The Product Leader’s Guide to Balancing Product Discovery and Product Delivery

In every product organization, you as HoP—along with your product managers—must constantly balance product discovery (what to build) and product delivery (build it). Do too much of the former, and you’ll never get anything built. Do too much of the latter, and you’ll fall victim to building the wrong products in a beautiful way.

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The Lack of Gender Parity in the Workplace: A Must-Read Guide

In my time as a product coach, I’ve had the opportunity to work with a number of great product people, and around half of them have been women. My work with leaders and aspiring leaders in the product world has given me insight into many companies and industries. If I’d been an employee, I might have only had experience with a handful of companies, but as a coach I get to work with dozens.

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How do you lead when your team is exhausted?

Spring is just around the corner in the northern hemisphere and since most people around the globe are still fighting the pandemic, our work/life balance continues to be a challenge. Many of us haven’t seen our colleagues, employees, and peers in person in a long time. Everyone seems to be exhausted and drained from the last 12 months of home office, homeschooling, home everything.

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Struggling to Find the Time to Develop Your Product Managers? Start Here

In my new book STRONG Product People: A Complete Guide to Developing Great Product Managers, I’ve aimed to deliver everything a product leader needs to help team members live up to their full potential and to feel empowered. Get a quick overview of the book here and find out how I recommend approaching the content in the book here.

Want to actually dive into some of the book content? In this post, you can preview Chapter 11: How to Find the Time?

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The PMwheel in Action: Conversation with Sophia Höfling, Head of Product, Babbel

In the past, I’ve written a few posts about the PMwheel, a tool I created to help define product managers’ roles and responsibilities. But today, I’m excited to share someone else’s perspective. Sophia Höfling is a Head of Product at Babbel. She’s been using the PMwheel as a coaching tool for the product managers on her team.

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Developing STRONG Product People—The 5 Main Ingredients for Being the Best Coach Your Product Managers Have Ever Had

In case you haven’t heard the big news yet, my book, STRONG is now published. In this post, I’ll be sharing some of the concepts from the book. If you find yourself wanting to explore any of these topics in more detail, be sure to check out the book. You can order your copy here.

Let’s talk about developing product managers—and not just any product managers, but strong product managers. We all know that product management is a super hard business to be in and we expect a lot from our product people.

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Why being a product person makes me less suspicious of an upcoming COVID vaccine

We’ve been hearing a lot lately about the speedy development of the COVID vaccine. Great news, right? Well, there are a lot of people who are worried that by getting this vaccine, they’ll be turned into the “guinea pigs” of the pharmaceutical industry. The common argument is that “A vaccine that has been developed this fast can’t be tested well enough.” But as a product person, I completely disagree.

In my career as a product manager—and in my work as a consultant and coach—I’ve had the opportunity to observe several product initiatives that have unfolded in a pretty similar way: there’s no time to lose and we have external pressure to succeed (if we don’t, we’ll run out of funding, money, or lose important customers).

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All blog postsPetra Wille
A lightweight way to create a development plan for PMs - the Future Self

Let´s assume you are a Product Manager and you know or have figured out what your next best development topic is (e.g. by using the PMwheel) you then should come up with something I would call a development plan. Something that helps you commit to small actions that get you closer to the competent product management personality you want to become.

The future-self framework takes the form of a document that you need to fill, and it has four parts: As-Is, To-Be, Actions and a Timeframe.

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The PMwheel as a Manager of Product Managers

The PMwheel has become a reliable compass for people who want to navigate their product career or develop their direct reports. It’s an approach that I have personally used in my work with clients ever since I developed it.

For managers, The PMwheel is a simple, but powerful way to assess the responsibilities, skills, and knowhow of your product managers. Keep in mind that no two assessments for your different product managers will be the same—some will be stronger in one area, while others will be stronger in others.

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How to use the PMwheel as a Self-Assessment Tool for Product Managers

I have created the PMwheel back in 2016 to give my coaching sessions with PMs from all over the globe some more structure and I am using it ever since in my work with my clients.

And I figured out that it is a framework that many of my former coachees are still using long after they have left the initial company. They, in this case, are mainly using it as a tool for self-assessment in times where there is no line-manager helping them with their personal growth. It became a compass for many people that helps them navigate their product career. So I have decided to share it with a much bigger audience to help even more people with it.

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The PMwheel – a Compass for the Product Manager Development Journey

Back in 2016, I was working with the product organization of a larger tech company. They asked me to help every product manager on the team “understand the role of the product manager better,” and to help the product managers understand what “better” would actually look like.

This was not an easy challenge and, although I had a certain take on what product managers should be responsible for, I lacked a clear framework—an assessment that I could have discussed with the individual product manager in one of our coaching sessions.

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Inspiring Strong Product Leaders: A Conversation with Teresa Torres

Some weeks ago, I had the honour of being interviewed by Teresa Torres. There was no shortage of topics for us to cover in our recent conversation. We’ve talked about my upcoming book, about how to develop STRONG product people if you are a product leader and about my coaching cards.

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