim every bit of this at the individual. Not the team in aggregate, not a headcount number, the person sitting across from me. Grow people that way and you don't just get more out of them while they're yours. You build people who go on to do the same for someone else. That's the only impact that outlives you.