Petra Wille - Strong Product Leadership in the Age of AI

And this is something that I see a lot of organizations falling short right now. A lot of leaders falling short right now. So what is your positive take on AI? And do I see the million possible ways how all of this can basically go wrong? Yes, I see all of that. But still, we're still inventing the future. And product people are part of inventing the future. We've always been. So what is your optimistic story that you tell your team and your organization right now about the future? Hello, and welcome to One Night In Product, the show where I chat to some of the brightest minds in product from across the globe to help you see product management in a whole new light. If that sounds up your street, don't forget to dive into the back catalog on your favorite podcast app or on YouTube. And of course, follow, share, or drop me a comment or review. It all helps keep the lights on. On this episode, I'm welcoming back for the third time the wonderful Petra Villa, product leadership coach, author and founder of Products at Heart, the popular Hamburg product conference that everyone speaks so highly of and all of the best people go to, which is clearly why I've so far not been able to get anywhere near it. Petra is the author of Strong Product People, which gave us the PM wheel and a way to assess the gaps in our product teams, as well as strong product communities, which gave us some advice on how to start filling those gaps. Now she's back, but not with a book, but another wheel. This time, the product leadership wheel. And I'm sure you can guess who that's aimed at. Petra, thanks for coming. And welcome back. Oh my God, is it the third time already, Jason? Third time. Why does everyone keep saying this? Because whenever anyone comes on and I say it's like the third time, and they're like, oh, I thought we only did two. It's like, no, no, no, no. People are forgetting me. Although I did look at the list of old episodes, and I think the first time you and I spoke was back in like 2021 or something like that. So it was... Yeah, or even earlier. It was very early. It's been a minute, but it's okay. We're here. We're excited. We're going to talk all about leadership. But before we talk about all of that, it's been a while, as you said. So what have you been up to? How are things going? What's on your plate these days? Things are going great, I'd say. Still busy organizing and running product at heart events. We just had our leadership event a few days ago, which went amazing. And saying that as an organizer sounds weird, but as we were running this format for the first time, and it's a one and a half day format now, it always just have been a four to five hours format in the past. So it's more extensive. And we didn't know if people will like it, because let's face it, product leadership people are busy. So can they pull themselves out of their calendar for basically two days plus the travel? And will they then find enough value in the event and the gathering? Luckily, they did. We have really nice reviews and the event as an organizer, you can sense to some extent if the flow was good and the experience that you had in mind when curating all of it is really coming to or becoming a reality. And by the looks of it, that we managed to do that well. And now we're busy to finalizing every little small detail for the conference in June. So that's still a lot of work. I started to write my opening and closing remarks or our opening and closing remarks yesterday. So and that's trickier than ever, because how can I now write an opening and closing remark for a world that is eight weeks out with all the AI developments happening all the time? So not an easy task. And then that's product at heart. And then I'm really touring with the product leadership wheel right now. And we will talk about it a bit later, I guess. But many, many companies are picking up on it and say, like, you know what? We have heavily invested in developing our product management function in the last few years. We have maybe not done equally much for our product leadership community. So this is the conversations that I'm having a lot. Plus a bit of product tank touring, for example, where we discuss how can I become a product leader? So what are the skills that I might be already able to practice in my current role that helped me to get in a leadership position down the line? So that seems to be an interesting topic. And for example, I'm at product tank Cologne in a few weeks talking about that exact topic. A big cathedral as well in Cologne, as far as I remember. Yeah, indeed. Now you're just creating a new one of product leadership as well. Yeah, just next to the old one. Reminds me of the old story, like, I can't even remember which cathedral people were talking about. But just this idea that, like, back in the old days, it took so long to create a cathedral that the people who started on it were not the people who finished on it. Somehow, kind of keeping them motivated towards the end goal, despite the fact that in some cases they may never see it. And that kind of reminds me of some of the more exciting discussions around product vision and stuff like that. And maybe also with you and the end state of leadership as well. Like, you know, it's a big journey and who knows. But as long as we can kind of keep going in the same direction and have that vision in mind that we can get to one day. Yeah, and that's actually, I like the narrative because we oftentimes in product think that our decisions are so minor and not very important. But oftentimes a small feature decision is here to stay for a long time, even after you long gone and left the organization. And it still might have impact to millions of people's lives. So, yeah, I like this kind of thing about the cathedral more than about your tomorrow's success. Yeah. Well, you know, it's a marathon, not a sprint. Although, of course, now the marathon, now that's been beaten under two hours as well. So that's becoming a sprint as it turns out. London loves me. Seriously. I mean, amazing stuff, amazing stuff. All about the technological advancements and the shoes and stuff as well. All right. So who knows training percent, but Berlin next and then because that's flatter, right? So Berlin and then they can go and break it again, I guess. But imagine being the guy, the second guy who also broke the world record, but got beaten by the first guy. So I don't know if there's some kind of product leadership message in there. Like, you know, you only got to win your own race or, you know, don't. Yeah, that's important. Don't compare yourself to other people. Exactly. Well, we'll talk about that soon as well. It's not a good idea on the personal level. I'm always comparing myself to other people. You should. Well, right. So let's talk about leadership then. So obviously, as you say, you've got the leaders event for Product at Heart. You've got the leadership wheel, you do leadership coaching. But before we go into the new wheel and start going into some of the specifics, I wanted to kind of zoom out a little bit, maybe talk about that cathedral, maybe even bigger than the cathedral. Leadership in general, like if we want to just think about the kind of the philosophical concept of leadership, you speak with a lot of leaders, you coach leaders, you work with leaders, you try and make leaders better. But what do you or how do you define leadership? Not even product leadership, but just leadership? How do you define that these days? That's a good question. I thought I'd start with an easy one, you know? Yeah, I like it. The tricky part here is that my definition is maybe not so much important than are people in leadership positions ever reflecting on that. And this is something that