How to be the best coach to product people | Petra Wille (Strong Product People)
Petra Wille (guest), Lenny Rachitsky (host), Narrator
In this episode of Lenny's Podcast, featuring Petra Wille and Lenny Rachitsky, How to be the best coach to product people | Petra Wille (Strong Product People) explores 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.
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.
Key Takeaways
Start 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.
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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. ...
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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.
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Treat storytelling as a design task that demands time and iteration.
Compelling stories rarely emerge spontaneously; Petra recommends budgeting serious time (e. ...
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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.
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Communities of practice are a high-leverage, low-cost way to grow PMs.
Internal and external PM communities provide peer learning, shared problem-solving, and a sense of progression—often at far lower cost than courses and conferences—while also easing the people-development burden on individual managers and improving retention.
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Healthy communities need purpose, roles, and curation—not just activity.
Petra emphasizes clarifying the community’s purpose and values, distributing ownership beyond a single ‘hero’ leader, establishing rituals (e. ...
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Notable 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
Questions Answered in This Episode
How can I quickly draft a first version of a ‘good PM’ competency model tailored to my company, without getting stuck in alignment loops?
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. ...
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If I’m a PM without a strong manager, how can I self-direct my own development using Petra’s framework?
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What are some concrete examples of ‘next bigger challenges’ I could assign to mid-level PMs to stretch them meaningfully without setting them up to fail?
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How might I structure an internal product community of practice in a small company (e.g., 3–5 PMs) so it actually runs and doesn’t fizzle out?
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For a specific upcoming presentation (e.g., roadmap pitch), how would I apply Petra’s storytelling advice step by step—from first draft to final talk?
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Transcript Preview
Getting promoted is way harder if you're not good in telling stories and rallying the team behind a shared goal and all these kind of things. And you usually achieve this through good storytelling techniques. And in some teams, I've seen the product person not being really, really good at it, but then the whole team helped creating the stories and stuff like this, so you definitely could compensate to some extent. But I would consider it a bit of a career stall if you don't get to a decent level of storytelling and to a decent level of public speaking.
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast. I'm Lenny, and my aim here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. Today, my guest is Petra Wille. Petra is an independent product leadership coach and author of Strong Product People. And for the past 10 years, she's been helping product teams boost their skillsets and up their game. Alongside her freelance work, Petra organizes events in Hamburg, Germany, where she's based, and does a ton of one-on-one coaching and speaking and writing. In our conversation, we focus on three things. One, how to become the best coach for PMs, which is really important if you're a new PM manager and even if you're not a new manager. Two, how to become a better storyteller and why that's important for leaders at every stage of their career. And three, why finding a PM community is so valuable and how to go about finding one. Petra is awesome, and it was such a fun chat. And so with that, I bring you Petra Wille. Hey, Ashley, head of marketing at Flatfile. How many B2B SaaS companies would you estimate need to import CSV files from their customers?
At least 40%.
And how many of them screw that up, and what happens when they do?
Well, based on our data, about a third of people will consider switching to another company after just one bad experience during onboarding. So if your CSV importer doesn't work right, which is super common considering customer files are chock-full of unexpected data and formatting, they'll leave.
I am 0% surprised to hear that. I've consistently seen that improving onboarding is one of the highest leverage opportunities for both sign-up conversion and increasing long-term retention. Getting people to her aha moment more quickly and reliably is so incredibly important.
Totally. It's incredible to see how our customers like Square, Spotify, and Zuora are able to grow their businesses on top of Flatfile. It's because flawless data onboarding acts like a catalyst to get them and their customers where they need to go faster.
If you'd like to learn more or get started, check out Flatfile at flatfile.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Mixpanel, offering powerful self-serve product analytics. If you listen to this podcast, you know that it's really hard to build great product without making compromises. And when it comes to using data, a lot of teams think that they only have two choices, make quick decisions based on gut feelings or make data-driven decisions at a snail's pace. But that's a false choice. You shouldn't have to compromise on speed to get product answers that you can trust. With Mixpanel, there are no trade-offs. Get deep insights at the speed of thought at a fair price that scales as you grow. Mixpanel builds powerful and intuitive product analytics that everyone can trust, use, and afford. Explore plans for teams of every size and see what Mixpanel can do for you at mixpanel.com. And while you're at it, they're hiring. Check out mixpanel.com to learn more. Petra, thank you for being here. Welcome to our little podcast.
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