Lenny Distilled

How to be the best coach to product people

November 27, 2022

Featuring: Petra Wille (Independent product leadership coach, Author of Strong Product People)

5 quotes · 5 insights

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Excellence demands obsessive depth

People that's starting, often they are getting a better storytelling journey. Often totally underestimate how many time actually great storytellers are investing in creating the stories... that's two weeks of work, not eight hours a day, obviously, but two weeks of work, maybe one or two hours a day to really carve that story.
Petra WilleIndependent product leadership coach, Author of Strong Product People 00:36:18

Make your impact visible or it doesn't exist

Getting promoted is way harder if you're not good in telling stories and rallying the team behind the shared goal and all these kind of things, and you usually achieve this through good storytelling techniques... I would consider it a bit of a career staller if you don't get to a decent level of storytelling and to a decent level of public speaking.
Petra WilleIndependent product leadership coach, Author of Strong Product People 00:00:00

The best PMs have T-shaped skills - deep in one, broad in many

It's not a role, it's a career being in product and, really, there's so many things to learn and so many things to get good at.
Petra WilleIndependent product leadership coach, Author of Strong Product People 00:09:20

Stories create change where facts fail

Really make sure that you're using language that speaks to the heart and the minds of the people because we constantly tend to use too much of our business lingo and it's banner blindness... Maybe you can find something simpler and say, 'We need to learn something about this particular thing,'
Petra WilleIndependent product leadership coach, Author of Strong Product People 00:37:48

Test for intellectual fearlessness and curiosity

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. I think product people need to be curious about the world, how it works, about things, no matter the topic.
Petra WilleIndependent product leadership coach, Author of Strong Product People 00:22:33

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