I often see happening is people understand early on that a career works like that. You are an individual contributor, then you're a senior individual contributor, then you're a platinum individual contributor. And at some point you may get some, I don't know, team lead responsibility. And then that seems to be a more powerful role. And what's more important to the people, the paycheck seems to get bigger if you level yourself up, right? So oftentimes the goal of people in leadership roles always was and always have been bigger paycheck and sometimes bigger realm of influence. That's a motivation that I hear a lot in people as well. I saw the other leaders in my organization. I saw the decisions getting bigger, the higher you go. I want to make these bigger decisions. I want to have the bigger context. But it is not often the case that people really paused at some point in becoming a leader and were like, huh, maybe now that I have team lead in my title or head of product or whatever it is, CTO, I should actually go and learn a thing or two about leadership in general, right? And I would love to see that more often. And I think this is something that your boss should actually be doing and your organization should actually be doing. And let's face it, the big corporate organizations do have their internal leadership programs. So that's usually what people get promoted into and then attend. And that helps them to build some fundamental leadership skills. And if I talk about fundamental leadership skills, and we can talk about the product wheels, 12 responsibilities in a bit. But for me, it has a lot to do with this providing directional clarity to all the people in your area. So where are we headed? Why are we going there? How do we compete on the playing field that we decided to be our playing field? And that's definitely one. And then it definitely has to do a lot with the people you're working with. So a lot of it is building the right team, hiring the right people, feedback, promotion, rewards, all these things, coaching skills, very underleveraged in all these conversation around leadership. So how do you build your coaching toolkit so that you are able to coach the people that are working with you and for you to excellence? Yeah, that is high level stuff. And then a lot of it should be personal development as your leadership personality. So self-reflection in a work, figuring out how you balance your energy, for example. This is what a lot of leaders don't have time for, but should be more deliberate about. Otherwise, burnout is just lurking around the corner. And so you have to build some healthy habits and some practice around upskilling yourself as well. So how do you stay up to date and relevant while being super busy? That's another thing that leaders should be looking into. But that's just from top of mind. And it all starts with this awareness. OK, a good individual contributor does not make a good leadership figure. And then understanding what is the delta and what gets you to this. Hey, now I can confidently call myself a leader or in some organizations, they're still called manager level, whatever your name is. But there's some work that needs to happen in between being a good IC and a successful leader. But it's funny because I've seen that dynamic and even kind of, to some extent, lived through it myself. And I'm sure maybe you did earlier in your career as well, when you kind of, exactly as you say, you kind of, you get bumped up, you become like the best IC and therefore the natural next move is to become that manager or leader or whatever you want to call it. But you don't get, first of all, you don't reflect yourself because you probably don't know that you have to. But also you're not encouraged to because your boss probably never got to do that themselves either. So because they maybe were in the same situation as you just a few years before. So they were kind of under-sponsored and just moved up and promoted to queen on the chessboard or whatever. And then, yeah, they basically kind of had to work it all out themselves. They had no mental models or kind of reflection themselves. They had no way then to sort of ask you to do that because they didn't do it and they never got the support. And so maybe they don't even think that's a thing and it's just something that you should just grow into. And you almost just have this line into the future of like X amount of leaders deep, your boss, their boss, their boss's boss and all that. And none of them have ever got to do any of that stuff and they've all just tried to work it out, which seems to mean that it could work or it could not work. But I guess there's a wider problem than just leadership on a personal level. There's like, how do you almost calibrate for the fact that maybe all of the people that came in front of you didn't get any of that sponsorship either? Yeah. And that is the cultural. So again, that has to do with the company and organizational culture and culture always comes from a lot of things that are invisible. I always have this metaphor of culture is to employees what water is to fish. So you're constantly surrounded by your company's culture, but you can't see it. If you ask a fish, how does water look like? They would not even know what you're talking about. The same happens if you ask employees, what's your company culture? They then sometimes talk about, I don't know, rituals of recognition, for example, or what is promoted or demoted in the organization, what rituals they are sometimes, these kinds of things. But if there is no posing and reflecting culture and no, hey, leadership is a different role than product management, for example, then it is very hard for the individual person to start having this realization and then being able to identify where gaps may lie and then how to close these gaps. But this is exactly what motivated me to first create the product management wheel. Because I saw the exact same thing in the average mid-sized scale up, maybe old traditional industry kind of product company, because they had no clue what product management is all about. And the books were just helpful to a certain extent. So they needed more concrete questions where they could say like, yes, we're doing this or no, we're not doing this. And then the reflection of, oh, if that is something we should be doing, but we're not doing it, we might want to think about if it's a good thing for us to do. And if so, we should start practicing that skill. So you need some sort of a compass that helps you get out of your either product management woods or product leadership woods or leadership woods in general. This is, for example, what some of the personality tests do or tests like the Gallup Strengths Finder or Conferees for your improvement structure. These are all self-assessment tools that help you first to diagnose where you are and then inspire your, I call them learning headlines. So stuff that you would like to put down on a piece of paper and then think about how you could improve those. So action items that get you closer to your future self. Absolutely. But I mean, we've kind of touched on it just now, this idea of leadership and product leadership and product teams and all of that. And yeah, we have the kind of the overall concept of leadership, but we also have product leadership. We have the leaders that are leading product organizations. And whilst I obviously have a lot of thoughts and feelings on that, I guess the first interesting question, given the work that you do is kind of what's the, I don't even know if it's easy to sort of sum this up in a short, succinct way, but like, how do you see the general state of product leadership based on what you see, what you've experienced? Maybe people you've talked to out there, people you