The Parenting-Prompting Perspective

How coaching techniques I mastered as a people manager also helped me with parenting and prompt-engineering

Recently I had the opportunity to make a unique observation that I am calling the Parenting-Prompting Perspective.

My daughter Saanvi wanted to learn to play “Jana Gana Mana”, the Indian National Anthem, on her piano. At the same time I was learning to use AI coding assistants (V0, Cursor). Specifically, I was building Happiness Jar as a small but useful utility (read more about it here) as a warm up for several larger development projects.

There were many interesting parallels in both situations:

1. I had to work through others – Saanvi and AI specifically – to get the job done.

2. There was a lot of stuff I did not know how to do myself yet had to coach someone else to do. Examples: I cannot read music and have never learned to play any musical instrument myself. At the time I also did not know any React/NextJS to build a modern web app.

3. As a counterpoint to #2, I did have relevant experience that I could use to drive outcomes in both situations. Examples: Growing up in India, I had heard and sung the national anthem hundreds of times so I knew exactly how it should sound. After decades of working on production-grade software, I knew the general shape of the app and major pitfalls to watch out for.

So I turned to my trusty toolkit of coaching techniques and found something interesting! The same coaching techniques that have helped me grow my reports over the years were also effective techniques for parenting and prompt engineering! I knew the former for a few years now as a mom-exec-in-tech but the latter was a pleasant surprise.

In today’s article I’m highlighting 5 coaching techniques I have used with my reports, mentees and coaching clients that I also found effective in my Parenting-Prompting Perspective.

Most of these techniques are from the Co-Active Training Institute where I have done many coach training courses. A few techniques are from various leadership books I have enjoyed reading. Credit to the respective authors below.

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Coaching Technique 1: Destination Postcard

This technique involves asking the coachee to describe a Destination Postcard which is “a vivid picture from the near-term future”.

I first read about this technique in the Heathman brothers book Switch.

Creating a destination postcard is an interactive process. Or in AI-lingo, you can’t use one-shot prompting. In both of the above cases I had to iterate several times to reach a Destination Postcard we both agreed on.

Using Destination Postcard with Saanvi

We found a piano rendering of “Jana Gana Mana” on Noteflight that we listened to together. This score was too complex for Saanvi’s level of piano learning so we iterated and looked for other music that had simpler music she could understand. I encouraged her to look for something that she could understand 60-70% but not necessarily all of it since learning new techniques would be part of learning to play the song.

I also had Saanvi arrange her own music from all the examples she saw and heard. Doing this exercise gave her a concrete destination postcard of what she was aiming for. It also reassured her that while it would be a stretch from her current skills, it was achievable!

Using Destination Postcard with AI

V0 was a lot more sure of its abilities to create anything 🙂So I had to temper its confidence while I was building up Saanvi’s.

Here is the first prompt I used with V0 to generate the very first UI for Happiness Jar and its output.

I want to build an app called Happiness Jar where users can write short notes (no more than 25 words each) to add to their jar. Each note should have a date attached to it to show when it was written. I also want users to be able to edit and delete their notes.

It took several prompting iterations to reach the UI I wanted. The most effective technique was showing V0 screenshots of other sites for the visual elements I was looking for. This is the UI we landed at as the destination postcard.

Coaching Technique 2: Articulate What’s Going On (AWGO)

This technique involves speaking what you see, hear, experience or sense is happening in the moment. I like using the simplest form of this technique which is to repeat the coachee’s words back to them.

Using AWGO with Saanvi

The Destination Postcard score that Saanvi was using involved using both hands to play. Saanvi is still a beginner pianist and she was finding this frustrating. I used AWGO with her this way: “I am sensing your frustration from trying to play the full score with both hands. You said it was hard to keep track of all the LH and RH notes while learning to play this new piece. Do you have thoughts for anything you can do to help yourself?”

This prompted Saanvi to self-reflect and suggest that she write another simplified version of the music that only had left hand notes so she could learn them first. Once she did this exercise, she made significant progress and got more confident in her ability to play the whole piece!

Using AWGO with AI

After doing the UI exercise with V0, I switched to Cursor to write the actual app. At one point while working on the app Cursor wrote a lot of code I couldn’t understand and some of the app functionality also stopped working. I used AWGO with Cursor this way: “I am seeing a lot of new code added very quickly to the app that I don’t understand. Could you slow down, look at all the new code generated since the last commit and explain to me in concise but clear steps what it does? Don’t write any more code until I tell you to.”

I’ve found that using phrases like “slow down” and “explain to me” are helpful to get clearer responses from AI assistants. Telling AI assistants to stop doing and reflect or explain things is also useful when debugging. In this case, Cursor paused to explain the “optimistic updates” pattern to me and why it was adding that. In the course of its explanation, it found the bug that caused the app functionality to stop working and had a very human-like “aha!” moment! After getting my permission to write the fix code, it was back on track to building the app!

