getting promoted is way harder if you're not good in telling stories and running the team behind the 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 these stories and stuff like this so you definitely could compensate to some extent but I would consider it a bit of a career starter 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 vile 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 skill sets 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 a 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 belay hey Ashley head of marketing and flat file how many B2B SAS 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 brainstorm 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 zero percent 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 your aha
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their customers where they need to go faster if you'd like to learn more or get started check out flat file at flatfile.com Lenny this episode is brought to you by mixpanel offering powerful self-serve product analytics the 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 are hiring check out mixpanel.com to learn more Petra thank you for being here Welcome to our little podcast hi Lenny such an honor to be on a Friday night Friday
night your time Friday morning my time thank you for making the time of course you're a product leadership coach you just talk about what you do as a product leadership coach and then also just a bit about the numbers of PMS you work with number of companies you worked with
the kind of impact you had just to kind of sell a little bit of context in your background how I usually describe is that I work with people leading product people so that's the product leadership level that I'm looking at so that might be a CPO and a smaller startup or a product
director product team meet these are the folks that I'm usually working with for the last four years I'd say and before that I coach product managers so I see level product folks and before of that I did a lot of product Discovery coaching for teams and whole product
organizations and you were asking about how many people I may have influenced that's a real hard question so to say so in one-on-one coaching that's what I know I coach around 130 people so far over the last few years which is already a lot most of them have yeah 10 to 20 sessions with me some
really stick with me over the years so they have more sessions so that's that and then I have group coaching sessions in corporate and in public setups and that's I would say another 150 and there's all product leads so usually those people are working with a team of
10 product people and there are some Ripple effects so I think I have an impact on their lives as well if they're coaching their boss or their line manager so to say plus the teams that I work with as a discovery coach plus the people that read my book and hopefully
are using some of the techniques and in the end yeah I did a bit of the math and I think it might be around fifty thousand sixty thousand people if we look at it from the product leadership to IC level structure yeah that might be the impact so that's a pretty impressive
number wow that is an impressive number and I always love chatting with folks that do the kind of work you do because there's such a unique insight into working one-on-one with PMS that are trying to get better and understanding like what trends are happening across
PMS at different companies and different countries and things like that so I'm excited to dig into a bunch of stuff the other thing that I love about where you focus there's a lot of people that focus on IC epms and there's a lot of people that focus on senior leaders VPS cpos
and I love that it feels and correct me if I'm wrong but you kind of focus on this middle layer of like first line managers directors yes which I feel like is often the most important influential layer of a company because they're the ones doing a lot of the work and making
a lot of the decisions day to day that is the case Plus at least with a lot of clients that I'm working with Dan lot train product people so they often come from a marketing background or a business background or from the data background so to say or the engineering background but they often never have
worked in a product management role so they are missing a lot of basic product management practice and a lot of empathy for the struggle of the product people to some extent plus how should you help people grow if you have no clue what their role actually is all about so that's what I
actually like to help them with to get this Clarity on a strong Compass how the best product organizations and product managers should be working just to give a little bit of that tangent because that's an interesting point you just raised when you work with folks that are
not product people and that end up leading product people and trying a better product what's the thing they lack most like the skill or the understanding of product if you have to think of one or two things that these people like okay they totally missed this part about product
management about building products one thing that that is made me sense out the most is I see product people on the IC level have to go through some of the struggles on their own even if a product Community has some best practices to it because as the Align manager has no clue about the
product Community out there and the craftless product management they often struggle to point them in the right direction to say like hey I think that's a problem somebody else already had so maybe you could watch a talk or read this blog post or there's a book about
this particular thing and then go try it so that's the first thing so product people I see level often have then to learn a lot of things on their own so to say because nobody's curating their progression for them to some extent so that is one thing and then I use this method for of the eight-legged creature
because people tend to talk about t-shaped employee profiles but t-shaped is so not enough for a product person right we want them to understand underlying problems of the business and the users finding solution for those getting things out of the door with the
team doing a lot of product Discovery looking at the data how people are using it iterating on the products so there's so many things that we want them to be good at and to understand that and the complexity that the role actually brings with it that's sometimes hard for people that
have never worked as a product person to really understand so yeah if I would need to pick two things then that's maybe the two biggest differences my first one is such a great one it comes up a lot on these chats of just how much of getting better at product is just
doing it you can read all the books you can take all the courses you can read my newsletter you can read your book which we'll talk about but there's only so far you'll get without actually just doing it and just like failing doing great things that succeed and it takes years
right it's not like something you'll do six months all right I'm feeling really good about being a product manager yeah I totally agree I so often have said the sentence of 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 um yeah I totally agree yeah crazy ass roll speaking of your book you wrote a book it's about product leadership and coaching and we're going to touch on some of the things you wrote In the book but can you just briefly describe the book that you wrote who it's for what
it's about it's quite a niche book right so it's focusing on people managing product people so product leads and then the people development part of their job so it's not another book talking about how to come up with a great product strategy there definitely is a chapter
on that to some extent but it's more how you coach those things so it's not so much about how you do these things on your own it's more how you could help product people to understand hypothesis-driven product Discovery a bit more uh how could you help them
think about team motivation or how could you help them getting better and giving feedback all these kind of things so this book has this meta um level of Health helping product needs to develop their product folks and that is actually what the book talks about in five different parts and I think 28
