#3: Strategy coaching - with Petra Wille, Product Leadership Coach and author of Strong Product People

In this episode, we spoke with Petra Wille, an internationally renowned Product Leadership Coach and author of Strong Product People. We explored how product people can become more strategic and how leaders can coach their teams to develop their strategic thinking.

We talked about:

• How important is strategic thinking? Having coached companies in different situations, Petra explores the difference between empowered versus feature teams, and how that impacts the need for strategic thinking and the ability to grow it.
• The relation of Martin Eriksson’s decision stack and strategic thinking.
• How much strategy is needed? Many times multiple teams are working on the same product and strategy.
• Strategic coaching can be “demystification”: just start somewhere, draw it on a whiteboard.
• Learning more about how others do strategy by leveraging learning buddies: you show me yours, I show you mine.
• A litmus test for strategy: “walk me through it”. The storytelling needed to explain your strategy, communicating it with different amounts of time to see how many details and understanding we can add to it.
• You can use any topic to practice strategy: hobbies, daily life, or other products/industries.
• How getting better at strategy also means being able to handle bigger periods of time, being able to manage more uncertainty over time.
• What to do when there is no higher-level company strategy (or too many strategies!). Arne Kittler’s Collaborative Alignment framework.

Among many other things!

You can know more about Petra’s material and what she is doing at petra-wille.com

Remember that you can find more info and material on 100productstrategies.com.

If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs

You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho bassino, at nachobassino.com (training, coaching, and more)