GfK (short for Gesellschaft für Konsumforschung, or "Society for Consumer Research" in English) is a market research company that provides data and insights to businesses and organizations around the world. The company was founded in 1934 in Germany and is now headquartered in Nuremberg, Germany.
Their goal is to help companies to make better-informed decisions about product development, marketing, sales, and other strategic decisions by providing them with a wide range of research services and data analysis tools.
GfK's main focus is on providing market research and consumer insights to businesses in a variety of industries, including consumer goods, retail, healthcare, technology, and media. They conduct research through a variety of methods, including surveys, focus groups, and online research. They also use big data analytics and other advanced techniques to gather and analyze data.
We joined GfK in August 2022 as Product Management Coaches. The Vice President for Industry Insights & Product Development Practice instructed us on three main pillars the Product Managers at GfK struggled the most with.
The goal was to increase the confidence in their ability to use frameworks, best practices, and tools in these areas. While the coaching had clear objectives and key results attached, coaching happened very individually based on the experience and challenges of the individual or team. In other words, our aim was to do a cultural transformation in Gfk's way of approaching product discovery.
We started with the coaching sessions in August 2022 until March 2023. To achieve the best results in our quest, we decided to divide the coaching journey into three different formats: 1:1 coaching, Product Clinic, and Process Coaching.
Topics
During the 8 months that our mission with GFK lasted, we worked on three different topics in the 1:1 coaching sessions:
OKRs
Every coaching topic had its own set of objectives and key results.
Together with the champion we set the OKRs to be able to track our progress and know if the sessions we were providing were valuable and useful. The OKRs were:
Speaking in Terms of Value
Stakeholder Management
Cross-Functional Product Discovery
Nomination
While the champion enabled the coaching, it was the VPs job to nominate participants. All three VPs were eager to send their participants of various levels from product Owner to Product Director.
We would do one 1:1 coaching session per week, for 4 weeks, resulting in 4 hours of personalized coaching with our Group Product Manager.
We decided to follow a semi-structured approach, focused on a specific topic. The goal of this format was to increase individuals’ confidence and competence in relation to a specific topic.
Interaction Structure
Evaluations
These are some of the reviews from the coachees:
💡 It empowers you to think from a different perspective and see things from a different angle.
💡 Coaching helped me learn about a concept that allows influencing product-prioritization sessions based on well-funded and comprehensible reasoning.
💡 I would say that these sessions with Alex were the most useful trainings because they were connected to my daily work, in practice not only theory.
The second format we worked with GFK was the Product Clinic format. The objective of this format was to apply the best practices on cases that the different teams were struggling with.
It was a cross-functional invitation to a 60-minute online session of voluntary participation.
For this format, we focused on a specific workstream, how to work with a Lean Canvas. The coach led and drove the discussion about options for best practices approach in each particular case.
How to work with a Lean Canvas was of particular interest as for every major initiative Product Managers had to craft a Lean Canvas to be able to successfully defend the initiative.
We held 2 Product Clinics working each time on a team-specific Lean Canvas that got improved during the session.
Participants enjoyed these sessions, leaving not only with the knowledge of how to improve the Lean Canvas further but already with an improved one.
Besides the 1:1 coaching in Cross-Functional Product Discovery, we got asked to help a dedicated team more hands-on via Process Coaching in Product Discovery.
The coach worked with a single team alongside a product manager for two hours a week for multiple months to help with product discovery processes. The coach ensured that the process is hypotheses-driven, client-centric, cross-functional, and follows the double-diamond logic. They included all relevant functions, promoted best practices, and value-based decision-making. The coach also provided feedback, advised, and consulted on specific issues and challenges, while proactively sharing methods and best practice examples. The goal was to ensure that everyone sees the value of product discovery and that it is visible throughout the entire organization.
Very specifically we helped the team to launch surveys faster, built user personas, prepare interview scripts, and to inform stakeholders about the insights and learning via monthly updates.
💡 Coached 40 Product Managers, Product Owners, and Heads of Product throughout 8 months with an average recommendation score of 8.
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