chapters if I get it right wow it's a lot of chapters what is it called where can people find it just while we're on this topic and then we'll get into some of this they should be available on Amazon and it's strong product people a complete guide to developing great
product managers that's actually the title and the subtitle so to say awesome strong product people okay I read parts of the book I looked at a lot of the stuff that you write online and some of your videos and there's three things that I want to spend our time together
on to dig into one is what you just talked about how to become a better Coach to product managers for PMS two is storytelling skills you have a lot of great stuff on just like becoming a better Storyteller and then three is how to find a great Community to become a better PM does that sound good yeah that
sounds amazing let's do that okay awesome so the first topic basically the premise of your book is just how to become a better Coach your product managers and for me actually personally the biggest inflection in my career was having an awesome manager who helped me
become a better pm and that just like was the point in my career where I really accelerated and so I fully buy into the power of having a great manager and a coach and oftentimes those aren't the same people and you have a kind of these five ingredients that you have to be the best coach to
product managers and so just to start what are these five ingredients what do you have to get right to be a great coach gpms yeah you're asking so I was already referencing to to number one and number one is really having a solid definition of what a good product person looks like in your
context so what is your definition of good so to say and a lot of the product leads that I'm working with have this as an implicit feeling based experience based thing they can talk about some of the aspects but it's often the case that they're not have fully reflected on what
our personality traits that I want to see in product people that are hard to develop while I'm coaching them and what are skills and know-how and capabilities they want to see in the product people that I'm working with and some are super good and have it all written down but
most of the product folks that I'm working with haven't so that is Step number one is doing this reflection then step number two is having a clear idea where every PM currently is in their current career in their situation life in general all these kind of things so
put the pin on the map so to say and then think about what is your vision for them in the future so how good could it get and I usually encourage product leads to think bigger than their current role at the current company because that's the longer term thing and then even more
important is what I call the next bigger challenge so what is the next bigger challenge I would love to assign this product person to if I could because I know that would help them to learn a new skill or to yeah again you know how whatever it is right and
creating such a list once a quarter for example you block yourself an hour in your calendar you write down the names of your direct reports and then you just think about okay what would be this next bigger challenge for them it's not always the case that this comes around the corner the next day sometimes
it talks it takes a quarter two or three but if you wrote it down you will see this opportunity and then you could assign this person to the opportunity and really help them grow substantially over time so that's number two then hopefully you share this Vision you're
having for them with them and do a bit of an alignment session because it's not always that they have the same things in mind maybe your vision for them opens up their thinking and reflection a little bit more but you have to have this conversation where you actually see them
and that's a lot of encouragement and bringing out the best in them and these kind of things then it's definitely a development plan but I think that's more on them than it is on you because you don't get the apps from other people's branches so you cannot really help them
develop but you could remind them of going to the gym for example which would be step number five by the way that's the follow-up but the development plan is something where a lot of product managers need help with because that's the inspirational part that's
situational part that's where you could help them to really see some of the differences between your definition of good and their current profile and maybe they need to get better in prioritization maybe user interviewing is something they want to get better at and then you could help them defining
steps that they could take small things that they could learn maybe it's a book maybe it's giving a presentation at a conference maybe it's reflecting on your way of prioritizing and then look at what others are doing so whatever it is that is something you could help them
with and then finally it's the follow-up that sometimes just a nudge every once in a while at the water cooler to say like hey how is it going with your personal development plan and some really need the weekly reminder and some maybe need even a daily email whatever it is ask them how they want to be
reminded of their personal development and how you could help them and assist them while doing that because they still have a day job rights of Urban Development will never be the number one priority and it shouldn't awesome so just to summarize really quick I have
the list here in front of me one is have a clear sense of just what it takes to be as competent PM in a row two is an idea of where that PM is today and one thing they could do to improve three is a shared vision of how they'll take that next step four is having a development plan of how
they can move towards this vision and then the last piece is a commitment just following up with them and making sure they're staying on top of this exactly what's interesting about this just looking at this it feels a lot like a road map and a strategy and a vision for
a product the definition where we are today is like the problem idea where you want to go next is kind of like strategy and then there's a vision of where you're going to go together and then you check in so it's kind of these like stand-ups do you think of it that way at all or is that
just something I'm noticing I think about it that way as well even to an extent because so many companies are are lacking the real strategy bit right and it's similar with the people development strategy that is something that I see not being present in so many
environments as well so even that similarity is a given I'd say yeah which of these do you find is the most lacking usually or slash where do you think the biggest like if someone were to just like I want to be a better manager where would you suggest they start it's like
right at the top figure out what a great pm at this company is ah that is a great question no I usually advise people to start with the development plan because even if you have never done the assessment and even if you don't have your compass your definition of what makes a good product
manager you usually have an idea or they have an idea of what they want to learn next or where they want to get better at so I said they say something like my storytelling capabilities are maybe not as good as they could be or prioritization is people are constantly
complaining behind my back that they don't get the order of the things in my backlog or whatever it is or I think my opportunity solution free is suck or whatever it is and you could use that and start helping them creating this development plan that's not a structured
assessment but it's a perfect start and it's obviously the follow-up that makes a big difference and that just takes so little time from the product lead the small not just that's super easy and these development plans I usually tell people to create a new one with a new
headline or topic once a quarter or every four months so that is not a massive time invest as well so that would be my suggestion for where to start if that helps yeah I love that advice because I can imagine a lot of people get stuck in that first one of
like I don't know all of the things that I need to know about what a great PM right now is so that's a nice simple way to start and there is another aspect to it a lot of product leads try to create their compass and while they do so they think about maybe I should have an aligned version with my