talk to at the conferences. How's product leadership doing as a whole, as far as you see it? Yeah, I think we were doing fine. And then all this AI stuff hit. So I saw product leaders getting more and more professional in what they do. And I would say two years back, it was rather clear what good product leadership is all about. And people were working towards that. I think it could have more, it was still a bit of reading five books and then creating your own, Hey, this is what product leadership is all about. That's for example, the gap that I was trying to close with the product leadership wheel that I did this work for all the people now, but still it was well understood what makes a successful product leader and what makes a successful product organization and product leads war upping their game. And then AI hit us in all its complexity. And now, and we experienced that firsthand last week at the leadership event, right? Just a matter of scale, we had like 60 product leaders over from all across Europe, even some rest of world folks. And the thing is, all of them need to play with a lot of these AI tools to still understand what are the strengths and weaknesses of the models, what are they good for, where are they falling short, for example, then they learn more about their own efficiency gains. So that's currently what every product leader is trying to understand. So how can I up my leadership game supported by AI? And that could be simplifying writing emails, right? It's not necessarily the big philosophical leadership stuff. It's really practical things that everybody is currently playing with, but then they have to think about, okay, but how could this help us as a product organization and team to be more efficient in the product work that we do? And there is a lot of pros and cons because everybody seems to be playing with AI-aided discovery initiatives by designing experiments. Some use this synthetic personas to do user tests, which is something I hate, for example, but currently everybody has to play with all these things to see what actually works and what actually doesn't. On the team level, efficiency gains is always the headline. And then on the other hand, or that's the third dimension is how does all of that enhance our actual product? So where are we using this? Not only in our collaboration, not only for personal efficiency gains and team efficiency gains, but also in our product. Because product leaders see user interfaces becoming less relevant right now, or so many things are conversational. So that might be the user interface of the future. It's more voice, it's more language. So that is something that a lot of them are looking into. And what does this mean for our product? And then again, down the line for our team topology and org setup. So will we need the exact same number of engineers, but with different backgrounds? Should we be hiring context engineering people into our product organization? Because that will be massively relevant. So I think product leaders understood the job quite well. And now they need to understand this job again. understand this job again in this world where we are in constant shift and AI is throwing new things at us on a daily hourly basis, even it's stressful. Well, it's interesting where it does sound stressful, but it's interesting as well, obviously AI, you know, everyone's talking about it and some of it and some of what you've just said, yeah, yeah, I completely, you know, I can see why people need to spend time on that and, and some of it you think, well, like some of that doesn't necessarily feel like a leadership thing, it kind of feels more like a kind of IC thing, like the people that are deciding what the button do or what the interface is and stuff like that, but it kind of feels there is a bit of buzz around this just general idea that like, you know, leadership is cooked, we don't need leadership anymore, we certainly don't need middle management, what we need is everyone just being a builder again, everyone's going to use all these different AI tools, they've probably got some AI, you know, Claude code based AI chief of staff that's doing all of their day to day work, apparently, and then they're then just, you know, we've got stories of CEOs, like going back and trying to build interfaces and sort of build little bits of MVP and stuff they can get in front of people. It kind of feels almost as this pressure to collapse, leadership down or remove leadership entirely and just have everyone just building stuff and throwing, you know, spaghetti at the wall and just seeing what works like, do you see a lot of that? And do you think it's a good thing? I'm a happy spectator of that and how it is my end fault, because I don't think that will be what will help companies succeed in the future. Because there are a few few things that I observe here. First of all, I like if everybody's wrapping their head around this kind of, should I become more of a product builder? Can I work more cross functional that I'm currently doing? So I would always encourage every product person on the planet, go vibe code, go Claude code, go cowork, go whatever product you want to use, but use all of them. Create some agent, agentic setups, do all of it, understand it. I think it helps. And if only in having more informed conversations with the developers that you're currently having, and I would encourage the engineers equally so to think about how can they prototype quicker and do more of the discovery work maybe. So go people overstep the borders of your past roles. I think that is a good thing. Collaborate more and build more together. There's nothing wrong with that. Do it. But is everybody enjoying this new way of working? Because product people are in a product role for a reason. Design people are in a design role for a reason. So are engineers. And just because we can now vibe code ourselves to something, is that the work we want to do day in day out? And is that something that is equally rewarding and that is giving us the same purpose? So I think this is a big question that we're currently having. So in what bucket is everybody falling now talent wise and purpose wise and willingness to pick up certain roles and jobs and tasks wise, right? So that's, that's nobody knows how this will actually plan out. And then I see that work becomes way more intense. And I think everybody who uses AI extensively sees. So I constantly feel like if I would have like five golden retrievers running around in my office and say like, Hey, Petra, look, this is what I created. Can you just review it and tell me what you think about it? And then I review it and tell them what I think about it. And I throw the stick in the woods again and my golden retriever runs off. But I do this with five little golden retrievers all day long. And my brain is cooked by 11. Really, I need to take a walk because work is getting so intense. So I think AI is pushing us humans to our limits to some extent. And everybody will need to find a sustainable pace in this new way, ways of working. So let's see how that actually, because you cannot, technically, we could have a lot of efficiency gains, but our brains just overheat at some point, CPUs no longer processing. So maybe we cannot fire half of our stuff because just not possible. Otherwise, the other one's burning out really quick. So let's see how all of that happens. And then the worst reflexes in organizations do come up when time is freed up by AI. So a lot of my coaching conversations are around learn faster, more experimentation, not more feature output, because right now everybody has this tendency to push it out faster and nobody needs more features that will create so much tech legacy. And I think it will create a lot of expertise erosion as well, because no