Perceptions of coaching in product development teams

Contemporary global product development teams face increasingly ambiguous work environments. They are typically distributed, working in different organizations and in different time zones. They have different socio-cultural and professional-culture backgrounds. Individuals may speak different languages and the team may lack a common natural language. Within such scenarios, teams are still expected to produce quality products and bring them to the market in ever-shortened R&D cycles. Coaching product development teams in project-based courses and also in industry is gradually perceived as a response to team needs. In order to better understand how to maximally benefit from coaching, we developed a study based on a conceptual foundation of coaching [8]composed of five coaching roles carefully characterized to span the complete space of coaching activities. The context of this study was a project-based design course at Stanford University. The study supports the following conclusions: (1) different stakeholders in the design process have different views regarding coaching; (2) the stakeholders' differing views change as the design stages progress; and (3) project success seems to correlate with some coaching style mix.