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Lenny's PodcastHow to be the best coach to product people | Petra Wille (Strong Product People)
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At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Coaching, storytelling, and community: leveling up modern product managers
- Product leadership coach and author Petra Wille joins Lenny Rachitsky to unpack how managers can become excellent coaches for product managers, why storytelling and public speaking are critical career skills, and how community accelerates growth. She outlines a simple five-part framework for developing PMs: define ‘good’ in your context, understand where each PM is now, align on a shared vision, build a concrete development plan, and follow up consistently. Petra also shares practical techniques for improving storytelling and public speaking, emphasizing deliberate practice, audience-friendly language, and reusable story formats. Finally, they explore the outsized impact of strong product communities—both internal communities of practice and external networks—in driving learning, retention, and shared standards of excellence.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasStart coaching with a clear definition of a ‘good PM’ in your context.
Most managers hold an implicit, fuzzy view of what good looks like; Petra urges leaders to explicitly define the skills, knowledge, and personality traits they value, using or customizing existing competency models so PMs have a concrete compass for growth.
Anchor development in a simple, living plan—then follow up relentlessly.
Rather than over-engineering frameworks, co-create a quarterly development plan around 1–2 focus areas (e.g., storytelling, prioritization), break it into small, realistic actions, and revisit progress regularly in one-on-ones so it doesn’t get lost in day-to-day execution.
Use multi-perspective assessments to understand where each PM is today.
Tools like Petra’s PM Wheel™ and other published PM assessments can be adapted to your environment, and should ideally include self-assessment, manager assessment, and peer/team input to reveal blind spots and inform targeted coaching.
Treat storytelling as a design task that demands time and iteration.
Compelling stories rarely emerge spontaneously; Petra recommends budgeting serious time (e.g., a couple of weeks in small daily chunks) to craft narratives, test them with different audiences, strip out jargon, and prepare multiple versions (short, medium, long; spoken, written, visual).
Storytelling and public speaking are career accelerators, not nice-to-haves.
Petra sees weak storytelling and public speaking as a common career stall for PMs—rallying teams around a shared goal, evangelizing strategy, and influencing stakeholders all depend on these skills, which can be built gradually through small, safe speaking opportunities and structured feedback.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotes“It’s not a role, it’s a career, being in product.”
— Petra Wille
“How should you help people grow if you have no clue what their role actually is all about?”
— Petra Wille
“Getting promoted is way harder if you're not good in telling stories and rallying the team behind a shared goal.”
— Petra Wille
“Consistency beats intensity… smaller chunks of people development in your calendar are better than the big bang 360-degree reviews.”
— Petra Wille
“Training budgets are expensive. Communities are a pretty cheap way of doing people development.”
— Petra Wille
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