human is holding context anymore, or at least not a broad enough context for it to be relevant. And then we will see a lot of, what was the third thing that I would, oh yeah, and then all the security risk that we're currently creating in all the organizations. So I'm pretty sure companies will, it's like they, I don't know, everybody's heating up the stove and they just need to burn themselves once or twice. And then paces will slow down. Everybody's coming back to this. Okay. We still have to be intentional about the things we do. We have to be more intentional about where we use these tools and where we don't. And we have to be intentional about how we define roles. And all of that will change. Team topologies will change tremendously. But will companies have like one or two employees? And yeah, I know there are examples where people earned a lot of money and build companies really quick with wipe coder tools. Congratulations. But I just onboarding with a new client and the procurement process still requires me to fill out 12 open word document forms. So they haven't even made it to the late nineties. Yeah. I think there is a lot of buzz right now. And I think it's perfectly fine to pause, take it slow, ignore some of the noise, but still stay curious and experiment with some of it. No, a hundred percent. I think one of the things that I still strongly believe is the, I don't think that I believe it. I do believe it is judging myself, but there's this idea that actually in all of these companies or all the companies I've worked with, like what they've suffered from is not that they've not had enough builders and that they have too many leaders. Yeah. It's that the leaders that they had needed to do a better job of leading and leadership and good leadership is still just as critically important, if not more important than before to try and help do some of the things that you've just talked about. So just this idea that all the leaders are going away, which had to collapse everything down to one level and everyone's going to build stuff. And I think that the thing around burnout is really people are starting to come up with studies now saying how people are, you know, they're reporting that burnout, right? They're saying that they can't keep up, they can't manage. And of course, then you're starting to see some of the limits of what the tools themselves can do. And then the teams are then sort of having to go and sweep up and clean up afterwards. So again, I'm a hundred percent with you. Stay curious and, you know, learn stuff and, you know, be excited, but don't lose all sense of judgment, right? That doesn't seem like a good thing. On the leadership level, I think it is more important than ever to have an optimistic future narrative around what greater good your organization, company or product can contribute to. And this is something that I see a lot of organizations falling short right now, a lot of leaders falling short right now, because let's face it, a lot of what we're currently seeing is stuff that was described in movies like Her or Black Mirror or something like that. But we need more optimistic tech stories. And I think it can be product leaders coming up with those ones. So I see a bit of agency there for every product leadership person out there, even every product manager out there. So what is your positive take on AI? And do I see the million possible ways how all of this can basically go wrong? Yes, I see all of that. But still, we're still inventing the future and product people are part of inventing the future. We've always been. So what is your optimistic story that you tell your team and your organization right now about the future? Well, anyone who knows me knows I'm a natural optimist. So it's absolutely that's definitely part of my job as well. Good. But one of the things that I think is interesting around leadership, and this is something that came up in the report that I co-authored with my co-conspirator Saeed. Oh, thank you. I thought it was a good report. But for those listening state of B2B product management, it was a report that Saeed Khan and I pulled out, put out back in March. And one of the big findings in there, people should go and download it, of course, but one of the big findings in there, absolutely. One of the big findings in there was almost a 50% average gap between how leaders, product leaders within organizations feel that they're doing across a bunch of dimensions, you know, certain strategy, coaching teams, etc. And how ICs think leaders are doing, ie the leaders think they're doing a pretty fine job, all of the things they should be doing. And the ICs think that the leaders are not doing so good a job in the areas that they believe that their leaders should be doing a good job. And it kind of makes me think there are a number of potential explanations for that. I'd be curious to get your take, obviously, given the number of leaders that you speak to, like one of the is that, well, maybe leaders are just doing a bad job. And the ICs are bang on the money, they can see what the leaders can't see, the leaders are kind of just self conceited enough to believe that either because of lack of experience, or just lack of empathy, that they just think they're doing a good job, and they're not. Or it could be that the leaders are doing a pretty good job, but the IC, they're kind of somehow not communicating that to their ICs, they're not, I guess, almost representing that they're doing a good job, like the good jobs being done behind closed doors, and the ICs aren't seeing it. Or it could be that the ICs just have completely unrealistic expectations. And they're looking at these leaders thinking that they're failing, but actually, the leaders are doing exactly as good a job as they should be doing. And ICs are just being bamboozled into thinking that they should be doing better than that. Now, I don't know if that's something that you kind of see yourself when you're out there with teams, if you see that disconnect, or if you've got any general thoughts about just that disconnect, or the principle of there being a disconnect between leaders thinking they're doing a good job, and ICs not really thinking that at all. Yeah. I have a story to share about that one. So I think two and a half years ago, something like that, the team from Y.Oslo reached out and said, like, if I would be willing to come to Oslo to deliver a talk, and they asked me what I would be fancy talking about, and we did a bit of a brainstorming session, and they wanted obviously something that would be of interest for the entire audience that was product managers, and a lot of design and user research folks, and a bit of engineering, that's usually what they got. And we landed on the topic of managing up. And this question of what was the last time when you provided your boss with meaningful feedback. And that's because both them and I observed that leaders would love to get more feedback from the people they align managing and from basically from everybody in the organization, but it's rarely happening. And that got me curious. And I did a survey online and asked people, when was the last time you gave feedback to your boss? And what was the feedback all about? And yada, yada, yada. Turns out, as much as leaders could not describe what their role is all about, of course, product managers, they have expectations, but it is not structured. It's more anecdotal. It's something that they learn from a colleague, or sometimes that's actually the best case if they once had a boss that did better leadership. But more often, they had no clear framework for how to provide their leadership people with feedback. So that was basically the core thing for the talk that I was saying, okay, but before I can tell people, manage up, I maybe