How to be the best coach to product people | Petra Wille (Strong Product People)

Product leadership is a distinct craft from product management. While individual contributors focus on solving user problems and shipping features, product leaders face a different challenge: elevating the people who build the product. It is a shift from managing the product to managing the portfolio of talent.

Petra Wille, an independent product leadership coach and author of Strong Product People, has spent the last decade helping product teams boost their skill sets. Having coached hundreds of product leads and influenced thousands through her writing, Wille argues that the "middle layer" of management—directors and group leads—is often the most influential yet under-supported leverage point in an organization.

Whether you are a new manager or a seasoned CPO, your success hinges on three pillars: your ability to coach, your capacity to tell compelling stories, and your ability to foster a community of practice. This guide explores the frameworks and actionable steps necessary to master these domains.

Key Takeaways

• Define "Good" Before You Coach: You cannot effectively develop talent without a clear competency framework, such as the "PM Wheel," to act as a compass.
• Consistency Beats Intensity: Small, regular nudges on a development plan are far more effective than massive annual reviews.
• Storytelling is a Career Gatekeeper: Inability to tell a compelling story about your product vision is a significant "career staller" for PMs aspiring to leadership.
• Preparation is Key to Narrative: Great storytelling isn't improvisation; it requires significant preparation time and should be adaptable to different formats (spoken, written, visual) and lengths.
• Communities Scale Leadership: Building an internal Community of Practice (CoP) distributes the burden of training and increases team retention.

The Five Ingredients of Effective Product Coaching

Many product leaders, particularly those transitioning from other disciplines like marketing or engineering, struggle to define what excellence looks like. Without a clear definition, coaching becomes arbitrary. Wille outlines five essential ingredients to structure your coaching practice.

1. Establish a Definition of "Good"

The first step is creating a compass. You must have a solid, explicit definition of what a competent product person looks like in your specific context. This includes both personality traits—such as curiosity and empathy—and hard skills.

If your organization lacks a formal career ladder, do not wait for HR. adopt an existing framework like the "PM Wheel" (discussed below) or the "PM Daisy" and customize it for your team. This provides a baseline for all future conversations.

2. Assess the Current State

Once you have a compass, you need to locate your people on the map. Where is the PM in their career? What is their situation in life? Crucially, you must identify the "next bigger challenge."

This is not just about the next promotion; it is about the next assignment that stretches their capabilities. If you identify this challenge early—even if the opportunity won't arise for another quarter—you can position the PM to seize it when it appears.

3. Align on a Shared Vision

Share your assessment with the product manager. This is an alignment session where you discuss their potential. Often, a leader’s vision for a report is bigger than the report's vision for themselves. This conversation serves as encouragement and sets the trajectory for growth.

4. Create the Development Plan

The development plan bridges the gap between where they are and where they need to be. While the leader provides guidance, the PM must own this plan. You cannot force growth; you can only facilitate it.

Focus on actionable steps. If a PM needs to improve prioritization, the plan shouldn't just be "get better at prioritizing." It should be specific: read a book on the Eisenhower Matrix, apply it to the backlog, and present the results to the team.

5. Follow Up Consistently

The final ingredient is the follow-up. A plan that sits in a drawer is useless. Development discussions should not be reserved for mid-year reviews.

"Consistency beats intensity. It’s the small nudges—a quick check-in at the water cooler or a weekly reminder—that make the difference. It takes very little time from the product lead but signals that personal development is a priority."

The PM Wheel: A Competency Framework

To assess skills accurately, Wille recommends using a structured framework like the PM Wheel, which categorizes product management into eight distinct buckets. This helps identify specific areas for improvement rather than giving generic feedback.

1. Understand the Problem: Can they diagnose underlying user and business problems?
2. Find Solutions: Are they skilled at hypothesis-driven discovery?
3. Plan: Can they build roadmaps and align goals?
4. Get it Done: Do they effectively work with engineering to ship?
5. Listen and Learn: Do they use data and qualitative feedback to iterate?
6. Team: Do they understand team dynamics and motivation?
7. Personal Growth: Are they actively investing in their own learning?
8. Agile: Do they understand the values and principles behind agile, not just the rituals?

Using a tool like this changes the dynamic of a one-on-one from a status update to a strategic career conversation.

Storytelling: The Skill You Can't Ignore

While technical skills are vital for entry-level PMs, storytelling is the lever for advancement. As you move up, your job shifts from doing the work to rallying the team behind a shared goal. If you cannot articulate a compelling vision, you cannot lead effectively.

"I would consider it a bit of a career staller if you don't get to a decent level of storytelling and public speaking. Getting promoted is way harder if you're not good at telling stories."

It Requires Deliberate Practice

There is a misconception that great storytellers are born that way. In reality, effective storytelling is the result of rigorous preparation. For a major strategic narrative—like explaining the next four months of focus to the entire company—a leader might need to invest two weeks of effort, spending an hour or two daily refining the message.

This preparation involves removing "business lingo" and three-letter acronyms. To trigger the chemical responses in the brain that make stories memorable (like oxytocin and dopamine), you must speak to the heart and mind using natural, evocative language, not corporate jargon.

The Three-Format Rule

A robust story must be versatile. You should prepare your strategic narrative in three formats:

• Spoken: You must be able to vocalize it comfortably.
• Written: Essential for asynchronous/remote cultures.
• Visual: A whiteboard sketch or a slide deck to anchor the concepts.

The Three-Length Rule

Furthermore, you need to be able to deliver this story in three distinct timeframes based on the audience and context:

1. 75 Seconds: The elevator pitch.
2. 6 Minutes: The context setter for a sprint planning meeting.
3. 18 Minutes: The TED-style talk for a company all-hands.

Overcoming Stage Fright

For those terrified of public speaking, the only way out is through. Start small. Present to your immediate team, then a local meetup of 30 people, then the company all-hands. Seek feedback from "friendly faces" in the front row to build confidence, but also ask strangers for feedback to uncover blind spots in your narrative logic.

The Power of Community

One of the most scalable ways to develop a product team is to build a Community of Practice (CoP). Leaders often feel the burden of being the sole source of knowledge and coaching. A CoP distributes this load.

ROI of Community

Establishing an internal community is cost-effective compared to external training or conferences. It drives retention because high-performers stay where they are learning. It also creates a "stickiness" among the team—people value the peer network they have built.

Signs of a Healthy Community

Engagement metrics (likes and comments) are often vanity metrics. A healthy community is defined by:

• Signal-to-Noise Ratio: Are members learning new things, or is it just noise?
• Distributed Ownership: If the community collapses when the leader goes on vacation, it isn't a community; it's a broadcast channel. Healthy communities have multiple members curating content and organizing rituals.
• Networking: Are people building genuine connections across different parts of the organization?

For product leaders, fostering this environment is a high-leverage activity. It creates a self-sustaining ecosystem of learning that continues to operate even when you aren't in the room.

Conclusion

Being the best coach for your product people requires a shift in mindset. You must move from being the person who has all the answers to the person who provides the compass. By defining competence clearly, investing in the art of storytelling, and building a community where peer learning thrives, you create an environment where product managers can evolve into product leaders.

The journey from individual contributor to leader is not linear, but with the right frameworks—like the PM Wheel and deliberate development planning—you can ensure your team doesn't just ship features, but builds a sustainable and high-performing product culture.