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

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. 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. If you read my winter 2022 newsletter, these names may sound familiar!

My blog editor,Melissa Suzuno, conducted these interviews with Lisa and Jason.

Tell us about your company and role. 

Lisa: I’m a product coach at Codecentric. As an expert in custom software development, codecentric AG is a leader in agile software development and innovative technologies in Germany. My work involves: training and coaching individual product people; coaching whole teams on topics like product management, discovery, strategy, roadmapping, collaboration, and dual track agile; running workshops; and occasionally jumping in as an interim product manager or product leader. 

Jason: I am Product Director for DueDil, a UK-based regtech company. We merged with another company in the same space, Artesian Solutions, in mid-2021 and will be launching our new brand and proposition soon. As part of the merger, I took responsibility for the combined product team; it’s a small team of three, but we are looking to expand.

How did you first come across the PM wheel?

Lisa: I saw Petra’s post about it on social media and wanted to check it out.

Jason: I saw Petra’s book launch publicity on Twitter. I’ve got a podcast, so I’m always interested in speaking to authors about their books. Petra was gracious enough to spend some time talking on the record about some of the themes from the book, including the PMwheel. The rest is history!  

How and why did you decide to use it?

Lisa: As a product leader, I’m always interested to hear how people describe what good looks like for a product manager and the skills that people need. It’s really all over the place. If you just Google “What are the skills that a product manager needs?” you get so many different things.

Since I already knew Petra and had read her work before, I knew I would probably like what she had to say about this topic. 

The different dimensions she uses really resonated with me. Having a different set of questions to help people—either the managers or the PMs themselves—was really helpful because a lot of the things I’ve seen just tell you to rate yourself on a scale from 1 to 5 and it’s hard to know what that means. I found it very well-rounded and easy to apply.

Jason: One of the great things about STRONG Product People is how practical it is, and how it gives you tools and techniques to really take control of team development and identify areas of strength and weakness. I was really keen to run this assessment over the existing team before we expanded, to make sure we have a good understanding of where we needed to invest, and the types of talent we needed to bring on board.

We heard you created materials based on the PMwheel. Tell us a bit more about it and how you’re using it. 

Lisa: The first few times, I just used the PMwheel as it was. Anytime someone said they were a bit uncertain about their skill set and what areas they could improve, I would just send the blog post with the PDF and tell people to check it out. It’s easy to connect to the questions in there to get a sense of how good you are and how much room for improvement there still is.

After doing this a few times, I created a Mural template of the PMwheel. It’s a living, collaborative document that gives us transparency in both directions. 

I basically took the wheel as it is and all of the questions that were in there already and added different sections for the self-assessment and notes and action items. Now we can use it over the course of our coaching sessions. It gives a clear visualization of the expectation, where someone sees themself, where I see them, and how to bridge those gaps. I also created markers so it’s easier to see which questions are essential for someone in a junior position, which are essential for someone in an intermediate position, and which are essential for someone in a leadership position.  

Jason: The first thing I noticed was that the PMwheel, whilst fantastic, is fundamentally a diagram on a piece of paper. I wanted to have an easy way to visualize a PMwheel based on data rather than having to draw it out myself. I also wanted to be able to visualize multiple people at once to get an arresting visual of our strengths and weaknesses. 

I’ve not been a software developer for a few years now, but I still remember enough jQuery to be dangerous! I pulled together a pretty simple data entry form + visualizer using the Highcharts library. This was useful for me but I wanted to share with others in case they had the same need. Petra has been kind enough to share this technique with the world and I wanted to contribute in the same spirit. Find the visualizer here.

How has it helped your coaching process with product people?

Lisa: It helps me stay organized and structured. This ensures fairness, especially when you have several people who report to you. It ensures you set the same expectations for everybody. And it’s very transparent. 

A lot of the time in my career, I’ve felt like the expectations were not very clear. My managers couldn’t really coach me because they didn’t necessarily know about product. The PMwheel helps you see what your manager thinks is important as well as an understanding and shared vocabulary around those expectations. People know what different terms mean and you can build with a common understanding and starting point. 

I’d also like to mention that I don’t always use it in every session. It can be a bit excessive to look at the PMwheel every time. For more junior product people, we look at it more frequently, and for more senior people we’ll review it once a quarter or so.

Jason: So far we’ve used it for self-assessments and to get an initial read. To be honest, we’re still early in scaling the team out so I’ve not used it in great detail and it’s not informed any decisions yet, but I’m expecting it to be invaluable over the next few months.

Are you using one of my frameworks, whether it’s the PMwheel, the FutureSelf canvas, or something else? If you’d like to share your experience, feel free to get in touch!