peers so the other product leads in the company and then we're talking about the career levels and all these kind of things and often takes ages until something is coming back from HR or you have a unified version so that is something where I usually say like no start with your own personal team
because the folks in your team usually just have you as a line manager it's a great your compass and encourage your peers to create their compass and a bit down the line it might make sense to harmonize some of that but it's better to start helping your products folks and
giving them some orientation then being totally Paralyzed by the fact that it's not a compass that is used in the whole company I want to talk about this compass and how to figure out what a competent PM is and I know you have a framework around this and I have some
stuff I'll actually share too but on this latter piece of checking in the development plan I wrote about this once but I'll share here briefly something that I did with my PMS that was so effective was every time we did a performance review every six months we had a performance review
we put together a Google doc with all of the things that we agree they should be working on and we pick like say five themes or three themes and then we pick very concrete things they should do over the next six months that will help them develop these things and then more
importantly to your last point is we did a monthly coaching session where we looked at the status of each of these things so there's like a color code for each of these 10 things that we all agreed we should be you should be doing these things for the next six months so we checked in how they're
going so that the next performance review it's not like oh I forgot all these things yeah it's all like yeah yeah exactly and it's really we all of us know consistency beats intensity so really the smaller Time Investments on a weekly basis and that applies for the
PM's time investment to learning new things and it applies to the product leads investment and helping their people to grow I think for both parties it's more likely and more pleasant if you have small chunks of people development in your calendar and that's why I like your story right because you
were focusing on regular check-ins more than into the Big Bang 360 degree reviews and it builds on your point of the development plan is something the person develops like here's what I believe I should be working on and it's not like you inform it a bit and give
them feedback like maybe this isn't or maybe to work on this other thing but yeah the fact that they own it I think is really powerful yeah yeah going back to knowing what is a competent pm at a company something I want to I'll make sure to include in the show notes for
this is I actually did all this research on the career ladders I that all of the biggest tech companies and like so I have the spreadsheet that it's public of just like the skills that every company evaluates through PMS by but most companies don't have these are they're
like not great so say your company doesn't have like a career ladder competency framework leveling thing what do you suggest folks do to help figure out what is a competent pm here at our company I'd say use one after assessments that are already out there maybe we can include this as well I
wrote a blog post where I put all the ones that I'm aware of into so there's the PM Daisy and obviously Monty Kagan has an assessment and I created a framework called the PM wheel and there are a few others in there I go find one that is close to what you actually think
a good PM should look like and then customize it don't use it just by copy paste because sometimes you have just rather technical VMS in your organization and then all these assessment points about user interviews and Discovery are maybe not that applicable in your situation right so
use one template that is close to what you want to achieve have you customize it because it is really a great inspiration to see oh these are all the things that other people think a PM should be doing or maybe you could merge one or two of those and tailor it to
your needs so that would be my first suggestion plus reflecting on the personality traits because I think there are some things that you better hire for and that are super hard to develop in a corporate environment um 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 the best product people that I know whatever the topic is they're interested and tell me more about it so that is for example something I would always check when hiring product people because I know
it's hard to build that muscle or empathy definitely something that I want to hire for I know that I can help them develop this muscle a bit more and stepping in the shoes of users and stakeholders and colleagues easier but still if there is yeah not a decent level of empathy built into this person
then it's nearly impossible for me as a product to help them get to the decision level so that's another important thing think about personality traits and think about skills and know-how and to think about skills and know how use some of the already established assessments some
will try to link to as many of those that you mentioned in the show notes um maybe talk about the PM wheel which is the framework that you suggest for folks to understand just like what are all the skills that a PM needs to have it's hard to talk about that really briefly so
I split all the things that PMS usually do in eight buckets so to say and it starts with our day able to understand the underlying problems that users and the company actually is having are they good in finding solutions to those problems then it's they're getting they
do some planning parts or they're able to maybe come up with a road map or with good goals that are help aligning the team these kind of things and it's get it done that's already able to actually deliver the thing to work with the team that's maybe writing backlog items and
all these kind of things then it's listen and learn so are they able to really gather a lot of data these days and then look into what customers are actually saying so the quality different quantitative aftermath of stuff going live and are they able to iterate on the
solutions that they shipped and then it's another three buckets that are a bit out of the PM process which is team so do they know about how teams actually are different from working with individuals do they think they have to motivate a team can you motivate the team so this whole teamwork part and
it's personal growth I put it on my PM wheel because I want that to be part of every conversation that I have with my PM so that's why it's on on the wheel and then last but not least it's agile because when I was still coaching PMS I often found that they never reflected on the
underlying basics of agile ways of working so they often never heard about the agile Manifesto or agile values or agile principles no matter what framework they're using but I think that is key so that's bucket number eight and every of those buckets comes with at
least 15 framing questions so is this person good at doing this is this person good and doing that and it hopefully gives you a really nice and well-rounded picture of where this person currently is and I usually advise people to do a self-assessment then ask the line
management for an assessment and ideally some of your team members because they have a different perspective on you as a product management personality as well so folks want to see that maybe they Google PM wheel Petra and we'll also link to it um how did you develop this I managed it
and came from talking to a lot of PMs and just like here's the things that I see again and again PMS need to be good at to be successful yeah it was actually that would have been pretty cool it was more the personal need of me starting off as a product coach and I had this
yeah this sense of I need this Compass because how should you start a coaching conversation I first have to learn about what is their perception about them and their capabilities in their know how and then I can help them work on some of the things they want to work on but it is
