Nov 27, 2022 · 1h 12m · lennys-podcast
How to be the best coach to product people | Petra Wille (Strong Product People)
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In this episode, product leadership coach Petra Wille joins Lenny Rachitsky to discuss how leaders can become world-class coaches for product managers, master the art of storytelling and public speaking, and leverage communities of practice for scalable career growth.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Lenny holds 28% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Lenny as informed peer 3.9 Guest teaching 5.9 Guest disagreement 0.3 Lenny pushing back 0.1
speaking balance: gold is Lenny, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 1:05:21 Pushing back on engagement as a metric
Petra directly challenges the conventional industry standard that community managers should measure success by raw engagement, arguing it creates noise rather than value.
Hardest push from Lenny ▶ 17:14 Reframing the starting point for managementWhen Lenny assumes managers should start by defining an all-encompassing compass framework, Petra pushes back and redirects the approach to starting with simple quarter-by-quarter development plans.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 7:23 The eight-legged creature vs T-shaped profilePetra systematically educates the audience and Lenny on why standard corporate HR concepts like T-shaped skill profiles fail to capture the multi-dimensional complexity of product managers.
Lenny holds their own ▶ 19:10 Lenny outlines his 6-month review and check-in systemLenny steps into expert practitioner mode, laying out the exact monthly tracking and Google Doc system he built and ran with his PMs at Airbnb.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Lenny as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Lenny pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Coaching Product Leaders and the Middle Management Layer | 4 | 6 | 1 | 0 | Lenny sets the stage by highlighting Petra's background and observing that middle managers in product are often the most crucial yet neglected layer. Petra explains her specific coaching scope and how non-product managers struggle with empathy and foundational craft. | |
| Overcoming the Knowledge Gap in Non-Product Background Managers | 3 | 7 | 1 | 0 | Lenny probes into what non-PM managers lack most. Petra educates him using her 'eight-legged creature' metaphor instead of standard T-shaped profiles to explain PM complexity and the need for curated career progression. | |
| The Purpose and Scope of 'Strong Product People' | 4 | 7 | 0 | 0 | Petra details the 5-step framework from her book for developing PMs. Lenny synthesizes her points by drawing an apt parallel to product strategy, roadmap, and vision. | |
| Initiating Development Plans and Establishing Consistent Follow-Up Cadences | 6 | 5 | 1 | 1 | When Lenny asks where managers should start, Petra reframes the premise by advising against comprehensive assessments first, instead recommending starting immediately with a targeted development plan. Lenny shares his own concrete management practices from his operating career. | |
| Assessing PM Competencies and Screening for Inherent Traits | 5 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Lenny mentions his public benchmark research on tech career ladders. Petra advises customizing existing frameworks like the PM Wheel and explicitly hiring for innate traits like curiosity and empathy rather than trying to teach them later. | |
| Deep Dive into the PM Wheel Assessment Framework | 3 | 7 | 0 | 0 | Petra breaks down the 8 distinct buckets and diagnostic question structures comprising her PM Wheel framework, explaining how she originally developed it out of coaching necessity. | |
| Practical Coaching Execution and Managing Content Overload | 4 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Lenny and Petra discuss avoiding information overload for PMs, agreeing that applying practical methodologies iteratively to solve current problems is far more effective than consuming endless books. | |
| High-Impact Coaching Questions and 1-on-1 Health Checks | 4 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Petra shares actionable coaching prompts and emotion-based check-ins to make 1-on-1s meaningful, connecting her ideas to Matt Mochary's incremental improvement scoring methodology. | |
| Sponsor Segment: Integrating AI Features with AssemblyAI | 3 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Following the mid-roll ad read, Lenny introduces the storytelling topic. Petra explains that compelling storytelling takes substantial time and iterative drafting, advising PMs to cut corporate jargon that deadens emotional resonance. | |
| Overcoming Public Speaking Anxiety and Advancing Your Career | 3 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Lenny admits his own stage fright. Petra shares tactical advice on overcoming speaking anxiety through low-stakes audiences, physiological grounding techniques, and emphasizing storytelling as an essential career unlock. | |
| Storytelling Role Models and Inspiring Communicators | 3 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Petra shares her favorite storytelling exemplars, including former manager Jason Goldberg, Hans Rosling's engaging data presentations, and Sarah Kay's spoken word poetry. | |
| Storytelling Frameworks, Iterative Formats, and Recommended Literature | 5 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Petra describes the Hero's Journey framework adapted for PMs and maintaining 3 standard story formats (elevator pitch, sprint kickoff, company all-hands). Lenny recommends Pressfield's book while Petra cites Nancy Duarte's works. | |
| The Strategic Value and ROI of Product Communities | 3 | 7 | 0 | 0 | Petra outlines her recent research into Communities of Practice, demonstrating how internal and external communities offer cost-effective development, retention, and peer-to-peer learning. | |
| Evaluating Community Quality and the Power of Knowledge Sharing | 4 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Petra lists evaluation criteria for quality communities, emphasizing mutual trust, actionable learning nuggets, and active contributions over passive consumption. Lenny reinforces the value of local offline meetups. | |
| Architecting Sustainable Communities and Lenny's Community Case Study | 6 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Lenny shares the operational architecture and moderation of his 10k-member community. Petra challenges conventional community engagement metrics, asserting that signal-to-noise ratio and distributed leadership circles are superior health indicators. | |
| Lightning Round: Favorite Books, Media, and Everyday Tools | 3 | 4 | 0 | 0 | In the rapid-fire lightning round, Petra shares her top book recommendations, media choices, interview prompt strategies, and utilitarian operational tools. |
Statements from this episode (23)
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…”
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…”
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.”
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…”
Personal development should not be an employee's top priority
“Personal development will never be the number one priority. And it shouldn't.”
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 …”
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.”
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.”
Product managers should consume content just-in-time rather than constantly
“I find you don't need to be listening to and reading everything all the time. It's just like, I need to figure out how to prioritize. Let's see what's out there.”
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…”