need to come up with at least a few leadership responsibilities that they can reflect on and then provide their boss feedback about. And this is how the whole product leadership wheel thing started, because it was actually designed for the individual contributor to be able to provide their boss with better feedback. Because for example, this creating culture and what culture is all about, and if that is something their boss is doing or not, is an interesting reflection point, or the role clarity and ownership. So are roles clear? And are they documented? And are people hold accountable against these role definitions? And are coaching conversations happening around them? If an individual contributor has a structure like that, it's way easier for them to say like, yes, no, yes, no, we're doing this, we're seeing this, I see this in my leader, I don't see this in my leader. And then it is way easier for those two people, the boss and individual contributor to have this conversation about where are the gaps, right? Or I think you're not providing us with enough directional clarity where the boss says like, huh, I'm providing you with so much directional clarity, there is the 50 pages slide deck over here. Why is it not present in every of your sprint planning meetings? And then they could have this conversation about, yeah, because it's not a living document, you have presented it once a year ago in an all hands meeting. But this is not actually helpful as a decision making framework that we could use in our sprint. So maybe we need to work on that gap, right? So yeah, that assessment framework structure was missing. And there is, I see that gap existing everywhere, basically. And it all boils down to not clear enough role definitions from both sides, I'd say. So for like the ICs, as well as also for the leaders and kind of roles and responsibilities. Yeah. Because that's an interesting point, as well. And I guess it depends a lot on the industry and the context and the type of company. But just this and almost kind of touches on that earlier point that we raised around kind of just almost being promoted into it. And having to try and work out as you go along, because, you know, maybe you're working for an organization that's never had, you know, ultimately strong product leadership, because maybe it's not never been a strong product company. And therefore, they're trying to work out as they go. And they promote that kind of best person into that spot. And they're having to try and work out as best they can. But at the same time, they don't have any of the things you just talked about. Which means that again, they're just trying to work it out. I think it's helpful to have this benchmark. And you could use one or two books and benchmark yourself against them. But don't make it a religion. That's what I would say here. And a similar thing. So for example, I even wrote a blog post about why both the product leadership and the product management wheel are not benchmarking tools. So I don't like when organizations say like, Oh, cool, then now we can benchmark all our PMs against each other with your frameworks. That's not what I designed it for. That's not what it actually is good at. What it helps them to benchmark them against is the ideal basic average product management standard, I'd say. So it gives you a bit of a baseline what usually are the tasks of a product person or product leadership person. And then you still can decide in one or the other pocket that that is not relevant in your organization, in your industry, at the company size you're currently at. Because let's face it, in a startup, strategy might have a different rhythm than it has in a big corporate, for example. So I think in a big corporate, you're not even responsible for a strategy oftentimes, if you're a team lead for three product people, right? So, yeah, you're not benchmarking yourself ultimately against the wheel, but it helps you to see where you might be standing against the current body of knowledge when it comes to product management and product leadership. I guess there is a natural inclination, depending obviously on the mindset of the leaders within the company, there's a kind of natural inclination to try to benchmark people because we've all sat through like nine box meetings in the past as well, and just trying to trade people off against each other to see who gets the promotion or who gets the pay rise or whatnot. And as you say, there's this kind of, maybe you shouldn't do that with this type of tool. Maybe there are different tools that do that, or maybe there shouldn't be any tools that do that. Because I think one of the things that you said when we chatted before we came to do this interview was just this idea that every single individual person with whatever wheel they're using, they have certain capabilities or not. And to the point earlier around the marathon and running the race and such, you don't necessarily have to win, get in under two hours to be the best version of yourself. Maybe you just need to get in under three hours or four hours. You shouldn't be being judged against something which is from a completely different, they just have different goals or different skills, or you need a different type of person to do different types of role as well, I guess. So I don't know, it just feels that that natural inclination is always going to be there from a kind of a tick box HR exercise. How do we know how good A is versus B? But is that something that you actively are able to push back against within organizations, or is that always this kind of gravity trying to drag people back to that kind of measurement? Yeah, what I try to reflect back on them if they want to benchmark people is usually I just ask them to bring out the role descriptions. And then this whole mission crumbles immediately. Yeah, exactly. They don't have any or they have used the safe guide and copied the six sentences that are in there about a product leadership person, right? So that's their role description. And then I'm saying like, okay, but how would you benchmark people if you don't have a proper role description, what product leadership or product management is actually all about? And then they say like, yeah, but that's why we're using your wheel. But then I'm saying like, yeah, okay, but that needs customization. And I did various product projects like that for big corporate organizations where they took my material and then we held various sessions with HR business partners, with the line of business, with actual product leaders and product managers to come up with a customized versions of that for their organization. And then sometimes we can find parts of the wheel that might help in this salary conversations and promotion conversations, but a lot of it, and that's always my advice, delegated back to the team's level, I think that is actually the best thing that you could do. So take something like that assessment, and there are other people having similar assessments, right? So you don't need to use mine necessarily, but use such a tool and then rather have a conversation with the people you're working with, so if you are an IC, you use that with your engineer, with your designer and with your line manager to get 360 feedback, and the same can be done by product leadership people. They talk to their peers, the CTO, the COO, the CFO, whoever you have on your level, your boss, obviously, CEO, maybe, and some of your direct reports to get a 360 as well, and then usually people are smart enough to find a learning headline and think about how they could up their game and what they could learn next. Because product people in general are curious human beings, otherwise you usually don't end up in product, so you don't have to be so prescriptive on your assessments