Product Leadership Blog

Product Storytelling: How Matthew Arnold Used a Comic to Share His Product Strategy

Storytelling is a critical skill for product people. And it’s often not enough to tell your story one time in one format—you need to experiment with sharing it many times in many formats to find what works best for your company and stakeholders. This is why I love this story from my coachee, Matthew Arnold, Director of Product at Brain in Hand. Matthew knew that he needed a way to communicate his product vision and strategy—or “stratevision” as he calls it—and he landed on a solution that’s both simple and effective: a comic.

Why Agile Coaches Can't Be Product Coaches

Over the past few years, I've noticed a growing visibility of product coaches in our industry. They're at the conferences, they're prominent on social media, and their influence is making waves in the business world. As a result, many companies are beginning to recognize the potential value that a product coach can bring to their organization. This is a good thing!

Case Study: Coaching Through Transformation at Novo Nordisk

I know it’s been a minute (okay, slightly longer than that) since I’ve offered a glimpse into what I’ve been up to. Of course I’ve shared news about the Product at Heart conference and my Communities of Practice research, but I haven’t shared any updates on my actual product leadership coaching for a while. But that all changes today!

The Power of Cross-Disciplinary Learning

As a coach for product leads, I've noticed an interesting phenomenon: Some of my coachees make much more progress than others. And as a naturally curious person (and someone who’s invested in my coachees’ success), I started trying to get to the bottom of this. Why do some people make progress in leaps and strides while others only improve gradually? I’ve come to the conclusion that while there are several key personality traits that can help someone become a great product manager—emotional intelligence, adaptability, and intellectual horsepower—there's another skill that's often overlooked: cross-disciplinary learning.

My (Highly Opinionated) Guide to Product Maturity Assessment

Should you run a product maturity assessment for your product org? This is a topic on the minds of many product leaders, but it’s not as simple as a yes or no answer. There are reasons why you might want to conduct a product maturity assessment as well as risks for doing so.

In this post, I'll provide a comprehensive (and admittedly opinionated) overview of various assessment tools and approaches available in the market. My goal is to help you decide whether an assessment is really the right step for your product org, and if so, to give you a few ideas of how to move forward.

Product LeadershipPetra Wille1 June 2023Self-Assessment, Assessment, Product Maturity

Radical Optimism or Why Every Leader is a Futurist

As a leader, you are by definition a futurist. (This is something I’ve learned from Alicia Shao just recently). Let’s explore this for a second. Your role is to look ahead and anticipate the challenges and opportunities that your team will face in the future. You study and analyze trends, forecasts, and scenarios to understand how the future might unfold. You provide insights and recommendations on how to prepare for and shape the future. In times like these, when the world is changing rapidly and unpredictably, this role is more important than ever.

Product LeadershipPetra Wille13 April 2023Radical Optimism, Futurist

How I Use the Decision Stack in Product Leadership Coaching Sessions

If you find yourself struggling to make effective decisions in your role as a product leader, or if you're having difficulty coming up with a cohesive product strategy, you're not alone. Perhaps your direct reports are constantly turning to you for guidance and direction, unsure of which path to take. Sound familiar? If so, you may benefit from learning more about the "Decision Stack" framework developed by Martin Eriksson.

My Coaching Practice - What I Do And How I Do It

Are you a Head of Product, Product Team Lead, or CPO looking for someone to support you as you set about developing a strong product organisation? Look no further. I can help you to become the confident and self-aware product leader you want to be.

Coaching, All blog posts, Product LeadershipPetra Wille28 December 2022Coaching, Results

End-of-the-year Reflection: Stop Living on Autopilot

We all know: constraints are good. They are the fuel for our creative thinking. But for life choices and career planning, I see too many people accepting constraints way too easily. They are living on autopilot. Instead of creating their own future, they are more accepting of the future others have in mind for them.

Bite sized tips, All blog posts, Product LeadershipPetra Wille9 December 2022bite sized, feelings, autopilot

How to introduce yourself as a product person - Better Introductions

I recently attended a product meetup and have to share an observation: Many of us could better introduce ourselves. So I’m sharing real-life examples with this post of how an improved introduction could look like.

Need to Pivot from Growth to Profitability? You’re Not Alone

I’ve observed a trend over the past few weeks. There seems to be a major shift in the business world. In the past, the best growth stories have attracted senior leadership and investors. But this no longer seems to be the case. In 90% of the coaching sessions I’ve had with product leads over the past few weeks, we’ve discussed how to “pivot” their product strategy from a growth story to a profitability case.