often that coaches come totally unprepared to the coach to the coaching especially when the company is actually paying it for them and to some extent forcing them into the coaching and then they're just like okay they told me to show up Petra what should we do in these
sessions and then that's why I created a PM wheel to have this first conversations about where they think we should invest more time in our coaching session so that's how I created it cool coming back to just the bigger question we've been talking about just like how
to become a better manager lead a coach to your product managers it's interesting how simple it is like the way you frame this in your writing is it's like five ingredients to be the best coach your PMS I've ever had and if you look at this list of things to do it's like very straightforward and not a
lot of work figure out what it what they need to do to be successful where are they now align on what on that with them and then just give them some things to focus on to move closer to where they need to be like that doesn't take a lot of time yeah I totally agree the book
talks about some more aspects actually so that's more or less the first two parts of the book and then there is more on onboarding and hiring great product people there is a lot more so that's actually the biggest part about how to coach certain concepts of today's product management
industry so to say hypothesis-driven product development for example how do you explain these Concepts to people that are not yet familiar with these things and really it helps product leads to reflect okay what are the small things that I could help them to get better at certain things
because that's actually where a lot of the magic happens we tend to read all the books and we tend to know all uh our thought leaders and all these kind of things but our product people often need Super practical advice so maybe it's really something like explaining them the
Eisenhower Matrix for getting better time management because they never heard about anything that could help them prioritize their tasks because that's the reality that we find in a lot of the companies right so the big part of the the book is really this how do you
really help them understand this smaller tasks and things that the daily work requires them to do I think a lot of that I find is like winning you need something that's the time to find it and introduce it and read about it there's like so much content yeah like I am I'm
guilty of this just there's a lot of stuff to read and listen to as a PM and like I find you don't need to be listening to and reading everything all the time it's just like I need to figure out how to prioritize let's see what's out there that's awesome and maybe save
it for the future but like there's so much stress I think that goes into like oh my God I gotta read everything all the time yeah I totally agree just I think two weeks ago one of my coaches told me that he stopped reading a lot of books and consuming a lot of content and
he instead dedicates the whole year to using one methodology or a book so in in that case the picture research continuous Discovery habits and that's what they read over and over again for the whole year and I think there is a it's it's it's an interesting it's an interesting way of looking at things
that is interesting that's like a yeah very committed better pick the right book there yeah that is true yeah but maybe some of your colleagues pick another book and then you could just share what you learned and what works better and a bit of a community thing oh
we're gonna get to that I like that before we get to a retelling topic is there anything else you want to share along the lines of if folks are just like I want to become a better Coach to my PMS any other thoughts you want to close with yeah one one easy tip is get yourself a list of great questions
that you could ask in one-on-ones if you don't have the time to prepare um there will be one of my tips as well there's several um great coaching books out there some of some of the some of the questions are in my book as well yeah just find some coaching questions
make your small compilation and then really see what resonates with your team and that often is a bit of a health check so how are you doing what would make you more successful in the role that you're currently having all these kind of things could be helpful do you
have any other examples of those that's actually useful just like a few few more examples of coaching questions no it really depends on what I find super helpful is a list of emotions because people tend to find it really hard to talk about how they currently really are
and I don't know why this is the case maybe it's just maybe it's not feeling comfortable to talk about this with your line manager which is another topic and bringing us back to the topic of company culture but it for example is something that I always have handy and if I have
this notion of okay this person maybe really needs a hug to some extent then this conversation about hey look there is this list of 30 emotions where do you think you currently add and why and could I help you with that so that could be something and then there are I think
you talked about more Chiari the other day right yeah that episode just came out yeah exactly so and here has a great framework as well I would need to look the questions up but maybe put them in the show notes as well that's a bit of a house check as well and you first of all it's five easy
assessment questions for you for your folks and then it's more of okay if you're ranking yourself as six how could I help you to make it a seven so it really focuses on incremental improvements not crazy stressing everybody out improvements not at what it what could I do to make it a 10. it's
more really how could I improve your situation really build rapport really be there for your product folks and I think creating this list of coaching questions as a go-to list could improve the quality of your 101s because let's face it we often run into those ones either we ditch them or we
run into those ones completely unprepared and an assessment could help a development plan could help and a prepared list of coaching questions could help to make that way easier and for your PMS to feel more valued that's a great callback to the met and by the
way his name's France Matt machari instead of machari the CH C now we know it's very little something now we know that's good yeah and you pointed out in his curriculum he has a bunch of questions that you mentioned about like how what were you one to ten on this thing and then how do we get you
to yes eight or nine so we'll link to that in the show and it's awesome so many so many more things to read so many things to link story good job poor listeners this episode is brought to you by assembly AI if you're looking to build powerful AI powered features in your
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PMs can get access to powerful AI models for transcription summarization and dozens of other tasks that are fast secure and production ready all of their models are researched and trained in-house and continuously updated by their team of AI experts which for RPM
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way more visit assemblyai.com to try assembly ai's API for free and start testing their models in their no code playground that's assemblyai.com well let's get to a happier simpler topic maybe maybe not uh storytelling so just like setting context it feels like as a PM also as a Founder also is
just a leader of any kind you're always told you need to be a great Storyteller that's a big part of leadership you have a great Storyteller because that gets people excited and on board with your building but it feels like I've heard so many things about becoming a better
Storyteller there's always like feels great when you're reading it and then you get to like a deck you're starting or a meeting you're about to run or a dock and like how do I make this a good story I need like some kind of conflict maybe in a character I don't
know there's a hero's journey there's all these things you're like I don't know I don't know what I'm doing so I guess just a a broad question crpm who wants to get better at storytelling do you have any things you would suggest that are just like concrete things someone could do
