Changing Product Organizations Deliberately: What Coaching Can Do and Consulting Can’t – with Tobias Freudenreich (Founder & Coach @ Hey Clarity.)

How Do You Really Change a Product Organization? On Coaching, Change Processes, and Why “Just Explaining How It’s Done” So Rarely Works

In the twentieth episode of the PRODUKTKRAFT Podcast, our anniversary episode, I talk to Tobias Freudenreich about a question every product organization faces sooner or later: how can deliberate change actually be brought about? Tobias has been coaching product leaders, managers, and teams for around a decade and accompanies the transformation of product organizations together with his co-founders at “Hey Clarity.”

We start with a deliberate distinction: Tobias sees himself as a coach rather than a consultant. What does this difference mean in practice, and why is it so rarely enough to “just explain to an organization how it’s done”? We talk about what a typical engagement looks like, whether companies even know what they want, and how, as an outsider, you can tell what’s really going on in a product organization. The fact that change processes often feel sluggish and fruitless has a core rooted in systems theory, which we touch on in passing.

From the organizational level, we move down to the people, because every organization consists of individuals. What happens when individual team members don’t want to go along with the change process at all and suddenly find themselves being coached? How does coaching individual contributors differ from coaching managers? And when do you have to let someone go – how do you, as a coach, open that kind of conversation?

It stays practical and full of takeaways: what can you, as a manager, borrow even without outside support – for example, for an honest assessment of where your organization stands, or for the question of how you lead your team members? What do you take away as a product manager? And which situations can only be solved with outside help, and which can you tackle yourself?

Have a listen to learn more about deliberate change, coaching, and developing strong product organizations.