How to be the best coach to product people

Petra Wille is an independent product leadership coach and author of Strong Product People, who has spent years coaching product leads and PMs. The conversation covers how product leaders can coach their PMs well, why storytelling and public speaking matter for PM careers, and how communities of practice help product people grow.

01Key learnings

• Define what a good product person looks like in your specific context, since many leaders only hold this as an implicit feeling rather than a written standard.
• Start coaching with a development plan for each PM, even before a formal assessment, because most people already know what they want to get better at.
• Identify the next bigger challenge for each direct report each quarter and deliberately assign it to help them grow faster.
• Follow up consistently with small, frequent check-ins rather than large annual reviews, since consistency beats intensity for development.
• Use an existing competency assessment such as the PMwheel as a starting point, then customize it heavily to fit your product context.
• Hire for hard-to-develop traits like curiosity and empathy, since these are difficult to build inside a corporate environment.
• Build storytelling skills deliberately: plan real time for it, use plain language instead of jargon, and prepare the story in short, medium and long formats.
• Start a community of practice with explicit purpose, values and success metrics, distribute responsibility across members, and prefer signal quality over raw engagement.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.