today tomorrow this week to become a better Storyteller to level up their storytelling skills yes I think I would enough to mention two things so first of all people that starting often they're getting a better storytelling Journey often totally underestimate how many
time actually Grace dollar tellers are investing in creating the stories and making sure they can share the story in nice ways and formats so that's maybe the first tip you have to plan to put in a lot of work to create your story and when you say when you say a lot of work
what do you um like what are you thinking what's like an order of magnitude of time depending on the scale of the story or Decker we'll roll off them so I think if you let's say you want to explain the rest of the company what your you and the team are up for for the next three to four months so to
say and then I think 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 and think about different audiences and different framings of when am I able to tell this story and that is actually I
think a rule of thumb of time investment so it takes time because people often think like I don't know you just get better overnight in telling great stories it's just not how it works so you have to practice and you have to put in a lot of work and time to come up with a A
logical compelling motivating story and it then lasts for longer than a week or two and so that's that's a lot of work and then the other tip would be 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 that's like Banner blindness some of the words that we're using people totally overhearing them because we're using them so often and there could be even things like product Discovery so maybe your company is already so fed up
with all your product Discovery stuff that you should start using different terms even if then say hypothesis driven product management it's more or less the same thing and maybe it's even too complex maybe you can find something simpler and say like we need to learn
something about this particular thing um because studies show and that's that's the that's the scientific background stories really have an impact on our brains so hormones get released depending on how the story is actually uh formed if they're Cliffhangers or if
it's really like oh you're a superb with the hero and think where is it going to take him or something like that and that releases um yeah hormones in your brain and that only happens if you're using natural worlds so to say so you could talk about smell and sense and how people feel and
how their life would be better if this product would be out all these kind of things so really make sure that you think about they really speak to their minds and to their hearts and remove all your three-letter abbreviations and all these kind of things which is something
that everybody says as well but it is way harder to do it when you really start to create your story to remove all these terms and that takes a lot of time and um yeah as well so you have to really put an effort into did the don't use too much to bingo so the first point which I love is like
you think people are just good at this and naturally great at telling a great story but a lot of it is right like some people are like you do it enough and you like it'll be quicker probably but for most people it's gonna be like just put in the time and it gets better and
better in your story emerges you practice and it's a cultural thing so I really find in in average Americans for example being better at it than most of us Europeans and I think that's because even in your school system it seems to me I don't know you tell me if that is
the case but storytelling and being in front of a plus or something like this is something that is encouraged and valued already where in at least when I was at school this was not part of the whole system at all so um really late it was part of what we did but not from an early age so it's
just not something yeah that we trained in or that we used to so sometimes even speaking in front of 30 people people are freaking out because they never did that so that's their cultural differences to that definitely as well speaking of the idea of speaking in
public and being nervous and that kind of thing which I always get really nervous speaking in public and people don't think that when they hear me and other folks that are publicly speaking talking but it's like freaks me out every time uh do you have any advice for
people that want to become better public speakers slash be less nervous speaking publicly I was really bad and something I think it's well I have to tell you and it's still not something that I love but I know it's part of the work that we do and so so so the easiest way is to get
in front of really small and super friendly audiences so that is I think the first first starting point and I don't know where that is that could be your team it's a super small audience usually five to ten people or maybe you will find with your company of 80 people or 120 people maybe the company All
Hands is already something where you could actually speak I that was my first time and I had to speak in front of the whole company at a company all hands around 90 people back at the time and I only had to give a brief update on what we did the last two weeks and it was
like five minutes on stage but it freaked me out and so that's where I'm coming from and it really helped me to start small then product tanks for example this local product Community meetups that totally helped me because friendly human beings and not too many of them so sometimes they're just 30
people attending and I knew in the summer not so many people are coming so why not giving a talk there so really start small and then grow the audience over time and always make sure because that helped me a lot to get feedback from strangers and peers if possible
because the peers tend to give you the harsher critique so to say where the strangers are more polite but they're not so familiar with the work you do or with the story that you want to tell so they can spot some gaps in your storytelling technique or something like that so that is something that
helped me a lot to always have this friendly soul in the front row where I know I get some feedback from later on plus then having complete strangers and they there's always somebody coming up after the talk right so that could be your first person giving you some
stranger feedback so to say what about if you're just like about to give a talk and you're like oh my God I'm so nervous do you find anything that helps you get over that I think the two things that work well it's either the Superman pose so that is one thing if you're
standing like this looking straightly up um that is one one thing that helps many people it's not not my preferred one and then the other one is a bit of the gorilla thing just like tapping here there is a I don't know what's the English Vegas no it's not the Vegas Nerf it's no
different I think it's Timeless I need to look it up and if you just like yeah hit that softly for some time pretended yeah that bumps your energy level so to say so that helps me and again friendly faces front row so find people that you like and respect and that you know that
have to spark in their eyes when you start talking that definitely helps as well do you suggest doing these moves in the bathroom where no one can see you or yes backstage you're doing those ones backstage and think about what you're wearing because if you're wearing something like
that and do this before you enter this stage people might see that they may love that just come out beating your chest it's a power move yeah do you think it's important for PMS and leaders in general to get great at public speaking or do you think it's okay if they are just okay
it really depends so I think not being able to speak publicly and to bring you a point across because a lot of people do public speaking but they never bring their point across so if you want to achieve both things I think it is a career solar if you can't for product person can do the IC
level product management job but getting promoted is way harder if you're not good in telling stories and running the team behind the 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 these stories and stuff like this so you definitely could compensate to some extent but I would consider it a bit of a career starter if you don't get to a decent level of