and your development plans, as some organizations think. I still know you have to have the promotion salary conversations, but you can often detach it from 80% of what is in my wheel. Well, let's talk about the wheel then, because we've been kind of skirting around it for a little bit, but it'd be kind of interesting to kind of go into some of the specifics. Yeah, go ahead. Well, no, but you say you have this, you have this, obviously you had the PM wheel originally, that was, as we kind of touched on, that was designed to try and kind of assess capabilities and standards for product managers, but now you've got the product leadership wheel, which is the same, but for leaders, so you kind of hinted at a bit about like where some of this came from, this, you know, you were trying to come up with ways for people to give good feedback, but what actually kind of precipitated the actual idea that we actually need to bring this together into a structured thing that you can sort of publish on your website and start to give talks about and using in your, in your kind of engagements and stuff like, what was it that kicked that off and what was that process like for you? Yeah, I knew that for a very long time. So the reason why I created the product management wheel is 13 or 14 years ago, even I started to coach product managers and I wanted something that gives the coaching a bit more structure. So that's why I, right in the beginning came up with a product management wheel. That's why it's so old to some extent and out there for quite a while. And it helped me in my coaching. Of course, I, at some point when I started to only and solely coach product leaders six-ish years ago, I had the same idea. I was like, okay, I need to create something that is my baseline definition of what product leadership people do to structure my coaching. And I did various attempts to create that, but it was so obvious that it would be so much more work and that this is not an easy, easy project, basically. So I knew this will take time. And I put it, always put it on the backlog, the further down on the backlog, you know, further down on the backlog it went. But then after delivering this talk at Y. Oslo about managing up, I already had a good solid, I think it was like eight responsibilities that I had identified by then, and it was just like these responsibilities, just headlines to say like, Hey, this is what product leadership should be touching upon. This is what you could feedback on if you talk to your boss. And then I was like, Oh, maybe I can just like use that and develop it further and see if it works. So that's what I did. And in good product management fashion, that required me to conduct a lot of interviews because I'm coaching product leaders all the time, so I'm very well know what they actually, yeah, worried about or working on, but I needed to have different conversations around the wheel because if you put something in writing with great power comes great responsibility, so I conducted quite a few peer interviews with product leaders to see what they think about it, conducted interviews with people that would be line managing product leaders, conducted interviews with individual contributors, tech folks to really close the gap and look at it from various different angles, and then at some point it manifested in this wheel and other than, so the product management wheel always has been a wheel. With the product leadership wheel, the wheel-like structure just comes from a time allocation exercise that I suggest the leaders to do, and that becomes a wheel. So they have this kind of circle, think of it as cake, and then they slice it and dice it by these 12 leadership responsibilities to say like, Hey, I'm spending that much time on team building and team development, and I spending that much time on peer and executive alignment, and I spend that much time on process oversight and process design, and that is where the wheel-like structure comes from it, other than that, it is organized around this 12 leadership responsibilities. And then every of the responsibilities comes as very detailed questions, like the product management wheel, are you doing this? How good are you at doing that? And I developed a performance scale that helped people assess that. So level one is we heard of that being a thing in product, but we haven't even been able to look at that. And level two is then, yeah, okay, we have a bit of a basic implementation of something, and then it goes all the way up to, Hey, we are actually experts in that, so other companies or other teams are reaching out to us to explain them how we actually go about that from a leadership perspective, so I had to develop that scale that works across the board, so yeah, it took me two years, I think, for it to be in the shape that it currently is, that's why the product management wheel is available for free on my website, and the product leadership wheel is currently only reserved for people that I'm coaching or that I'm working with. Yeah, so that's obviously an interesting difference, as you say, like the PM wheel, very much, you know, people can just take it, they can download it, they can get going with it, whereas the leadership one, I know, as you say, you're using it yourself, I believe that you're almost licensing it to other coaches as well, so like some people, not me, but some people might sit there and think, oh, well, there comes Petra, you know, grifting away and such, but it feels like the reason that you're doing that is purely as exactly as you say, because this has taken some time, right? This has taken a lot of effort, this isn't just a cash grab, this is to give you the right level of reward for the work that you put into it and the value, I guess, also that that can deliver. Yeah, and it is, actually, I think the first or second page of the wheel says product leadership is intense and so is this document, because this is another thing, it's a big document and it usually takes people six to eight hours to go through the PDF, take notes and think about where they would rate themselves. At some point I vibe coded a digital version of it and people hated it because they said like, then it feels like a checking the box exercise and it didn't get them in true reflection, so I see a lot of people running around with it for weeks in a paper version and then putting notes to it and it often has this coffee mark stains on it and stuff like that, so people really use it, but it seems that getting away from the desk with the paper helps them to get into reflection mode a bit more and it is pretty, it's a pretty extensive leadership reflection, so if people want to use it, it's a big time commitment as well, yeah. Yeah, so that's an interesting point then, this idea about actually getting started, so like imagine that, well, first of all, I guess, before we imagine anything, like who gets it started? Is it that someone, like a VP of product or something, an organization sits there and says, right, I want to go and do it or obviously if they're being coached by you, that could come up naturally, but or is it something where this should be, for example, almost implemented top down, like the CPO wants to do it for all of their leaders within the organization or if it's a smaller organization, the CEO wants to get their CPO or their VP of product or whatever, like what initiates this in your experience or what's the best way, like what makes it stick the most? That's a good question, so what I had in the past, product ops teams reaching out because them being responsible for role definition as well, I had HR business partners reaching out because them being responsible for role definition and role description, then transformation offices from big corporate organizations, I have a