When professionals move into coaching roles, they quickly realize technical expertise alone isn’t enough to support their teams. When an expert developer begins coaching, they may have a lot of knowledge about coding but have a lot to learn about helping product and engineering teams achieve their outcomes. Successful coaching is about nurturing and developing abilities rather than simply information dumping.
From my experience, immersive learning experiences work best for effective coaching. Instead of hypothetical scenarios of what could happen on the job, immersive learning is based on what is happening on the job — the systems and features teams work in, challenges and opportunities they’re facing and outcomes they’re working toward. Immersive learning is better served with a flexible playbook than a prescriptive curriculum, more akin to a sports coach than a college lecturer.
Playbooks help learners get from point A to point B. When used correctly, they create consistency where it matters. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel each time you onboard a new teammate or go into an organization to coach. But they become less helpful — detrimental even — when you turn playbooks into a rigid step-by-step process.
Flexible vs. Rigid Modern Playbooks
Think of playbooks as collections of techniques, resources, teaching aids, stock questions or other procedures to help processes become repeatable and unlock iteration. The only way to achieve this is to make your playbooks flexible.
Here’s are three ways to ensure flexibility:
1. Leave Room for Audibles
A big challenge with playbooks is preparation. Preparing too little makes adapting to your students’ needs hard. But over-preparation can turn the playbook into a strict curriculum.
At some point you may find that what you prepared and what you need to cover are heading in different directions. That’s when you need to “call an audible.” In American football, an audible is a last-minute change to a play, and making an audible work is a matter of experience.
Newer coaches may rely heavily on what they have prepared because they find it harder to adapt to dynamic situations. However, for an experienced coach teaching test-driven development (TDD) — writing a failing test before actually developing the code — sticking to a script isn’t the way. It’s about reading the room and knowing where you might double down and what instructions you could possibly skip. “Meet people where they’re at” is the mantra we use.
However, allowing for audibles isn’t an excuse to forgo preparation. Some think that being agile means not having a plan. Don’t fall for that. Adaptability is an outgrowth of good preparation. If you have learned and practiced extensively, you can make quick decisions confidently.
2. Collaborate and Iterate on the Creation of Playbooks
Playbooks are built on collaboration and a series of experiments. Write down what you’re trying to accomplish and keep a log of iterations and pivots to that experiment — and what you learned from them.
Maybe the experiment yields a repeatable play, maybe it doesn’t. The goal isn’t 100% certainty through immutable rules; instead, it’s progressive learning that gets people feeling confident and empowered.
Also, clearly define roles and responsibilities. Is there a senior coach involved? Is it a mentor/mentee situation? Clarity helps everyone understand their part in playbook development. It’s less about keeping people in their lanes and more about creating a sense of transparency, accountability and shared ownership. The playbook becomes a happy side effect of a team building a shared mental model and negotiating collective meaning.
3. Reflect and Refine
Your playbook may need refinement after running a learning program with a team.
Use these statements and questions to help reflect:
- Here’s what we thought we were going to do. What changed?
- What audibles were called?
- What worked well? What might we do differently?
- Was there an audible that might be turned into a play?
Next, teams document their outcomes and can refer back to the playbook as they progress. When new team members join, they can quickly understand the team’s processes and learn from past experiences. Even if an experiment didn’t go as planned, the team still learned something that can provide clarity for the next successful experiment.
By documenting lessons and changes, playbooks ensure important practices are consistently followed across the team as working agreements.
Measuring the Success of Your Playbook
A playbook is just one piece of a learning experience. To measure its success, you need to assess the entire learning experience across three categories:
- Indicators: How do you know that learning is taking root? This isn’t measured just through key performance indicators (KPIs), but any indicator that learners are doing something differently. In the case of TDD, are your students writing more tests? That’s an indicator. It’s not the point of learning TDD, but it’s a side effect.
- Behaviors: How are learners behaving differently? Sometimes it’s just a change in how they talk. With TDD, they may start talking about refactoring code to improve readability. These verbal cues show where learning is sticking.
- Outcomes: What conditions have changed? These are longer-term results that could be measured in a survey. For example, you might ask learners to assess whether they “can effectively use testing frameworks/tools for TDD” on a Likert scale from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.”
Using feedback and consider indicators, behaviors and outcomes to determine if training is effective. These measurements go beyond standard workshop surveys, providing deeper insights into the effectiveness of your training. Make profound learning moments consistent and repeatable by reflecting on what worked after every delivery.
The perfect playbook doesn’t guarantee good outcomes. The real value comes from the alignment, collaboration and iteration between leaders, coaches and teams. Playbooks help guide you toward these transformations, but experience and practice are how everyone succeeds.