Storytelling and to a decent level of public speaking so yeah I think it's important who's the best Storyteller PM that you've met and what made them great that's another hard question so who had the biggest influence on me was definitely uh Jason Goldberg he was
my former boss and he was the first person that came into the startup that I was working for back at the time and he was really the first person who entered every stage that he could find to talk about the things that he wants to achieve with us as a product team and as
a product organization in a way it was really motivational so it really helped me to experience that and how he was using this product evangelizing techniques to yeah to actually really tell the whole company what we're up for currently and what the problems out there he thinks are worth solving so
that was definitely an inspiration and then I think another great speaker is definitely Hans rosling he's no longer with us that's sad but he gave great TED Talks really data heavy TED Talks because I often hear from product people yeah but the work we do that's so boring
how could we make a great story out of that and I think Hans rosling showed over and over again that you can so that definitely is an inspiration and then on a totally different note I love spoken word poetry because that really talks to the heart and minds of people and I use
in my coaching I usually send people off to the Ted Talk from Sarah K which has the nice title if I should have a daughter and that that really helps people to understand like ah okay that's how you could be playful with words and that's what happens to me personally and to my body and to my
emotions if I listen to something like that so that's maybe three things I could be mentioning Hans rosling is the guy with the like World poverty charts and exactly our world and data now I hit sunness I think in charge but yeah cool I'm excited I'm gonna watch that one
again that's a good reminder maybe just another question around storytelling say European and you're about to start a document or a deck and you just want it to be a good story what are like two or three things you should just do to set yourself up for success yeah first of all it's
don't sit in front of the blank page for too long to start drafting something I think there's a lot of Beauty in this story as a design tool so to say because it's even easier to change the story than it is to change your prototype right so even before you put something
in writing you could start talking about it and see how it lands and then tweak it and I think that's the first thing get going and then the other thing is go start talking about your story go test it see how it resonates and then tweak it and maybe you could use one of the
proven story structures find the one that helps you most I really even if it's super boring but I'll use this hero's journey a lot where I think about should I put the team in the heart of the story because if it's a story that I that should help me to motivate the team
or to inspire the team to actions or something like that then maybe it's nice if I put them in the center of the story and make them the hero and talk about the demons and monsters they have to fight to Once arrive at this brighter future and maybe some other times it makes sense to put the user there and
really talk about how their world and lives would have improved once this product is out and available or maybe it's even a feature um that we're talking about or a bigger redesign or whatever you're currently working on right but you could use this proven sorry structure and see what
other things in there so the Call to Adventure what is the Call to Adventure what is this bright future and it helps you to start and to get going and then I usually advise people to have it hand the story handy in various formats so spoken that you could actually talk about it
written because we all tend to work in remote or as in Chronos environments so just a recorded video maybe yeah it's good but maybe a written version of it is nice as well and the next one is an illustration that helps you making some of the core points of your story visible to the audience and they
could be a whiteboard drawing a flip chart drawing they could be a bigger maybe it's five slides with emotional pictures on it or whatever it is but be visual with your story as well and then you should have it ready in three different formats in the super short 75
second elevator pitch version in the six minutes I can do this before we actually start Sprint planning version and ideally I have to go to the company all hands and have to talk about what we will look into for the next four months and that's maybe an 80 minutes
version and 80 minutes is the length of an average Ted Talk and there is a reason for that it has to do with the tension spans and all these kind of things so that's why I advise people to use this three length an example you're using there is like a PM designing the vision for their team potentially or
their strategy for the next say six months right yeah exactly so we don't need to create this complicated story for the next print I'd say that it's that's too much of an effort maybe a waste of time you need to look a bit further out to make it worth spending a lot of time on
creating your story if you had to pick one book or resource that helped you become a better Storyteller or that you've found other people coming back to that helps them level up their storytelling skills what comes to mind I'll share one first as you think about
that there's a recent book that you wouldn't think would be good at this but it really is really good at helping you understand how to tell a story and it's called nobody wants to read your and it's by foreign yeah and it's it's uh the title alone is like a great lesson which is nobody
wants to read your stuff just yeah and but the premise of the book is how to make it so that people find it interesting and useful it's by uh Stephen pressfield who wrote The War of Art and Bagger Vance and all these things so it's one of his newer books I
think so that's what comes to mind that's pretty cool it comes to mind back in the day when Marty King was my product coach he made me read selling the dream which is the Macintosh story on product evangelizing by Kawasaki and that's not it didn't help me to become a better storytelling but it
helped me realize that it's really important that I work on that skill so that is that is actually the trigger and material that helped me is basically everything from Nancy Duarte and Duarte Inc so they're they're even leadership books about rituals and how to ignite
um the spark in all the people you're having so they're talking a lot about the leadership aspect of Storytelling but they have something for the IC level as well 72 rules on storytelling and all these kind of things and I have a lot of free material I know it's not a book but
they have several books and that was great material that helped me to become better and the show notes on this episode are going to be out of control it's going to have some limit yeah the longest show notes ever sorry oh my God yeah it can be it's gonna be rough I'm
actually gonna try to get Nancy Duarte on his podcast oh yeah that's a good say hi if you do I'm a fan okay I'll do that I'll do that okay so getting to our final topic which is around community you're a big fan of finding community and just the power of being in a
community and I know you've done a bunch of research there you're just like pumping your fists as we talk about this I love it so tell us why you're such a big fan of the power of community for product managers in general um again the starting point was a rather ego Century it's starting point because
I'm constantly thinking about how could I scale the work that I do because I still see so many companies not getting a product coach or I still see so many companies where people develop and it's not a priority all these kind of things and at some point I thought
if the line manager is not taking care of the personal development who could and I talked to several of my colleagues about the question and at some point somebody said like yeah that's what community of practices are often used for so that's where a lot of people get their inspiration and basically I