All blog posts, Product LeadershipPetra Wille13 June 2022Profitability, Growth

The PMwheel in Action: Dynamic Updates from Lisa Mo Wagner and Jason Knight

One of the things that’s so exciting about developing a coaching tool is seeing how people adapt it to their own needs. And this post celebrates two incredible product people who have gone above and beyond in their adaptations. Not only have they created dynamic versions of the PMwheel, but they’ve made these updates available to anyone who’d like to use them. Meet Product Coach Lisa Mo Wagner and Product Director and podcaster Jason Knight.

The Product Leader’s Guide to Giving Feedback

Good employee performance is critical to the success of an organization and the products it builds, and feedback is one of the most important factors in employee performance for good reason. As management professor Christine Porath points out in Harvard Business Review: “High-performing teams share nearly six times more positive feedback than average teams.”

But most of us are guilty of not giving enough feedback to our peers, colleagues, and direct reports. Why is that?

Opportunity Assessment: Do We Want to Invest in Discovering This Idea?

When you’re working in product, there’s generally no shortage of ideas. And that is a good thing. But it can sometimes be overwhelming to collect and qualify all these ideas to see which ones have the potential to add value to your product. So how do you filter all these ideas and prioritize what to pursue? I will try to provide a pragmatic, hands-on answer to that question with this article, through a process I refer to as “opportunity assessment.” But before we start, let's talk about some prerequisites and the basic process.

Leadership Communication 1o1: How to Make Sure Your Messages Stick

How much time do you spend communicating with the other people in your organization? Chances are, it’s not enough. Megan Murphy, VP of Product at Hotjar, told the MTP Engage Leadership Forum that she spends 50% of her time on internal communication. This was such an important tidbit that I called it out as a key learning in my blog recap of the event.

Communication is one of those tricky skills. Since we all do it all the time, we tend to think we’re much better at it than we actually are. But there’s often a gap between the way we view ourselves as communicators and the way our teams view us. Here are a few of the most common communication problems I see in product organizations.

Product Leadership, All blog postsPetra Wille25 January 2022Communication, Strategy, Storytelling, wwmlead

How 360° Leadership Feedback Can Help You Level Up Your Skills

Leaders often find it difficult to get feedback, especially in a structured and actionable way. That’s why I started to offer 360° Leadership Feedback, where I schedule and conduct interviews with your employees and colleagues and package what I learn into an easily digestible format. I believe this will provide you with a solid basis for your self-progression journey. But what is it really like to participate in 360° Leadership Feedback? I figured you’d like to hear directly from a past participant.

KPI Trees: How to Bridge the Gap Between Customer Behavior, Product Metrics, and Company Goals

As a product leader, it’s likely that you’re always searching for tools that will help you foster alignment, transparency, and focus in your product organization. Maybe you want to help your team work in a more customer-centric manner. Or perhaps you believe metrics could be valuable, but you don’t yet know how to use them properly. If any of this sounds like you, KPI trees might be the answer.

A Product Leader’s Guide to Writing Compelling Job Ads

One of your core responsibilities as a product leader is growing your team. And this is not a passive activity where you let the recruiter do all the work and you just watch the candidates roll in. As a thoughtful and engaged product leader, you should be an active participant in this process. After all, this is the future direction of your team we’re talking about.

For this blog post, we’ll be focusing on one aspect of hiring: writing job ads (also known as job posts or job listings) for your open roles.

Product Leadership, All blog postsPetra Wille16 December 2021Hiring, Passive Sourcing

A Brief List of Product Management Assessment Tools

Occasionally, people ask me if there are any alternatives to the PMwheel. While I have a strong bias toward the PMwheel (I created it, after all!), I’ve begun to compile a list of other product manager assessment resources that are out there.

MTP Engage Leadership Forum—My 5 Takeaways

What usually happens in June happened at the end of September this year. Due to the COVID situation, our MTP Engage Leadership Forum made its first autumn premiere. Arne Kittler and I are the organizers of MTP Engage Hamburg and we had the pleasure of hosting the first Mind the Product in-person event since the pandemic hit.

Here are my key learnings from this half-day event.

Product Leadership, All blog postsPetra Wille25 October 2021MTP Engage, Product Leadership