The PMwheel in Action: A Conversation with Arne Kittler, VP Product at XING
The PMwheel is a tool I created to help define product managers’ roles and responsibilities. If you’re not familiar with the PMwheel and you’d like to read up on it first, you can get an overview of the PMwheel here, learn how product managers can use it for self-assessment here, or find a guide to using the PMwheel as a coaching tool here.
One of the things that’s so exciting about developing a coaching tool is seeing how people adapt it to their own needs. I’m thrilled to introduce you to Arne Kittler, VP of Product at XING and co-organizer of MTP Engage Hamburg. In this post, you’ll learn how Arne has customized the PMwheel for his team.
This is the second PMwheel in Action post. Read the first post, an interview with Sophia Höfling, Head of Product at Babbel, here. My blog editor, Melissa Suzuno, conducted this interview with Arne.
Tell us a little about your role.
XING is the leading professional network in the German-speaking market with over 19 million members. The company was founded in 2003 and has a broad offering of value propositions aimed at improving the working life of professionals.
Within XING, we have structured our product teams by so-called clusters consisting of three to five interdisciplinary product development teams, each with a product manager. Together with my engineering counterpart, I am responsible for such a cluster of five teams who work on some of the central networking functionalities of XING such as pages, posting updates, social interactions, and notifications. The product managers of these five teams report to me and I am very happy to have a smart and well-mixed team. I enjoy working with them and helping them develop.
How did you first encounter the PMwheel?
I’ve known Petra for many years and somehow came across it—maybe on the internet, maybe over a glass of wine. I don’t remember.
How and why did you decide to use it?
I think it was the combination of Petra’s book as well as reading Trillion Dollar Coach (the book about Bill Campbell) that gave me the necessary extra push to go from the regular 1:1s I’d been doing for ten years to an additional monthly session in which my team members and me consciously make time to reflect on their development.
The PMwheel provides a great framework for triggering a structured dialogue in these sessions. It helps us zoom out from the day-to-day without requiring a full “coaching atmosphere,” which I find sometimes artificial to create with people I manage and work with on a daily basis.
The PMwheel provides a great framework for triggering a structured dialogue. Tweet This
Have you made any modifications to the PMwheel?
Yes, I have completely customized the PMwheel to reflect my personal definition of a good PM in the context of how we currently work at XING. Some of the elements in Petra’s universal PMwheel (such as “Agile”) didn’t really offer much differentiation because luckily I can take a lot of things for granted in our organization.
I currently use the following dimensions:
Understand Context & Listen (to users, market, XING)
Increase Clarity (for yourself and others)
Convey Direction (to team, peers, stakeholders)
Corporate Citizenship (balancing own interest vs. greater good)
Adaptive Roadmap (for how to get to the direction in a dynamic context)
Foresighted Alignment (ahead of the wave)
Backlog, Team & Processes (In other words… just work)
Represent your product (to peers, stakeholders, org)
Did it help you create a definition of a “good” product manager?
Yes, in preparation of my PMwheel I created my own definition of a good product manager and found it helpful to sort my thoughts. I found it difficult to decide on the most important aspects to include, but prioritization is our job, isn’t it? ;)
How has it helped your coaching practice with product people?
I have shared my definition of good with everyone on my team and invited them to have a dialogue about the PMwheel. Most of them have already taken me up on that offer and I found the resulting sessions very fruitful, because we tapped into some topics which we hadn’t spoken about before and we were able to identify suitable next steps for my team members to try out or work on.
Do you have further plans for the PMwheel at your organization?
I have yet to have an exchange with my peer product leads at XING about if and how they will use the PMwheel. Since most of them have read STRONG, I suspect that some of them will already have tried it out as well. Initially I had also considered whether to first align my version of the PMwheel with other product leads in my company (because we do use unified
competency profile as part of our appraisal process), but then decided to just try “my” PMwheel as my very individual perspective.
Why do you enjoy using the PMwheel?
What I like about the PMWheel is that it kindly forces you as a product lead to sharpen your perspective on what you believe to be the most relevant skills out of the plethora of potential skills associated with the PM. By doing so, it not only helps in the actual conversations with my team members but also structures my thinking and my “magnifying glass” for what to observe in my team’s work.
Ready to try it out for yourself? You can download a copy of the PMwheel here.