reflected on my career and early on I was in a super engaging product organization where we really we tried a lot we shared a lot a lot of the things that we tried didn't work at all but others really fell on fertile grounds and we could learn from each other and
we invested quite some time in this sharing but everyone get better over time because of this community being present and so I decided to make this my topic for this year's research so to say and it was talking to a lot of my clients and former clients hey are you running a community of
practice if you don't run a community of practice why is that often they have never considered running one they don't know where to start so that's another problem obviously and at some point I decided to conduct a survey to see if random strangers can tell me about their
companies and their community of practice and it was super interesting as well for example I found it oftentimes there is a bit of a community of practice internally but they never heard about external product communities so they never heard of your community or to racist Community
or mind the product or any of those external communities and that is shocking to an extent as well because we also friendly human beings happy to share what we learn and they don't have to go through the same things over and over again soon so that's why I think
it's a super important question and I would love to help a bit more companies to start a community of practice or to mature the community of practice that they're already having what kind of impact have you seen folks get when they join or find a great community and then what are like
communities that you find are most useful you mentioned mine and I want to get your advice on what I could do to make it even better but maybe those two questions what kind of impact do you find when you find a great community and then what are some that you reckon One
impact definitely is stickiness so people tend to stay with companies where they're learning and growing and can yeah get to Mastery so to say hello Daniel pink um so that is really uh something that people are thriving for and if they find this in a company and a product
community of practice could be a big part of that so that is one impact then the other impact there's less people development on the desk of the product lead if there is a good product community of practice so product leads your life will get so much easier if
there is a product community of practice and it's actually a pretty cheap way of doing people development because trainings are expensive conference tickets are expensive getting an external product code expensive but helping people to learn from each other by making room for that and giving them
a bit of time to reflect and to share what they're learning that's rather cheap so I think that is the benefits that I see trading budgets training budget impact people tend to stay with the company a bit longer leadership wise it's less a time that you have to invest in people development
and it's just fun for a lot of people that's another uptake I'd say what are signs that the community that you're in so you found you mentioned a bunch that I think are awesome Teresa's Community we'll talk about my slack a little bit mind the product yes what are signs that
the community you're in is good with your time something you should stick with versus like man get out of there is actually a good question so I would say if it helps you with networking that is really something something good if you meet nice interesting people so that that is one
one thing I would love to mention and then if you're learning something new every now and then maybe not every day maybe not every week but every now and then there should be some real nuggets where you think like oh this is making my life easier or this is super
interesting I would never ever have stumbled upon this thing without the community so learning something new and then reflecting on how much you already learned about a certain topic or know about the certain topic which is contributing to the community you could
be a community moderator you could be somebody organizing some of the rituals it could be somebody just sharing what you learned so I think that is something that could um become in a good community that is possible at least to share that everybody's sharing and that there's
Mutual trust and then it's often just if you enjoy being part of this community that's I think another super important thing to look into do you like the people there do you like to hang out with them do you think they are kind lovely human beings and is there some level of activity in the community
because there's too many dead ones out there more or less and I think these are the things that I yeah would use as a benchmark when you're talking about this initially I was just imagining online communities but there's also obviously offline communities probably somewhere
in your yeah right just like yeah yeah yeah so that's like I think I don't know if people thought that when I was talking but yeah there's probably like meetups happening in your city with product managers that are meeting each other every week every month maybe that
sounds awesome and I love your point about the ROI the community versus a course versus reading lots of books like it's really affordable to join some kind of product Community especially if it's online yes and Roi could be really high yeah and it brings so much Clarity in your thinking
if you're sharing some things you learned with the community that this is a massive uptake as well so gives back that that really makes sense for you personally as well so you mentioned my slack Community um so if folks don't know this and they're listening basically if you're a
paid subscriber to my newsletter you get access to the slack and there's about 10 000 people in there mostly PMs and Founders and growth leaders and it's pretty damn incredible it's probably the thing I'm most proud of of all the things I've done over the last few years
around this newsletter and podcast and so if you're not in there you should definitely check it out it's thriving there's meetups happening all over the world every month there's all there's a mentorship program there's a mastermind groups all kinds of stuff and you're
familiar with it and so I just wanted to ask you while I have you here do you have any advice for how to make this community even more great that is not an easy question first of all congratulations I really think it's a massive achievement to start such a community
and to really have such a Vibrant Community because it's I know it takes a lot of energy investment at first to get it going and then a lot of energy to keep it on a certain level so to say um yeah what I found helpful is I have this community canvas that I use when
I'm working with clients and some of these things require workshops to some extent so it helps to reflect on what is the purpose of the community and that changes over time with the community members that are currently part of this community right so that is not a stable thing so sometimes
everybody has to pause for a second and then think about what is the purpose of this community what are our values and how we define success it's pretty boring I know because it sounds so so familiar with what we do in product management but I think it applies for product
communities as well and then it's you need to find good rituals and Rhythm and you learning we're already talking about some of the ones you are using and all for example what Teresa is doing um in her community I interviewed her um this year so there is a blog post on that online as well where she talks
about what she tried and what did work and what did not work so I think that is important then maybe not so important for your community well let's see let's discuss let me hear what you think which is incentives and sponsoring so how how do you yeah value contribution are you
giving back is it the Kudos mechanism or is it something that where people really earn Badges of Honor or earn time earn more training budget that's what a lot of companies do right if you're an act playing an active role in the community then you get more training budget to
spend or something like that or they Grant you time to do so so if you say like hey I want to be part of this product Community could I travel one month a quarter or something like that because I want to go and see those people that is something that people do so incentives and sponsoring then it's
