Today I wanted to go over a coaching tool we learned about a few years ago. It’s called the SOON funnel. It’s a method for coaching people on your team through a problem. The idea behind most coaching methods I’ve seen is that the people on your team can get to the answer on their own, and like I said last week, you can coach them to get there a little faster without doing the whole thing for them.

What is the SOON funnel?

The SOON funnel is an acronym for Success, Obstacles, Options, and Next steps. By using this acronym, you can break big problems down into smaller pieces that are easier to manage.

Success

A few years ago, a teammate told me one of his professional development goals was to learn more about our company’s AI and ML capabilities. This happened around the same time I learned about the SOON funnel, so I thought this would be the perfect time to try it out. So I asked, “what does success look like?”

He told me that success would mean that he could explain some of our AI and ML projects to other people on our team. He would know our capabilities (what we could and couldn’t do), and identify new opportunities to suggest to our AI team.

Obstacles

Next I asked him about his obstacles.

He said the first issue was that he was basically starting at 0. He didn’t know what he didn’t know, or what would be applicable to our company. On top of that, he didn’t know what our ML models look like (inputs, outputs, and what happens in between).

Options

Next I asked him about what some options would be. What’s the smallest possible action he could take to get started on the path to understanding these things?

He thought about starting with learning more terminology, followed by some code walkthroughs with a software developer on the ML team. In these code walkthroughs, the dev could also point out some parts of the model that were unique to our company.

These were decent suggestions, but the code walkthrough was a bit resource intensive for the level he was at. I suggested that code walkthroughs would be a better choice in the future, when he had developed more of a foundational understanding of the technology. That way, he would have a stronger sense of the fundamentals and he could get the most value out of the dev’s time.

Next Steps

Finally, I asked him what he thinks his next steps should be.

Based on what we had talked about with Options, he suggested finding some resources to learn more ML and AI terminology, along with books and courses to set up a stronger foundation before he felt he was ready for a code walkthrough.

My only additional suggestion was some Active Commitment. I asked him to message me and the head of the ML team together to state his intention to learn more in the ML and AI space, with the end goal of setting up a code walkthrough with a dev to learn more.

Wrapping Up

When using the SOON funnel, remember to let your team members speak first. They can offer up suggestions and you can provide feedback. This way they can refine their approach as time goes on. It also gives you the opportunity to course correct and get them to either reach higher, or scale down some expectations depending on the company’s strategic objectives.

Either way, the SOON funnel is a great tool for developing problem solving skills on your team. Sticking with coaching tools will develop your team and lead to better suggestions and plans coming from the bottom up in the future. The time investment now, will pay dividends in the future.