Petra Wille: evaluation

Transcript context

…Just to go a little bit on that tangent because that's an interesting point you just raised. When you work with folks that are not product people and that end up leading product people and trying to better product, what's the thing they lack most, the skill or the understanding of product? If you had to think of one or two things that these people are like, "Okay, they totally missed this part about product management, about building product." One thing that has made me sense out the most is I see product people on the IC level have to go through some of the struggles on their own, even if our product community has some best practices to it. Because as the line manager has no clue about the product community out there and the craftless product management, they often struggle to point them in the right direction to say, "Hey, I think that's a problem somebody else already had. So maybe you could watch a talk or read this blog post or there's a book about this particular thing and then go try it." So that's the first thing. So product people IC level often have done to learn a lot of things on their own, so to say, because nobody's curating their progression for them to some extent. So that is one thing. And then I use this metaphor of the eight-legged creature because people tend to talk about T-shaped employee profiles, but T-shaped is so not enough for a product person, right? We want them to understand underlying problems of the business and the users finding solution for those, getting things out of the door with the team, doing a lot of product discovery, looking at the data, how people are using it, iterating on the products. So there's so many things that we want them to be good at and to understand that and the complexity that the role actually brings with it. That's sometimes hard for people that have never worked as a product person to really understand. So, yeah, if I would need to pick two things, then that's maybe the two biggest differences. The first one is such a great one. It comes up a lot on these chats of just how much of getting better product is just doing it. You can read all the books, you can take all the courses, you can read my newsletter, you can read your book, which we'll talk about, but there's only so far you'll get without actually just doing it and just failing, doing great things that succeed. And it takes years, right? It's not like something you'll do six months, "All right, I'm feeling really good about being a product manager."…

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