Coaching Technique 3: Powerful Questions

Questions that begin with “Why”, “What” or “How” cause your coachee to pause and think which leads to clarity or insight. These questions are open-ended and cannot be answered with just a yes/no response which means, quoting Daniel Kahneman from Thinking Fast and Slow, System 2 Thinking is required to answer them.

Using Powerful Questions with Saanvi

Throughout this project, I asked Saanvi several powerful questions. Here are a few examples:

• [pointing to music sheet] “Can you explain what these squiggly lines are?”

• “How did your playing sound to you compared to the full version we just heard?”

• [when Saanvi encountered a note she didn’t know] “What are all the possible ways of playing this?”

Each question made Saanvi pause and think which led to self-discovery and progress!

Using Powerful Questions with AI

I had initially coded Happiness Jar with mock data since it was easier to work on UI updates without worrying about the database. But at one point in the app I wanted to switch over to Supabase for the database and the auth portions. Here are a few powerful question prompts that helped me:

• Writing implementation plans - “Write an implementation plan in SupabaseImplementation.md that documents the high-level steps for using Supabase in @Codebase”

• Pausing to do a Q&A after every few code-generations - “Why did Happiness Jar not need an api folder with `route.ts` files for handling GET, POST, and other HTTP methods?”

Visualizing flows - “Create a call diagram for adding a note to the database in Happiness Jar”

Coaching Technique 4: Reframing

Reframing is a coaching technique for providing your coachee with another perspective.

Using Reframing with Saanvi

We had one particularly difficult practice session when Saanvi was feeling completely stuck and unable to play a measure. I asked her to explain the measure to me like how her piano teacher would explain it to her. This shifted Saanvi’s perspective from being a stuck beginner to a piano teacher. In the course of explaining the measure to me she also understood how to play it and was able to unblock herself!

Using Reframing with AI

At one point in my app development, the “Add to Jar” button simply stopped working. Cursor was going around in circles trying to fix the code but it ended up just generating a lot more code.

This is when I asked Cursor to imagine it was a beginner junior engineer building their first NextJS app and a button in the app stopped working. I asked Cursor to explain what steps it would take to debug this. Switching its perspective from an expert NextJS coder to a beginner seemed to do the trick and Cursor was able to come up with a clearer debugging plan that led to the solution.

Coaching Technique 5: Challenging

Challenging is a technique to make a bold and outrageous request to your coachee with the intention of stretching them beyond their comfort-zone of self-imposed limits.

A key thing to note about this technique is that I tell my coachees to respond with a “yes” or a counter-offer. My personal experience has been that even the counter-offer is often greater than the original intention your coachee may have.

Using Challenging with Saanvi

I used Challenging with Saanvi right at the beginning of this project by saying “let's learn to play this song in the next 2 days before your next piano class so you can surprise your piano teacher by playing it to her”. It was a huge stretch to learn to play a new and difficult song like this in just 2 days while also handling school and other daily activities.

At first Saanvi was speechless but when I explained that she could respond with a “yes” or a counter-offer, she countered by asking if we could learn in 5 days so she could play it over a video call to her grandparents on the weekend. That was a definite counter offer with a more aggressive goal than what she might have had before (no deadline, hobby project) and also contributed to refining her Destination Postcard!

Using Challenging with AI

Towards the end of my Happiness Jar coding sprint, I decided to try Challenging on Cursor. Until this time Happiness Jar was a relatively simple NextJS/Supabase/Vercel app built from scratch so while it was robust, it didn’t have many of the bells and whistles that modern SaaS apps have.

Here is the Challenge prompt I gave Cursor:

I have decided to launch Happiness Jar in 100 countries. Help me make an internationalization plan that includes refactoring the app to incorporate translation strings design. Also give me translations for all the currently used strings in 4 other languages besides English including one RTL language.

While I didn’t end up deploying this functionality in Happiness Jar, Cursor’s response to this challenge gave me a much deeper understanding of how translation layers are built into apps. It was also a useful refresher in software I18N that I previously only knew in passing through the expertise of other colleagues in my team. For example, Cursor itself recommended that one of the translation languages should be a CJK language so we have additional coverage to check how the app renders internationally.

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Final Words

I’m constantly surprised by how much overlap there is between people management, parenting and prompt engineering. The biggest surprise has been how the other side – report, child or AI – shows their growth. Personally, this overlap between all my favorite domains has fueled my interest in AI more than the current industry hype!

Have you noticed anything interesting or surprising in your AI usage?