Strong Product People

A Complete Guide to Developing Great Product Managers

By: Petra Wille

Narrated by: Geri Murray

Are you a product leader looking for advice on how to be certain that every product manager on your team lives up to their full potential? Do you want to make sure your product people are competent, empowered, and inspired, and would you like to know how you can best help them on this journey? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then this book is for you!

By the end of this book, you will understand:

• Why you need to focus on the personal development of every product manager - and of the team as a whole - to unlock their full potential.
• Why coaching is an important part of your job, and how to do it in the most effective way.
• How you can define what a good product manager looks like.
• How you can accurately assess product managers and provide them with valuable, actionable, and helpful feedback on their current performance that will help them perform even better.
• Which methods/frameworks you can use to make sure product managers learn what they need to know to be more effective - enhancing their people skills.

And you will be able to:

• Reflect on your own coaching personality and define your own areas for development.
• Efficiently prepare and use one-on-ones as your main coaching tool.

©2020 Petra Wille (P)2021 Petra Wille

An essential book for product people at every leve

Much more than simply a catalogue of directions, tools or techniques, Strong Product People maps out the entire product landscape in a way that provides orientation and encouragement. Executives will gain insight into how their organizations really work, and beginners will see where the product journey can lead. Highly recommended!

Every Product people leader should read this

This is an excellent guide into the why and how of developing great product managers. This has greatly accelerated my growth and impact as a new manager of PMs. Will be re-reading regularly to ensure I adopt these principles and practices!

Interesting content, annoying distractions

The content was great but I must have listened to what felt like a third of the book to descriptions about where to find illustrations and references. I get it, they are important and they were helpful, but it's super distracting that every short chapter ends with minutes of descriptions of URLs. Also since there are so many chapters they really should be named according to the topic. Great book, but the most awful audiobook experience I've had, and I must have listened close to a hundred of them. Petra, please re-record this book! It's too good to be ruined by poor audiobook UX!

Be wary

"Strong Poduct People"is little more than little more than a compendium of lessons of lessons learned from other books. Be wary of any book we book that leads the the building authority authority section with "I did meet <name drop> but in their book on <title drop>..."
I made it a little over 3 hours into this read/listen, but but could not suffer past the endless reading of reference URL's you are else. The voicings were fine, but ust a smidge of directorial vision could have eliminated the suffrage.
As for product expertise, the author could have put their product hat on to deliver content we need, yet struggle to find elsewhere. Unfortunately, they did nothing of the sort.
Save your time and money... look elsewhere for stellar content.