# Strategic Frameworks for Collective Learning and Leadership Development

**Podcast:** All Things Product with Teresa and Petra
**Published:** 2026-06-09

## Transcript

Hi, folks.
This is All Things Product with Petra Wille.
And Teresa Kors.
And we're so happy you're here.
Petra, I want to ask you about something that I think can be really powerful, but I don't see it happen.
It's hit or miss.
So I think some companies are really good at creating opportunities for their teams to learn together.
And some companies just let everybody pick their own professional development path.
And I want to get your thoughts on both these strategies and what do you think works best?
Oh, I'm such a big fan of learning together.
And, you know, I even wrote a book on the power of communities of practice.
And that's why, basically, because I think learning together is so much more powerful than learning alone.
And, for example, in my email course, the email course comes with quarterly live Q&A sessions with me.
And actually, in the last three of these calls, I saw people from the same company purchasing the course and then joining the course and the Q&A.
And it was so funny to see was different variations of learning together.
So in one case, they came together because they want to hold each other accountable to really do something with the theoretical know-how they get from the email, for example.
Every email comes with this weekly challenge.
And so they want to go to the gym together, basically.
That's why they purchased the course together and show up to the sessions together.
And in one of the other sessions, there were three people from the same company and they had wildly different opinions about product leadership.
And I think that is why they joined together to be more aligned on what they think product leadership is all about.
And they told us in this Q&A session that they have, so they get their weekly email, everybody reads it, everybody does a bit of homework and then they have like, a weekly 90-minute session where they debrief on what they think about the email, what they tried, what worked well.
The three people that are taking it together do their own 90-minute session.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, that's great.
And that's actually great.
And I often am brought into organizations, and I think you too, when they're hosting book clubs.
So people...
purchase our books, they read our books, and then sometimes they hire me for Q&A at the end of the book club or something like that.
Again, it has a lot to do with holding them accountable that they have this deadline when Petra is basically joining, that they want to read it by then.
And I think it's so much bang for your buck because think about it, it's just like purchasing a few books.
And even without us, the authors being in the picture, It is already such a powerful thing to read something together and then exchange over what you actually learn and where your viewpoints may have changed and where there's something that you want to try and then circle back on the learnings.
I really love that.
Do you see something similar?
Yeah, I think I'm of two minds of this.
So we do a lot of like a company brings us in to do our product discovery fundamentals course for the whole team.
Right?
So they'll train 40, 50, 60, 200 people.
And I think, like, what's nice about that is it lets everybody get a shared language.
It becomes this big event of, like, we're investing in this way of working.
I think what's hard about it is not every team is ready for it.
Like, people are at different places in their own learning journey.
True.
Some are like on projects where like they're not really being asked to do continuous discovery and they take the course and they're just like, this doesn't really connect to my work.
And so we've started to promote more of this idea of train pilot teams first.
Like don't roll it out to everybody.
Really think about who's ready for this.
And I think there's something to be said for this, like just in time learning.
Like how do you get training just as you need it?
and not like, you're going to use this hypothetically sometime down the road.
Like, it's just not how humans learn.
We learn when like we have an urgent need.
But I think there's this middle ground that I think you're getting at.
Like you talk about three leaders taking your course or like a voluntary book club where people that are interested like read a book together.
Or a trio decides to take a class together.
We see this a lot in our direct to consumer course in our public.
public cohorts.
People will just sign up as a trio.
And then I think what's nice about these like smaller pockets of groups reading a book together or doing a course together is exactly what you said.
You get this like accountability.
You can hold internal sessions to talk about how to apply it to your own work.
You really, I think it's the momentum you get from doing it with peers.
And like knowing that like you have something on the calendar, you're going to show up, you have to discuss it.
I think the key, I think, I think both strategies, like everything from letting people just pick whatever they want to learn, I think works great for people that, for your like really self-directed high learning orientation folks.
I think the like big event train everybody works really well when you're trying to like kick off a big change in the organization and like make it an event.
And then I think there's this middle ground of like, can we just get pockets of interest to engage in something together?
I think all three can work.
I think the key is like, how do you be intentional about what's the purpose of the training or what's the purpose of the book club?
And then make sure that you're picking the path that matches your goal.
Yeah.
And it might be easier, for the product leaders here because first of all they're fewer in an organization usually and then a lot of the stuff that they need to practice has to do with inner work has to do with reflection and has to do with storytelling or a new kind of clarity or something like that so it's often that they can practice the things that I talk about in the course themselves without the need of bringing a team along or something like that so it's the occasional talk to your directory polls ask for feedback all these kind of things but it's nothing that they need a particular project to work on or a particular product in a particular state to actually work on.
It's a bit of a product maturity thing, of course.
So if somebody from a massive waterfall company would purchase my course, then they would think, what is she actually talking about sometimes?
But other than that, I think it's easier for product leaders to join that and join that together as a team.
than it is in your particular case.
I also think product leaders like might benefit more from doing it together because a lot of a product leader, like if we're talking about people who manage, who have like direct reports, they're less often on a cross-functional team.
And so this idea of like doing something with a peer gives you a little more of this like a buddy to learn with.
Whereas I think Even like in our courses, even when someone signs up individually, we hear all the time, like they want help with how do I bring this back to my team?
They're still thinking about discovery as a team sport.
Obviously, we think it's better if your whole team takes the course.
But they have that like cross-functional collaboration built in.
Whereas I think leaders are like hungry for that.
And so there's this like extra benefit of like.
Let's also just do something together because we don't get to do things together very often.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