customer success story from Novo Nordisk on my blog around that. So how they did it and how they used it, and then it can be individual product leaders that just want to develop themselves and it works equally well for all the use cases, you asked for what sticks, so the two cases where I saw it being most successful and used to a very substantial extent was when the product ops team brought it in, but these were stellar product ops teams as well, so they were not like the heavy to process people product ops teams, they were product ops teams that were all about supporting the product organization. So they were this kind of screw it, whatever helps our product organization to do the job better, we do it. And that's at some point why they thought bringing in something like the product leadership will would be a good idea. So that sticked very well. And then I know from the product management wheel that a lot of people are using it and taking it with them in different organizations throughout their career, and I expect to see similar things with the product leadership wheel. So the people that have been coached by me, where the coaching sessions end at some point, but the product leadership wheel is there to hang out with you a bit more, I hope that this is the case for the product leadership wheel is also part of the email course that I'm doing and the idea of the email course just really quick is like 52 leadership emails to help you further your craft and obviously the product leadership wheel is the tool that you get to reflect on your leadership right now. And I hope that that has a similar impact that people get the wheel, assess themselves, find their learning headlines, and then the course helps them close some of these learning headlines in an easy way. So I'm curating the learning journey for them because otherwise, you know, the interwebs, it's overwhelming. So many things that one could watch and read and all these kinds of things. So I try to, I try to offer a lot of shortcuts in personal development for product leaders. Yeah, absolutely. And that was actually, I guess that was my next question is like what to do once you, you know, you've done the reflection, now we can argue whether or not everyone is going to put themselves in a position to do that because not everyone seems necessarily to like reflecting, almost like vampires, I guess. But at the same time, for those that do, they get through it. They, they, they invest the time, they invest the six or seven hours or however long they need to go through and be honest with themselves and call out their capability gaps or where they should be focusing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I know there's a big thing around time allocation as well, like where they're spending all of their time, but they should be trying to balance that out and stuff. But what is the next step? I mean, obviously you've talked about obviously coaching yourself, like as in you can coach them, I guess one of your approved partners at some point can coach them as well, or there's email courses and such as well, but kind of taking a step back from all of those specific, I guess, offerings, like what is the ideal kind of philosophical next step for someone who's gone through that reflection exercise, kind of carved out a document or a report or whatever that shows exactly where they're at, like what next for them? I decided that I'm not too prescriptive with that, with the product leaders. I'm more prescriptive with that for the product management folks, because I assume that product leaders are rather good in going through the assessment or reflection, you could call it reflection, and then identify a few weak spots and then they naturally know what is the one they want to tackle next, right? Because that's either it's solving a leadership problem that they're having anyways, for example, role definitions. If you have one-on-ones coming up, or you have the promotion conversations coming up, or if you have to put somebody on a PIP, then it's a perfect time to say like, Oh, I wrote a definition, so actually crap, so maybe I should go do something about it, and if you only have the wheel without the coaching, for example, then I rely on the people be able to ask any of our preferred AI models, Hey, how can I upskill myself on X, or how can I come to a role description that is helpful in our company's context, all these kinds of things, and the tricky part with the leadership wheel is that it comes a bit of two-folded, so it was impossible to create something that only assesses the individual product leadership person. To some extent, it also assesses the state of your product organization, the processes and the product model that you about to create, so you have either a learning task for yourself or an upskilling task for yourself, or you need to design your personal gym for a particular skill that you want to develop, right, or it is, Oh my God, I have to fix this directional clarity part, and that is not so much about me, it's just that I have to plan a tour across the company to share again what is in my strategy deck that's in my drawer or something like that, right? So it could be these kinds of outcomes that people find, and if it's more about them, then I just use this super light white, back on a napkin, we can put a link to that in the show note thing that I call future self, which is like, you describe your as is, so what is the situation that you're currently having, what signals are you getting, for example, from your individual contributors about things that you should do more of, and then how would you describe your future selves or your to be, what would be different in the future, so my ICs would not actually give me this feedback anymore, and what are action items that would get me closer to this ideal, right, so that's super simple, that only works for your personal learning headlines, and then for your organizations, it's basically put stuff in your calendar and put stuff on your to do lists, this is like, okay, I finally have to call a workshop where we talk about our role clarity and role ownership, and maybe role definitions, and then we have to work on those role definitions, so the wheel might add to your to do list, but in a more focused, more deliberate way, and not just in a firefighting mode, so it often gets the leader out of the firefighting, and this is what, by the way, the individual contributors want to see, and leaders, because they hate the micromanaging boss, they hate that they're only available five minutes a day, because otherwise they're spinning too many plates and turning out too many fires, they want leaders to be more on top of things, and something like the wheel could help you to seem to be more on top of things, because you know what, all the things should be there on your plate, yeah. But that then goes back to the idea about time distribution as well, right, and this idea that there's a bunch of different, let's say, tasks or areas that product leaders are finding themselves spending time. Now, again, if I think back to the state of B2B product management report, there was a big chunk of questions there around, like, what product leaders wanted to spend more time on, what they wanted to spend less time on, and the same for ICs as well, so there's this kind of idea, which is kind of shared between your work and our work around, there are things that product leaders are spending time on, maybe they should be spending time on some of them less, and maybe they should be spending time on some of them more. Now, a lot of that's going to be contextual, but you also speak to and work with a lot of product leaders, as do I, but from your perspective, are there any areas that are very common that people, like, product leaders should be