Petra Wille

Updated 2026-04-09

An independent product leadership coach based in Hamburg, coaching since 2013. Author of STRONG Product People (2021) and STRONG Product Communities (2023). She focuses on Heads of Product and VPs rather than junior PMs. Her defining method is a flipped-classroom style of coaching: she does not hand out answers, she asks the kind of questions that force clearer thinking.

What Distinguishes Her

Wille is one of the few well-known coaches in the PM space who says explicitly: if you want someone to write your strategy or define your OKRs for you, she is not the right person. That honesty is disarming, but it also filters for the right audience. Her clients come with themes and dilemmas, not task lists.

The core method is the flipped-classroom principle: the coachee drives the agenda. Wille listens, probes, and reflects. That only works if the coachee brings a baseline of self-reflection, which she communicates very clearly.

STRONG Product People

Her first book is aimed at product leaders who want to develop their teams. It gets concrete quickly: how do you tell whether a PM is good enough? How do you create conditions in which PMs can grow? The book is grounded in years of work with dozens of clients, not abstract theory.

AI and the PM Role

In her Product Builders conversations with Teresa Torres, Wille discusses whether product management as a role is “dying.” Her perspective is pragmatic: the role is changing, but the foundation remains. People who understand how customers think, how teams collaborate, and how prioritization works do not simply get optimized away by AI. Her positive counter-figure is the Product Builder.

Connections

  • Teresa Torres — co-host in Product Builders; both work as coaches with similar views on the future of PM
  • Product Discovery — Wille trains teams in discovery practices and comes from an agile, empowered-teams background
  • Product Builder — concentrates her thesis that roles broaden without making expertise irrelevant
  • Lenny Rachitsky — same broad field, but a different medium: newsletter versus coaching
  • AI Evals — she co-hosts the episode that made this concept accessible to many PM practitioners

Sources