roles and that will be interesting in your case as well is Lenny the center of the community I try really hard not to do that yeah right I wouldn't try to not be the beacon of all answers I the actual goal of the community was I will not have all the answers let's just
bring a bunch of smart people together that are already there's this interesting filter of who pays for Content about product and growth and startup stuff yeah filters are really interesting so the whole idea was get out of the middle of this thing and let
people help each other and it's worked out really well yeah because that's what I would say after doing all this research it's not sustainable if the whole Community is on the shoulders of one two three people so you need to distribute the workload and you need to distribute this
responsibility because sometimes even things like yeah policing the community is not a pleasant job and if there's only one person dealing with all of these things then it's not really Community because then it's it's a bit organized like a company in this pyramid
scheme so I think more of it as circles different Circles of interest and then Building Bridges between them because maybe not everybody in your community is interested in the same topics but maybe they're the smaller Circles of 10 15 people interested in this one topic 10
15 people interested in this other topic you may be connecting the dots you may be giving a bit of impulse and inspiration but maybe other people are doing the exact same thing sharing their best reads and they're worthy to watch videos and all these kind of things so
content and curation definitely is another thing that you should think about and reflect on once in a while cool thanks for the advice curation is so important I found especially early on I found keeping the signal to noise high oh always especially early on it was really prayerful so there's a lot of
focus on this big detail-oriented about it all yeah plus a lot of communities that I see use engagement as a success metric and I'm actually not sure if this is a good success metric so as you say signal versus noise is maybe the better success metric which leads us to the down the
rabbit hole of how to protect it but yeah engagement is maybe not the predominant success factor for a community yeah that's interesting he also said it's a lot of work and just to give some shout outs to folks that helped me run this community that we have I couldn't
do this without him Trey who leads the community hello curates the best conversations in the back every week and then shares them in this new bonus email Community wisdom and then Ria who's been helping out run the Meetup program and then Jess who's helping with our mentorship program and
a few other things so that's the core team that helps this whole thing run thank you to them all thank you and it's super interesting that you're sharing that because companies often don't want to invest in yeah full-time Community managers maybe the wrong word because that not
necessarily has to be a full-time role but there need to be some people that really have a decent amount of time to invest in running this community um because otherwise it's not working and I still think it is still cheaper than sending everybody to trainings I've
been conferences all the time and it has a lot of yeah Ripple effects and network effects well guess what we've reached our very exciting lightning rounds so I'm going to ask you a few questions whatever comes to mind let me know we'll go through it pretty fast yes and are you
ready I'm so ready so ready what are what are uh two or three books that you recommend most to other people the art of thinking clearly by the belly it talks about human biases in a really nice and Illustrated way then what I use a lot in my coaching practice especially with senior
Executives who is outcomes over output because it's a super strong concept I'd say and then maybe I want to mention two books that are not yet written but two concepts that I hope will make it into books and one is Martin Erickson's decision stack and then there is another
book about public speaking that hopefully might come out if some people are supporting it on Kickstarter and that is called present yourself a public speaking book awesome if you can send a link to that we'll include it also in the show notes of course the record
whatever show notes speaking of that what's another podcast that you love I love the product Experience Podcast and if you're able to speak German then there is one that is called Product mentioned that's a nice interview series product I like that I do not speak German but I
bet it'd be fun to listen to anyway what's a favorite recent movie or TV show that you've enjoyed maybe New Amsterdam I loved it that's actually a medical director Matt and he's finding very unconventional ways to solve problems and I think he's a great leader so maybe that's a nice
framing for watching the show was it called New Amsterdam New Amsterdam sweet what's a favorite interview question you'd like to ask when you're interviewing folks definitely to tell me about the last time um so tell me about a time when you did your last round of user interviews tell
me about your last time when you onboarded a new colleague because I think as in user interviewing just tell me about the last time you really yeah Sparks nice conversations and interviews what are five SAS tools or products that help you do the work that you do now and if there aren't enough
for those just like great apps that you love right now I'm totally not into product management system these days because as I'm just coaching people on hourly basis I'm no longer the one looking into this Festival still using so uh that's a quite a tough question
things that I use a lot in my personal um work is rather boring stuff like bookkeeping software and time pranking which ones right that's interesting Harvest is what I use for time tracking and bookkeeping and I love that that makes my life easier since a few years already
and then yeah new banking apps that are coming up that I'm using for my accounts one is Quanto I think it's a German bank but they really did a great job in the user experience super seamless in their apps and all these kind of things yeah so that's two cool products that I love to use
great who else in the industry do you most respect as a thought leader influencer type person as I'm a conference organizer as well for a conference that was called my the product engage here in Hamburg that is the super hard question for me to ask because so many people have been
on that stage that I would consider being a thought leader they would maybe not consider them being a thought leader I think the third leader thing is pretty hard anyway so there's so many different voices in our industry and I think looking at the guest list of your
podcast actually is a very good start when you think about thought leaders and getting more Inspirations because there are ones that we know and some hidden gems on there great answer great answer Petra thank you so much for doing this uh We've hit the record on show note length I guess
so that's a milestone congrats yes thank you was a pleasure yeah two final questions where can folks finding online if they want to learn more reach out maybe work with you and how can listeners be useful to you oh interesting yeah the first one is easy LinkedIn Petra Villa you can find me
there and then there is my website petram minus w-i-l-l-e.com that's my website and how can business be helpful to me that's a tough one I think it could be mutual beneficial if you are a product manager I see level and you would love to get better supported in your personal
development and go by my book and just hand it to your manager if that's appropriate or just put it on their desk and just forget what it's there hopefully they read it or something like that I think that is how I would love to answer the last question remind folks of
the book is called and they can find an Amazon product people strong product people go check it out on Amazon exactly Petra thank you so much for doing this Lenny was a pleasure it's my pleasure thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to
the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode [Music]