Use This Powerful Concept From Learning Science To Coach Your Team

As part of my work on education products, I have picked up a fair amount of learning science and theory. I recently explained one of these concepts to a friend and realized there is a lot of learning science that is generally applicable especially to people management. This post will help you be a better manager applying one of the most powerful concepts — the zone of proximal development.

There is a powerful concept in learning research called the Zone of Proximal Development that has many lessons for product leaders. It is defined as the zone in between what you can already do on your own and what you can’t do — or in other words what you can do but only with help or support.

Support can be a person guiding you or it can be scaffolding that helps you do a task you couldn’t do otherwise. E.g. You can read a chapter book looking up some words. You can play the piano if the keys are labeled.

Over time the scaffolding can be removed and that thing moves into the zone of things you can now do without help and you can move on to something new.

It’s a simple but powerful concept because it pushes you to do a few critical things:

1) Normalize the idea that everyone needs support to learn.

In my current role as SVP of Product at Codeverse we build a platform to teach kids coding. Since we work with kids ages 6–13 we need to provide lots of support for this to happen. We have a specific language, Kidscript, made with simpler kid-friendly syntax and expert guides who do video chat sessions to answer kid’s questions and motivate them. Sometimes parents are concerned — why does my kid need this much help? Are they really learning? To me, I’d flip this on its head. If everything is easy for them and they don’t need any help — are they really learning?

If you are a manager the same is true of your team — how can you make sure every person on your team getting support for at least some of their work?

When was the last time your highest performers received support? If it’s been awhile or you don’t know, are they really being challenged? And will they stay if they are not?

Often the issue is with high performers you may not be able to personally support them due to their needs being outside your expertise. But they still need support.

The more senior someone is, the more likely the support they need is not inside the company in yourself as a manager or existing trainings but outside the company with experts or others in the industry or elsewhere who have done it before. See my article on 5 Workshops for the Growing Product Leader for some ideas.

2) Invest in scaffolding.

As a manager you do have a lot relevant expertise should share it, but one question is how to scale support and your knowledge. Sometimes managers feel like they need to take this all on themselves and provide that support directly via feedback, coaching meetings or diving deep into the details of their team members’ projects. But that becomes an issue because at best they run out of either hours in the day and are exhausted and at worst for their team it feels like micromanagement. I’ve definitely fallen into this trap before.

So what can be done? Consider how to “productize” support so it is more scalable. Engineering Managers tend to be really good at this — they use code reviews, group coding sessions, and regular tech talks to help their teams build skills.

Product leaders may find it challenging to “productize” support as there are so many different hats and every project and initiative has its own needs. Still you can leverage templates, peers and processes to scale your efforts.

I’ve used templates for discovery experiment planning, user research synthesis, and product requirements to help team members without personally being involved. I like doing regular product team meetings for brainstorming and reviews as peers can provide great support and learning.

If you feel overwhelmed try to start small. Take a couple hours every week to invest in scaling your manager support instead of giving it directly.

3) Remove the scaffolding

Remember one key in the above diagram is after sometime the scaffolding needs to be removed for the learning to progress as you can do more on your own and move new things into the ZPD.

At Codeverse in our coding tutorials in the beginner tutorials we literally give kids every line of code they need. In the expert ones we give examples and hints instead because kids don’t need every line of code anymore and providing it to them doesn’t challenge them enough.

One pitfall I’ve fallen into as a manager is I keep providing the same support to someone who doesn’t need it anymore. Maybe you are used to giving feedback on every product requirements doc created by your PM team. In the beginning that may make sense. They need that feedback cycle and learn from it to improve their work. But over time it may be better for both you and them to remove that scaffolding — let them move forward without your review. It’s true some things may not come out as if you’d given them feedback but they are likely immaterial.

Now consider what’s next. Maybe they need help building product strategy skills or presenting to exec audiences- if that’s the case then invest the time you spent reviewing product docs into providing feedback on a strategy proposal or roadmap presentation.

There’s always something new to learn — both for you and your team.