How to be the best coach to product people | Petra Wille (Strong Product People)

**Petra Wille** (0:00)
Getting promoted is way harder if you're not good in telling stories and rallying the team behind the shared goal and all these kinds of things. And you usually achieve this through good storytelling techniques. And in some teams, I seen the product person not being really, really good at it, but then the whole team helped creating these stories and stuff like this. So you definitely could compensate to some extent, but I would consider it a bit of a career staller if you don't get to a decent level of storytelling and to a decent level of public speaking.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:35)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast. I'm Lenny and my aim here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. Today, my guest is Petra Wille. Petra is an independent product leadership coach and author of Strong Product People. And for the past 10 years, she's been helping product teams boost their skill sets and up their game. Alongside her freelance work, Petra organizes events in Hamburg, Germany, where she's based and does a ton of one-on-one coaching and speaking and writing. In our conversation, we focus on three things.
One, how to become the best coach for PMs, which is really important if you're a new PM manager and even if you're not a new manager. Two, how to become a better storyteller and why that's important for leaders at every stage of their career. And three, why finding a PM community is so valuable and how to go about finding one. Petra is awesome and it was such a fun chat. And so with that, I bring you Petra Wille.
Hey Ashley, head of marketing at Flatfile. How many B2B SaaS companies would you estimate need to import CSV files from their customers?

**Ashley** (1:40)
At least 40%.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:41)
And how many of them screw that up and what happens when they do?

**Ashley** (1:45)
Well, based on our data, about a third of people will consider switching to another company after just one bad experience during onboarding. So if your CSV importer doesn't work right, which is super common considering customer files are chopped full of unexpected data and formatting, they'll leave.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:04)
I am 0% surprised to hear that. I've consistently seen that improving onboarding is one of the highest leverage opportunities for both sign-up conversion and increasing long-term retention.
Getting people to your aha moment more quickly and reliably is so incredibly important.

**Ashley** (2:19)
Totally. It's incredible to see how our customers like Square, Spotify and Zura are able to grow their businesses on top of Flatfile.
This is because flawless data onboarding acts like a catalyst to get them and their customers where they need to go faster.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:35)
If you'd like to learn more or get started, check out Flatfile at flatfile.com/lenny.
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Petra, thank you for being here. Welcome to our little podcast.

**Petra Wille** (3:39)
Hi Lenny, such an honor to be here on a Friday night.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:42)
Friday night your time, Friday morning my time. Thank you for making the time.

**Petra Wille** (3:47)
Of course.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:48)
You're a product leadership coach. Can you just talk about what you do as a product leadership coach? And then also just a bit about the numbers of PMs you work with, number of companies you work with, the kind of impact you had, just to kind of sell a little bit of context in your background.

**Petra Wille** (4:01)
How I usually describe is that I work with people leading product people. So that's the product leadership level that I'm looking at. So that might be a CPO in a small startup or a product director, a product team. These are the folks that I'm usually working with for the last four years, I'd say.