spending either more or less time on, depending on, like, what's top of mind, like, things that they should be doing a lot more of that they're not, or things that they should be doing a lot less of that they are currently doing? Yeah, I summarized this on the shipyard work, so I use this metaphor that I borrowed from Jeff Redfern, that leadership is all about building the shipyard. So if your product teams are working on sailing boats and container shipbuilding, for example, it could be very different stuff, it's all swimming on the ocean, but somebody has to design the shipyard around it. So material has to flow, the right people have to be at the right kind of dock at the right time. People need to understand, is it the container ships that we're currently building, or is it a sailing boat that we're optimizing for, right? And so again, that is, that's the high level structure of the wheel, it's people and the human focus, it is like the actual products that we build. So that's the product, a vision, the strategic focus, the directional clarity. And then there is the shipyard itself. So our ways of working, and how we actually working together and how we collaborate and how we provide ourselves with feedback and recognition and things like that. And that shipyard work in general is too often neglected. So too often I see product leaders basically jumping in for product managers, compensating some of the things that they think they people not doing well enough, it oftentimes is basically just not giving them the room to breathe. Um, so I don't want to blame that on the ICs. Sometimes it is important for the product leader to know my work is the shipyard work and my ICs and the teams are working on the boats and I'm not working on these boats, I'm working on the shipyard. So that is in general, a helpful metaphor to think about leadership in general. Um, yeah. And then I, as you were saying, I think it's easy to spend too much time, um, on the product work itself and for example, too few hours on the bigger strategic narrative or, um, nodding to Martin Erickson's decision stack here, um, how things are connected is something that oftentimes is not well understood in organization, so we do have a product vision, but is it well connected and explaining why our product strategy is our product strategy and is our product strategy really informing the goals that we actually trying to pursue for the next quarter? And if I look at a backlog of a random team, can they explain me how these backlog items are tied back to the quarterly goals and therefore the strategy? So this back and forth, how things are connected is something that leaders oftentimes underestimate in how much power does this can have. Um, yeah. And that is, that is a big one that I see not happening in product leadership enough. Too busy, uh, vibe coding new UIs for their applications these days, right? That's the problem. I know, I know. Or configuring OpenClaw. Or configuring OpenClaw, which then goes and shares all of their API keys and deletes all of their data and all the other stuff. Which keeps them busier than ever. Well, yeah. I mean, I don't want to go on a, on a rant on this one, but it does kind of feel that that, you know, kind of touching on the earlier AI topic as well, that there is a kind of like leadership is hard and fluffy and kind of feels woolly and intangible sometimes, whereas installing a whatever agent on your, on your Mac mini and just starting to do things and you can see the things and I can understand why people get excited and I'm excited about these things, but to your deeper point, like that doesn't take away the need and no LLM is going to replace the need to actually do all of those things that you just said, but they can certainly, again, as you've said, they can be used as a way to spitball potential solutions to them in your context, but they're not going to do the job for you. And someone needs to do that job. And if no one's doing that job, then all of the things happen that you've kind of touched on. So, yeah, fingers crossed the wheel will turn in the right direction for that one. We'll raise the ambition to product leaders. I would love to see that. Exactly. Or we'll just build a bunch of, a fleet of AI agents that are going to do it all for us. But one of the things that I do have to ask, given that you've written two strong product books already, whether we should be expecting a strong product leadership book in due course, or whether that's a river that you're not going to cross yet. Yeah, let's see. I'm currently still writing my email course. I don't know who thought it's a good idea to create that much email. So 52 substantial emails on product leadership, that's quite undergoing. That's more than a book, right? It's more than a book. Yeah. So if we would put it into a book, I think it would be twice the size of strong product people right now. And I'm not even finished. But maybe at some point I might be turning parts of it or some of it into a book because strong product people is all about the leadership aspect of product management. So I might be touching maybe on ways of working or the core product direction or clarity part in the future. Not yet decided. And I'm still working on the course, I think until July, I'd say, because I didn't want to pre-write too much of it because the times, you know, so many things are changing, so for it to be relevant, it has to be rather up to date. But once done, and I love content creation. I love writing. You know that it's my, I could do this all day long and it would be paid better. So books, not so much a thing income wise, but yeah, let's see if that is something that I'm doing down the line. I would love to. Well, of course. And, you know, can't really, well, but maybe we could go and talk about the book again, even though it's on the same topic, because there'll be some new things that have come up since. So two years down the line, who knows? Yeah. I would love that. New B2B reports by Dan and Jason to talk about, I'm sure. Fingers crossed, fingers crossed. Although, like you say, there's a lot of work that goes into kind of obviously getting the data, that's one thing, but then actually then sort of analyzing and LLM is very good for that as well. But just this general concept of like, how do we extract as much meaning out of this data as possible versus just like, just putting a bunch of summary tables up and that's it. So, yeah, no, it's kind of a labor of love, I guess, in some senses, but true, you know, someone's got to give B2B product management some love. I'm happy you're doing it. Me too, I guess. But obviously in the meantime, if people want to come and find you and maybe find out about some of your old books or find out about Product at Heart or any other stuff that you're working on, where can they come and find you after this and catch up and connect? So the best way is come to Hamburg in June for Product at Heart. The second best option is petrovilla.com. You'll find all the information there about the course and the wheel and I have a plethora of stuff available for free on the blog and in my newsletter. So I think that's the best place to look for some great resources. Of course, I'll make sure to link that into the show notes as well as links to all the other places and you can send me the link to that future self thing. We can get that in there as well. I will. All of the links, all of the time, make sure that they're AI search engine compatible as well. Love it. But Petra, obviously always a pleasure to chat. It's always a pleasure to chat. Yeah, likewise, time was flying. Exactly, 100%. It's almost like we just started, but I'll let you go and keep working on your course, I guess, but as for now, thanks for taking the time. Thanks, Jason, for having me.