Petra Wille
Independent Product Leadership Coach. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
authoroperatorother@loomista ↗LinkedIn ↗petra-wille.com ↗
Petra Wille is an executive and product leadership coach based in Hamburg, Germany, who works with product teams to develop leadership competencies. She authored the books STRONG Product People and STRONG Product Communities, and created the PMwheel assessment framework.
1shows
1appearances
21statements
0resolved
0supported
0contradicted
Everything Petra Wille said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
T-shaped skill profiles are insufficient for product managers
“People tend to talk about T-shaped employee profiles. But T-shaped is so not enough for a product person, right? We want them to understand underlying problems of the business and the users, finding solution for those, getting things out of the door with the t…”
Personal development should not be an employee's top priority
“Personal development will never be the number one priority. And it shouldn't.”
Many product leaders lack PM backgrounds and empathy for PMs
“At least with a lot of clients that I'm working with, they are not trained product people. So they often come from a marketing background or a business background or from the data background, so to say, or the engineering background, but they often never have …”
Non-PM managers force PMs to reinvent solved solutions
“As the line manager has no clue about the product community out there and the craft of product management, they often struggle to point them in the right direction to say like, Hey, I think that's a problem somebody else already had. So maybe you could watch a…”
Product leaders should create local team competency frameworks
“Grade your compass and encourage your peers to grade their compass and a bit down the line. It might make sense to harmonize some of that, but it's better to start helping your product folks and giving them some orientation than being totally paralyzed by the …”
PM competency rubrics must be heavily customized, not copied
“Don't use it just by copy paste because sometimes you have just rather technical VMs in your organization, and then all these assessment points about user interviews and discovery are maybe not that applicable in your situation, right? So use one template that…”
Curiosity is nearly impossible to teach in corporate environments
“Plus reflecting on the personality traits, because I think there are some things that you better hire for, and that are super hard to develop in a corporate environment. So for me that, for example, is curiosity.”
Leaders cannot coach product managers who lack baseline empathy
“If there is, yeah, not a decent level of empathy built into this person, then it's nearly impossible for me as a product lead to help them get to this decent level.”
PMs need practical advice rather than high-level thought leadership
“We tend to read all the books and we tend to know all our thought leaders and all these kinds of things, but our product people often need super practical advice.”
One-on-one coaching should focus on incremental gains over perfection
“So it really focuses on Incremental improvements, not crazy stressing everybody out improvements, not what it, what could I do to make it a 10. It's more really how could I improve your situation, really build rapport, really be there for your product folks.”
Crafting a product narrative takes two weeks of daily preparation
“So I think if you, let's say you want to explain the rest of the company what you're You and the team are up for the next three to four months, so to say. And then I think that's two weeks of work, not eight hours a day, obviously, but two weeks of work, maybe…”
Americans are on average better at public speaking than Europeans
“I really find in, in average Americans, for example, being better at it than most of us Europeans. And I think that's because even in your school system, it seems to me, I don't know, you tell me if that is the case, but storytelling and being in front of a cl…”
Inability to tell stories and speak publicly stalls PM career growth
“I think it is a career staller if you can't for a product person. Can do the IC level product management job, but getting promoted is way harder if you're not good in telling stories and running the team behind the shared goal and all these kinds of things.”
Storytelling is faster and easier to iterate than prototyping
“I think there's a lot of beauty in the story as a design tool, so to say, because it's even easier to change a story than it is to change a prototype, right? So even before you put something in writing, you could start talking about it and see how it lands and…”
Crafting elaborate narrative stories for individual sprints is wasted effort
“We don't need to create this complicated story for the next sprint. I'd say that it's, that's too much of an effort, maybe a waste of time. Usually you need to look a bit further out to make it worse. Spending a lot of time on creating your story.”
Internal product communities boost retention and reduce manager coaching workloads
“One impact definitely is stickiness. So people tend to stay with companies where they're learning and growing and can, yeah, get to mastery. So to say, hello, Daniel Pink. So that is really something that people are thriving for. And if they find this in a com…”
Internal communities are cheaper for talent development than external coaching
“It's actually a pretty cheap way Of doing people development because trainings are expensive, conference tickets are expensive, getting an external product coach expensive. But helping people to learn from each other by making room for that and giving them a b…”
Pre-defining quarterly challenges helps managers spot growth opportunities
“Creating such a list once a quarter, for example, you block yourself an hour in your calendar, you write down the names of your direct reports, and then you just think about, okay, what would be this next bigger challenge for them? It's not always the case tha…”
Consistent weekly PM coaching beats infrequent, high-intensity review cycles
“Consistency beats intensity. So really the smaller time investments on a weekly basis, and that applies for The PM's time investment is learning new things, and it applies to the product leads investment and helping their people to grow.”
Most product leaders lack a written definition of a good PM
“And some are super good and have it all written down, but most of the product folks that I'm working with haven't.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Petra's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Independent Product Leadership Coach | 1 | 21 | — | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |