A conversation with Petra Wille, Product Leadership Coach of Strong Product People
“Every product leader needs to have their own definition of what makes a great product manager because there is not this one size fits all definition. We’re operating in so many different sizes and types of companies and organizations, so I strongly encourage the product teams to come up with their own definition.”-Petra Wille
In this episode of Control the Room, I had the pleasure of speaking with Petra Wille about her extensive experience developing product people and how her experience as a software developer influenced her facilitation practice. We discuss a meeting she designed called Team Radar, the purpose of the meeting, what it helped accomplish, and why it was so powerful. Listen in for actionable facilitation tips, virtual challenges, and a few of her favorite facilitation questions.
Show Highlights
[1:40] How Petra Got Started Coaching Product People
[6:10] Debugging Communication
[14:40] Playful Retrospectives
[19:20] Coaching vs. Facilitation
[26:30] Leaning Into Moments of Bravery
Links | Resources
Petra on LinkedIn
Petra on Instagram
Petra on Twitter
About the Guest
Petra Wille is an independent product leadership coach and author of Strong Product People: A Complete Guide to Developing Great Product Managers who has been helping product teams boost their skill sets and up their game since 2013. Her book has already generated a lot of buzz in the product community with Martin Eriksson (Founder of ProductTank and Co-Founder of Mind the Product) calling it “the book we all needed on how to coach and empower our teams.” Alongside her freelance work, Petra co-organizes and curates Mind the Product Engage Hamburg, Germany.
About Voltage Control
Voltage Control is a change agency that helps enterprises sustain innovation and teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.
Subscribe to Podcast
Engage Control The Room
Voltage Control on the Web
Contact Voltage Control
Full Transcript
Douglas: Welcome to the Controlled Room Podcast, series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out all in the service of having a truly magical meeting.
Thanks for listening. If you’d like to join us live for a session sometime you can join our weekly Control the Room facilitation lab. It’s a free event to meet fellow facilitators and explore new techniques so you can apply the things you learn in the podcast in real time with other facilitators. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab. If you’d like to learn more about my new book, Magical Meetings, you can download the magical meetings quick start guide, a free PDF reference with some of the most important pieces of advice from the book. Download a copy today at voltagecontrol.com/magical-meetings-quick-guide. Today, I’m with Petra Villa, a product leadership coach who has been helping product teams boost their skillsets and up their game since 2013. She’s also the author of strong product people. Welcome to the show, Petra.
Petra: Hi Douglas. Thanks for having me.
Douglas: It’s so great to have you. I’m really looking forward to this conversation and let’s kick things off with hearing a little bit about how you got your start. How did you get into this world of writing about strong product people?
Petra: Actually it started years back as a software developer. That’s how I started in one of Germany’s large publishing houses down in Southern Germany, but I quickly realized that actually colleagues of mine quickly realized that I had a bit of a talent for the conceptual part of the job and the talent for talking to customers and stakeholders and contractors. And that was really over time something. It needed some time for me to understand that this is a talent and that it’s something that I could actually make a living out of. And first of all, I transferred into a project management role because that’s what most of the conceptual part of the job was called back then.
And then slowly over the years, I figured out that there is something else called product management, way more exciting than project management and that’s how I ended up in Northern Germany, current based in Hamburg and the first job, so to say, that I really took as a product manager was for Germany’s large business social network, which is the name is Zing, was working with them for five and a half years then going to a small startup as first of all, head of product. And then yeah, working there as an executive, helped them grow the whole engineering and product department so to say slowly, slowly making, making my way to the top. There is still, again, a lot of communication, how people can better work together, a lot of facilitation. Meeting facilitation was one of my big chunks of work back then. A lot of user interviewing still. So another facilitation role, facilitating user interviews, then more and more of that. And then once I spent two years with them, the hockey stick was not taking off as we would have hoped the hockey stick to evolve.
Yeah. And then I just decided to try if I can run my own business. First of all, did some interims head of product roles and gigs. And from there people really asked me, “Hey, now our head of product is back from parental for example, but we would like to keep you for some of the coaching because people development is really something that worked well while you were on board. And could you maybe just stay for some coaching sessions every once in a while.” And so again, other people pointed out that this is actually what they see a talent and that there is a need. And so I thought yeah, why not actually doing this? And that’s what I’m doing since several years now.
Douglas: That’s a common trend that I see with so many of my colleagues where it’s like we’ve meandered our way through the world and our peers and our clients have pointed out like, “Hey, this is awesome, what you’re doing and can you kind of stick around and help piece?”
Petra: Yeah, exactly. Maybe that applies for you as well, right?
Douglas: Well, it’s interesting. The software development, that’s how I got my start. So I think it’s not all that common for your facilitator to be a software developer, but there’s two of us, at least. It’s like I can definitely resonate with this kind of as a software developer being drawn to the conceptual and then also having the EQ strengths or the skills to relate to customers and to peers and to the kind of the organizational development or the team development kind of stuff. And then that’s what I think leads us down the road of facilitation, which is like how do we get people working together and what’s sustainable from a pace and things like that?
Petra: Yeah. So street credibility for sure helped when doing this. So being a developer on my own really helped me talking to developers, QA folks, and all these kind of people, because in the beginning, my kind of facilitation skills was not super theoretical. It was more of a intuitive thing. So I was not over rationalizing before actually doing my first meeting facilitations. I just did it. Yeah. But it really helped that I was able to connect to the people. I knew what their struggles are because at least for some miles I walked in their shoes and that helped me to get the facilitation role right in the beginning and really adding something to the greater good so to say right from the start.
Douglas: Yeah. I think it’s interesting as well as a software developer. We kind of train our brains to be procedural thinkers. And if you apply this procedural thinking to how people get work done or how they talk and collaborate or even you’re using that logic when you’re listening to people talk, you can kind of find flaws in what’s happening in the room. I don’t know if your experience is any different, but early in my career I would often find myself going you’re so they in the same thing but you’re disagreeing.
Petra: Yeah. The logical errors in communication. That happens to me a lot. Yeah. It’s a bit of reverse engineering sometimes and a lot of debugging while people and groups actually are talking about things.
Douglas: That’s really fascinating. I didn’t even think about the debugging parallel, but yeah. Learning how to debug software is definitely has come in handy when working with and building companies, because often you had to debug the process you put in place or the communication. It’s like, what’s going on here? Let’s unpack this, this elimination.
Petra: Yeah. And unpack is the word that we use a lot in coaching and in facilitation. Let’s unpacked that but actually it’s a bit of a debug mode we are entering then, right? Yeah.
Douglas: Yeah. I always think about it as like when people look at me, if they haven’t heard that term before and they’re kind of deer in headlights like what are you talking about, I always like to tell them imagine you got some luggage and you’re carrying around a bunch of stuff and your luggage and it’s all just jammed in there and we just need to open it up and pull it all apart and inspect it. It’s been so long since we packed this bag. We don’t even know, remember what’s in it. So let’s pull it all apart and take a look at it and see what was damaged in shipping.
Petra: That’s a nice metaphor. I’m usually using the Matroshka metaphor to really pull the Matroshkas apart and see what’s in. Is there another one in the one that we currently looking at? So that is by unpacking metaphor for, but maybe I like the luggage more because you never know what has been damaged. I like that. We’ll use that.
Douglas: Well, there’s also this nest. How did it get shifted around in transit? And is it the way we left it? Not always the case in complex issues.
Petra: No, because the shampoo totally ran out and now everything is covered in shampoo.
Douglas: That’s totally right. So I want to come to the book here around strong product people. And what would be your summary of what really makes a strong product person stand out as how would you identify them? If you wanted to hire someone that you would qualify as a strong product person, what are those traits or qualities?
Petra: Yeah. So in the book, so first of all, the book is written for people managing product people. So it’s actually product leadership book. And in the book I’m describing this. Every product leader needs to have their own definition of what makes a great product manager for them, because there is not this one size fits all. So many companies, different size organization sizes, different industries we all operating in. So I strongly encourage the product dates to come up with their own version, but I try to make a really handy book that is really a workbook and helpful in so many situations.
I give some examples and I talk about personality traits such as curiosity, adaptability, intellectual horsepower, just to name three. And then I talk a lot about the skills and the competencies that they actually need to acquire along the way. And there is eight buckets, more than 100 questions when it comes to skills. So it’s actually because it’s a broad role, right? And again, I encourage the people to customize that and see what works in their context and last but not least it’s a values definition. So some companies have company values. Sometimes you want to add product organization or product team values to the picture. But I think that makes a great definition of a good product person. So personality traits, skills, and know how, and then values that they hopefully share with the rest of the team or the company.
Douglas: Yeah I love that. It kind of aligns nicely with one of my philosophies around growing companies which is rather than thinking of a job title and putting job description together, or even worse, going online and just downloading some job description that says this is what a product person is or this is what an engineer is or this is what a marketing director is, instead thinking about what gap is created in the organization right now because someone left or because we’ve grown in the new way and thinking about how we fill that gap. So your points around customizing it, thinking about what our needs are, what are our values and how do we align with those is really solid.
Petra: Yeah. And you have to celebrate some of the talents that the people are actually bringing to the table. So I’m teaching so many product folks out there and they’re bit like snowflakes. They’re not ones that are exactly the same. So that’s why I think if you have a too strict definition of what a great product person looks like, then you’re really missing out on some great candidates and talent.
Douglas: Yeah. I usually use this kind of really crude, if I really want to break it down in the buckets, I like to think about how strong my team is on kind of product design or just design in general and then marketing, and then also technical aspects. So it’s like technical would be the features. The marketing would be what’s the go to market on this? How does it resonate? And then the design is like the aesthetic or it’s the Apple. So it’s kind of like Apple, Google, and then maybe a CPG company. And if you think about those elements of how that drives an impact on product, it’s kind of an interesting rubrics to think about how you balance out aura because different people are going to have different flavors of those things. No one really has all three of those at the same time. I don’t think.
Petra: Sometimes startup founders try to cover all three, but yeah. But then they usually grow out the organization pretty quickly because then it’s more about how to scale all of this product organization and that’s usually when they get bored and need to leave because it’s a bit like, no, we like the chaos, it’s creative chaos. And really, we need it for innovation and the rest of the company’s like what the heck, it’s super stressful with all the chaos. But sometimes I see it in startup founders or the first PM joining a startup or something like that. They have a bit of all three, which is okay for the early startup phase. But yeah, if you look to bigger companies then, as you were saying, usually the people don’t cover all the three aspects.
Douglas: Yeah. They have to get specialized so that we can get more efficient in our processes or whatever. And plus it’s just hard to find people that … I mean, these are rare breeds. They’re they’re founders, they’re like some of the early folks that come in and just kind of help get things off the ground and they’re hard to find. And I think that’s one place that I’ve seen groups struggle is they have this vision like, oh, this person’s going to come in and they’re going to have all the answers. And it’s like what kind of sliver needs to be solved? Let’s optimize for that.
Petra: Yeah. That is so. If they’re really waiting for this Messiah-like person that solves it all, yeah that’s just not happening. I always encourage teams or product people to do a role description exercise with the teams. So not that they use whatever HR is providing. More that you actually talk about your talents and what decisions you want to be responsible for and what decisions may not be in your comfort zone. So hopefully somebody else could actually step in and say yeah, but I’m totally fine with decisions and on the tech stack or something like that. I think it’s super important that teams really have a discussion about that when they start working together or as a team reboot, if they’re working together for quite some time. That could be another nice thing to do.
Douglas: Yeah. I think that’s really refreshing. And so many teams miss out on these moments to have these kind of meta discussions, right? Because so often we’re just so focused on the sprint. Especially if you look at scrum and all the rituals that get documented on how to keep the train running on time, they’re so focused on the tasks and the work that’s going to get done and not about me as a human and how I show up and how I integrate and what my unique role is. Not some role as an it’s defined by some methodology that we might be using. And so I encourage people to step out and it sounds like you do too, step out of that fray of just creation and just have some more meta discussions around who we are and how we’re showing up and the why.
Petra: Yeah. And actually the weird thing is it is kind of baked in the scrum rituals and we call it the retrospective. It’s just like so many teams are not playful with their retrospective. So they always do the same retrospective, keep drop at, and they do this every other week, but there’s so many great retrospective formats out there and why not having a meta discussion or a timeline retrospective over the last six months or the manual of me retrospective. So if you’re working with me, that’s the things I want you to know, which would help us to communicate better, work better together. So these formats are out there. Just teams should be a bit more playful with their introspectives maybe.
Douglas: That’s really cool. So what are some of your go-to? I mean, you mentioned a couple of examples there kind of quickly, but what is your go-to resource or inspiration to get more playful in retrospectives?
Petra: There is actually … I don’t know how to perfectly pronounce this in English. It’s called [foreign language 00:15:35] which is I can send you the link. And, and that is actually a pretty fun thing to play with some retro ideas. They have this format of, let me recall, set the stage, then collect information, think about what to do and settle in on actions or something like this. So it’s always kind of these four steps. And then they have different activities that they are actually suggesting, and they are pre-configured retros, but you could be really playful and just flick through various versions, always with pictures. So you get an idea how people even drew the whiteboard or a flip chart or something like this. And that always helps me to think like oh, what is a nice retro reformat for this? Because you have this feeling for a group of people and what they might need.
So you could think about one or two formats, then actually talk them through and say what feels right for you and then that’s how I pick the ultimate retro session. So I usually prepare one or two different versions and we always have the fallback of keep ad drop. Yeah. For example, I love the team radar retro, where you have a little spider web graphic and it has eight dimensions and I can set the tone and say okay, the eight dimensions are how happy is the team with their commitment, their velocity, their ability to adapt to changes. So whatever topic comes up, it can even be like being on time for meetings. So it can be super simple things you put on one of the dimensions. And then it’s not about me talking about those things. It’s more like inviting the group to talk about those and if they’re happy with this particular topic that I picked. Had great successes with that retro so yeah.
Douglas: And the team radar is something we’ve talked about before in the Magical Meeting stories. So folks can check that out. We’ve already written about it. That’s cool. So there’s something else that you touched on there that I want to talk about a little bit, which is this notion of kind of bringing the group into the decision around the agenda, what we’re going to talk about. And that is actually part of your team radar process. They get to pick those pillars or those axis. And you also alluded to this in the making two different agendas for the retrospective and saying which one works better for us. And I think you can take that concept even further too. How do we co-create it? Even just collecting stuff from folks around, “Hey, what do you think we should do next week?” And that way people come in feeling like they’re invested versus trying to get buy-in.
Petra: Yeah. And that’s always my goal with whatever I do. It’s kind of it’s their journey. It’s their work. It’s not mine. I’m just here to help them. But with preparing two different retro formats, I’m really helping them because usually the team is focused on getting things done and out of the door and not so much of, oh, what retro could we actually be doing? And these are the 300 retro formats we could be doing, what to pick. And that is more my competence as a facilitator to really have this notion of, okay, what might be something that could work for this team next week. But the ultimate decision is on them. And that really helps to foster the discussion a bit or to make it more lively than just me opposing a format on them. That’s weird and so not me.
Douglas: Nice. Yeah. It’s also just so exciting and invigorating to have the autonomy, to have a say, and I want to try this out and I don’t know. People resonate with that. And I think it also aligns with something we were talking about in the pre-show chat around coaching versus facilitation and this notion of how we show up in those different roles. And so I want to talk about that for a little bit and just hear how you delineate those two roles.
Petra: So to me, being a coach is the easier role to be in because then my job is even clearer. I’m usually in a one on one situation with my coachee. I just have to read their minds so to say. While I’m with a group facilitating a workshop, there is this group dynamic and there is the individual people in the room that I have to take care of. So that’s a bit more meta, more draining at least on my end, but some mechanisms are still the same. So it’s really, I try to be in the same lingo and what you were describing, so inviting people to unpack things or inviting them to this retro and to pick one format. So that is the same, no matter if I’m in a coaching role or in a facilitating role, I need to point out things in both settings so there often is the pink elephant in the room.
Nobody’s able to talk about it yet. And then I see it as my job to actually point it out, to be the first person actually put it in a sentence and in words, and then everybody is like, oh yeah, finally somebody said it. That’s actually what we all feeling since weeks. And the same happens in one on one coaching situations a lot, for example, if people are super drained, nearly burned out and I’m the first person to say like, “Hey, look, we have this coaching relationship for quite some time and today you are in actually not in a good shape. You’re constantly not finishing your sentences.” For example, that is something that people tend to do when they’re totally over the top.
And it really already helps them ease some of their pain or getting rid of some of their pressure once I actually was pointing out what I see. And then they’re like, yeah, you’re the first one actually asking if I’m okay and actually I’m not. And that is easier in a one-on-one coaching setup than it would be in a group setup.
Douglas: Yeah. It’s interesting too as I’m listening. It’s making me think about coaching can often be more ongoing or sometimes facilitation’s very specific thing that happens like an event. So you don’t work with the group as long. There’s certainly group coaching scenarios where you’re kind of working with a group over and over and over again. But as I’m hearing the distinctions it definitely feels like there’s coaching. That seems like there tends to be a little bit more back and forth where the coach is kind of pushing and maybe encouraging and things whereas facilitator might be just more in that extraction mode, like creating the conditions where the group does this thing and things emerge.
Petra: Yeah. And it usually is not the case with coaching. So for sure, the coach has a goal and we always try to shine a light on that goal. And I try to help them to unpack the things that are necessary to unpack, to maybe reach that goal, all these kind of things. So still there is a bit of focus, but if they need this session where they’re just complain for one hour straight because they have nobody else to complain to, then it’s perfectly fine for me as well. So then I’m kind of happy to listen in.
And yeah, I just saw a Donly show post tweeting today about it’s so lonely at the top, and that’s why it’s so important to have a coach around where you sometimes just can bounce an idea off or say like, “Hey, I’m busy. Can we just look at that? Am I really busy? Or is it just me? Am I not stress resistant or not resilient enough? Or is it really that I have a lot on my plate?” So all these kind of conversations are way easier if you have a counterpart. And if that is a coach, then it’s even nicer. Yeah. And in facilitation, you have this goal for the session. Usually it’s a workshop. You won’t get the people get to work together usually. Yeah. It’s a bit of a different setting and goal.
Douglas: I think in both cases, this notion that you mentioned around speaking the truth, the things that no one else wants to speak and I think it probably just surfaces a little different than if you’re a month, three months into a one on one coaching relationship, you might speak that truth a little different than if you’re in front of a group of 10 people. And something that surfaced for me when we were chatting and you were giving some examples of some stuff that was coming up for you recently, it was the language and the prompts that you were using. And I think that’s so core to being a good coach and a great facilitator is the questions and prompts and how we frame stuff for people. And specifically I jotted down, you were saying things like should we or can I help you with or I have a notion. So it’s like kind of these really soft ways of leaning, just kind of like nudging at this thing to see how many people are impacted by that.
Petra: The question is how much day one to open up in this situation. And I want to leave this decision really with the coachee, because I don’t want to be intrusive or intimidate them in any way. So it’s really like I ask them if they want my help on something and if they’re happy to unpack something. So for example, if I have this notion that they’re super stressed out today, pointing this out, I have this notion. So that’s what I usually will be saying. And then it’s more of an invitation. And if they do want to talk about this in this particular session, I’m happy to do so. I was mentioning this in our pre-conversation as well. So it still requires a bit bravery on my end and I always need to take all of my courage to really point these things out, because I think it’s just not something that human beings enjoy doing.
So if somebody else is suffering and it looks like more a personal thing or something they’re dealing with, then it is hard to actually ask like, “Hey, I see your suffering. Do you want to talk about that?” And if they say yes, then you have to unpack all these things. And you as a coach have no clue what comes after that question, because it sometimes is super easy stuff, but it can be a can of worms so to say, and then you are opening Pandora’s box then it takes you another two hours to actually put some things back in the box and send them off for another week or two. That is not an easy thing. And that’s why language is important. And it’s way harder if you do it not in your first language, so to say, because most of the coachings I’m doing, I’m obviously doing it in English and it’s way easier to do it in German for example, in my case.
Douglas: Yeah. That’s not something I have to the face of my practice, but I can, I can relate to that being difficult for sure. And certainly this moment of bravery really resonated with me because we often talk about the importance of leaning into conflict because facilitators, we just ignore the conflict. Then we really miss the opportunity to show up in maybe the most important way that we can show up and provide the real benefits that their clients’ seeking because if we just kind of ignore it, then it’s the status quo that they always are experiencing versus potentially having a breakthrough. But to your point, we can’t force it. The consent has to be there. People have to be willing to go there.
Petra: But it’s interesting. So you would say it’s exactly the same for you. So it takes this moment of, okay, now somebody has to say it. I will be the one. I now point out this little elephant in the room.
Douglas: It’s interesting. It depends on the moment. I don’t always point it out. Sometimes I might say I’m sensing some tension in the room because maybe that is enough of an invitation for someone to speak up. And then if no one says anything, then it’s like, is everyone okay? Is it okay moving on? And that might be just enough to say someone say, no, maybe we should to talk about this. And it just depends like the more I know the team, the more I know, should I push on this? But certainly the softer you just get making those openings, especially if you’re not sure if they’re ready, then just lean into it. It doesn’t mean bulldoze. Just, nudge lean in.
Petra: Nudging slightly. But this is way harder in all the virtual group sessions that we are currently having. So to me, this was easier or it is easier if I have a room full of people, because then I read all the body language and you could even smell all the adrenaline in there, or whatever ever cortisol, maybe as well. And that is way harder if we do virtual to a session. So I cannot see what they’re doing with at least born 50% of their body, so to say, and with most of them muted, sometimes even some off camera, yeah it’s way harder to read a group, at least for me.
Douglas: Yeah. It’s interesting because we’ve got some senses that are dulled, because we certainly can’t feel. I can feel the AC vent hitting me right now, but no one else feels that. I’m in a room that’s different from everyone else. I also can’t, like you say, I’m smelling different things, I’m even hearing some slightly different things because even though we’re connected via this technology, I’ve got a completely different computer that might have a completely different grounding issue that’s buzzing in my ear. We all have these different things that influence how we show up and how we see, but not only the dulling of the senses, but we also have this dispersion. There’s something happening in the chats. There’s this over here. There’s people in the mural over here. So yeah, you’re right. If the one on one is almost comparable. Much easier to deal with it but group is much harder.
Petra: Yeah. Group is much harder. The bigger it gets, the harder it is.
Douglas: Yeah. The thing is, is we just bring more people because specifically handle the dispersion of the signals. So if we’ve got different people observing different signals, so, okay, you’re watching the chats and handling the breakout rooms, I’m just dealing with content and watching the videos. That can help.
Petra: Yeah. More than one facilitator.
Douglas: Don’t always have that luxury.
Petra: No, not always, but I do this as well. So in some of my sessions, I have another person. Yeah. Observing the room while I’m doing most of the talking.
Douglas: Yeah. No doubt. I feel like there’s so much potential that the software still hasn’t quite gotten to. There’s a plugin or a separate UI for Zoom called macro I found really fascinating. Basically it would make everyone in the room’s avatar or video size proportional to the amount of time they spent talking in the session.
Petra: Oh, that is interesting.
Douglas: Which is a nice visual cue.
Petra: Yeah but the question is what does this to the introverts?
Douglas: Right. Right. Does it make them feel worse about the fact that…
Petra: Yeah, maybe, maybe it is.
Douglas: Right, right. I just feel like there’s a lot of untapped potential as far as bringing those signals together in a way that the facilitator and everyone else can just be aware of some of the dynamics that are happening.
Petra: Yeah. And it is a bit of maturity issue as well on the other hand, our teams or whatever software my customers are using because some of them are super familiar with all these tools, are so used to the sessions and actually facilitating something with a group like that, super easy. Just did a summer elective the last few months for executive MBA students and all of their studies are actually happening online. So they were so used to it and they knew each other as group. Way easier than facilitating for super old far German corporate clients that are actually not so used to all these worlds. Yeah. That makes a big difference as well.
Douglas: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think this is kind of coming up on the end here and I just want to give us an opportunity to close out with a final thought. So curious if you have anything that’s kind of still with you that you think that our listeners might want to keep in mind.
Petra: Yeah. Think about your invitations. That is maybe something. So are you inviting people to the conversation often enough? Are you asking the right question? And so it really helped me to compile a list of coaching questions that I really like asking. So find your right question. For example, I really loved this question of what will you be doing differently once this session is over? And so yeah, I have this top 20 questions, so to say, and that is something that helped me a lot to get better in my coaching and in my facilitation as well. So favorite questions is maybe something to put in a journal.
Douglas: I love that. We always refer to the questions as the Swiss army knife for facilitation. So I love that you have your top 20 questions and maybe that’s such a great piece of advice. Everyone should go do that. So thanks a bunch, Petra. It’s been a real fantastic conversation. I really enjoyed it.
Petra: It was fun. Yeah.
Douglas: Bummed that we have to end it.
Petra: Yeah. It’s a pity. Now I can enjoy the thunderstorms behind me.
Douglas: Yeah. For those that have been listening in, it’s been fun watching the video here as we’ve been chatting with the thunder in the background. It’s kind of spooky.
Petra: I will now go on the balcony and enjoy some more of it maybe.
Douglas: Excellent. Alrighty. Well again, it was such a pleasure.
Petra: Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Douglas: Yeah. Thank you so much. Thanks for joining me for another episode of control the room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. And if you want more head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.