So that is, it's leadership is so such a lonely job.
So it's even a bit of a team building initiative, maybe.
Yeah.
Do you find like.
Do you ever get, I know you do a lot of like bigger coaching engagements with companies.
Are you like working with a company and they're like, we're going to do, we want you to coach 10 different leaders?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's not a rare case.
And oftentimes, by the way, one of the things that we do together is curate learning path for the rest of the product organization that would, for example, then.
evolve thinking about what you actually were referencing.
So how do we upskill the entire organization on a particular skill?
And that is often part of the package.
So it often comes with role definition and role clarity first, because shockingly often, this is not a given in big organizations.
Sometimes they have solid PMPO role definitions, but for the leaders, it's usually rather shaky and non-existent, just four sentences.
Or they're very generic leadership descriptions and not a lot of product in there.
And from there, it oftentimes is the case that I help them build and curate this learning experiences and this learning path within the organization.
So that's part of the engagement oftentimes.
Yeah, I think the reason why I was curious about that is I can imagine it's really easy for a company to frame it as like, I want you to work with all of our leaders.
And then it turns into this like one-on-one coaching.
One thing that like Hope and I do when we work with leaders is we have two different options.
We have a like one-on-one coaching, like your leader needs individual coaching.
But we also do these group coaching sessions for leaders.
And that's where like, if I think about coaching versus teaching, like individual coaching is like, be a sounding board, hold space for the person, ask powerful questions, like help them see what they need.
Right.
But there's this sort of group component that I think is really powerful.
That's maybe less in this traditional coaching model, but still is it.
Maybe it's a little closer to teaching, but from a coaching framework.
So what we tend to do is like, let's say an organization is new to outcomes.
All their leaders have to learn how to set outcomes.
Maybe they take a course, but even if they take a course, they still need help with like, how do I do it in my own work?
That's where we might do like a group coaching session.
And each leader is like bringing their work and we're doing samples and we're like iterating on the fly.
And we're doing that with like 10 leaders in the room.
So they, and what I find that like by having them go through that experience together, they.
start to see like, it's one thing when you learn it in a course and you see examples that are like, maybe a little bit close to what you do at work, but they're not in the context of what you do at work.
And then you see it applied.
Yeah.
Then you see it applied to all your peers.
You have to try to do it yourself.
You're getting feedback.
You're getting feedback in front of your peers.
So you try a little harder.
We find that that model works really well.
Yeah.
And even a little better than training when we're talking about the leadership level.
Yeah, exactly.
So that's, that's my favorite combination.
The only embedded, it's just like terminology.
I tend to call them team coaching because I want the people in a group really be a team and not people, because otherwise in corporates, they send me like 10 product leads from various parts of the business.
And then it becomes a bit of a tricky situation again as well.
So at some point I decided to call a team leadership coaching and I, briefing these organizations that it is really beneficial if these people that are in this more group like coaching, that they're really working together on in the same business area, line of business, however they call it, however they slice the organization, but people that are working closely together.
That's usually where.
Yeah, a lot of the beauty from what you were describing comes from that they can bring their own cases, that they can be really vulnerable because politics and big organization, let's face it, it's a thing.
And the closer the group is that I get into the coaching, the more secure they feel with opening up and with sharing what they're currently working on.
Because in leadership coaching, it oftentimes is this.
hey, this is what the company tells us we should be doing strategically and this is the big goals that we should be driving.
But actually, and then they're coming up with all the things that they currently have on their mind and we walk through that and stuff like this.
So yeah, it's beneficial if it's more of a team than it is of a random group in this big corporate settings.
Yeah, I think we also find that like...
Just in the same, so we do team coaching, which we call, which is our cross-functional product team, the product trio coaching, which is why we distinguish team coaching from group leadership coaching.
But one of the things we find with the group leadership coaching is that in the same way that we teach teams, not when we're coaching product trios, we're not just teaching them the discovery habits.
We're also teaching them.
cross-functional collaboration and how to do it as a team sport.
We find in the group leadership sessions, it's the same thing.
Like, sure, we teach them how to put the discovery habits into practice, but we're also teaching them that their peers are a resource.
So somebody might ask a question and their peer actually has a solution.
And so we're also like...
trying to create this bridge of like, look at all these people in your organization that also can be a resource for you.
Yeah, I always try to get the CTOs in the team coaching sessions as well and the design leaders.
But companies are very reluctant to that if they hire the product leadership coach.
But whenever it works, it always was such a beautiful experience for everybody, I think.
So, yeah, I would love to see that more often.
Yeah.
And then I think, okay, so we've talked about like tiers of learning.
Like we framed this as learning together.
And us just seeing like pockets of people opting into this.
I want to go back to how I frame this as like three buckets.
We have like the head of product who's decided I want to upskill my entire team and they choose to train everybody.
We have the company that's very hands-off, the opposite end of that spectrum.
It's very hands-off.
You have some professional development budget.
Use it however you want.
I think, like, there is this sweet spot of, like, you can get the benefit of a shared experience of, like, let's learn together, but also get the benefit, which is the benefit of the train everybody at once.
But there's also a benefit of, like, just give people a professional development budget, which is they get to choose what's timely for them.
And do the training or the coaching or whatever the experience is when it's most relevant to them.
And I think what we're highlighting in this episode is there's this middle ground that can be a sweet spot that maybe not everybody realizes is an option, which is still let people choose, but encourage them to do it in groups.
So you get the shared accountability.
You get the momentum.
You get peers to learn from and to learn with.
And so like, it doesn't have to be all of training.
Everyone trains or everybody picks their own thing.
There's this nice middle ground of maybe just find a couple of buddies in the organization and do a course together or start a book club.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What a great summary, Teresa.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Thanks, Petra.
Great topic.