The Secrets of Product Management Podcast

The secret techniques to deliver value fast What should you do when you first get started on a new product management job, or with a new product that you don’t know that much about? how can you start delivering value right away? “The first 90 days” There are tons of guides out there on “your first Read More

Authentic and brilliant storytelling - about of your product, your customers, and yourself - can be one of the most important tool in your toolbox for success. In this episode we delve into more of the stories you need to be able to tell, how to structure them. And I expose some negative patterns in storytelling you should avoid, as well.

Do you have a product that some customers love, but you haven't achieved a repeatable sales model? Then chances are you need to fix your go-to-market strategy - how you market and sell you product.

n this episode, a few of the uncomfortable - and often unmentioned - truths about product roadmaps. Predicting the future; different stakeholders have different needs; and what is the purpose of the roadmap anyway?

In this episode I share my approach to coming up with great questions to ask as the interviewee in a job interview. They'll help you find out things you want to know, and they'll help position you as a serious, smart, prepared product person.

This episode is a follow-on of sorts to episode 302, “Not Technical? No Problem.” This question of “I’m not a programmer – can I be a product manager?” is surprisingly common. Most experienced product managers would say “yes” – you do not have to have been a programmer to be a great product manager. But, Read More

In this episode, an exceptional high school jazz band and its leader give us some valuable lessons on how to build a high-performing product team.

Your stories of what you actually did are the hiring manager's best way to assess what you can really do and what you are really like. They are critical for reducing the hiring manager's perception of risk of hiring you.

In this episode, three short "acts" - somewhat related brief stories that, hopefully, illuminate aspects of product management for you.

Product innovation can be defined as "Solving an important market problem in a new and better way, then taking it to market effectively" - but how do you find those important market problems that need better solutions? You have to talk to the market - and open-ended questions are your stock in trade for learning what you need to know.

Use your knowledge of the problems and challenges your prospects are facing, and the stories of your successful customers, to reduce the prospect's perception of risk about your product.

Liza Collin is the Market Readiness Director for Visma. In this episode she shares why she created this position, and how she helps Visma's product teams launch new products with much higher success rates.

Product managers create pitch decks and blog posts and user stories and sales trainings and ... the list goes on. But what if you hit a creative roadblock? Here are 3 techniques for blasting through these obstacles.

How to give your product marketing managers the product knowledge they need for a successful go-to-market.

This episode is a portion of my recent workshop on “product management for founders," that I gave at the Incepto startup incubator in Menlo Park, CA.

What are the most important soft skills for product managers? I think most of us intuitively understand that soft skills are important for product managers. But, given that, let's drill down a bit.

Greg Prickril has been coaching and training PMs for many years. ​He started noticing that product managers, on the whole, were not putting as much attention into their careers - their professional development - as they could be. And that simply applying product management skills and techniques could make a big difference for PMs' career outcomes.

There’s so much we could do as product managers – but we don’t have time to do it all. So you have to know where to apply your leverage, how to prioritize your time investment. You’ve heard of the 80/20 rule – what is the 20% you must do to get 80% of the value? Read More

In this episode I share an important mental model I learned from Brian Kurtz, from his book Overdeliver, about his career in direct marketing, and his advice for anyone doing marketing of any kind.

Retrospectives are a great, cheap tool your team can use to rapidly improve their effectiveness. Here's how to do them, how to sell your organization on them, and, as an example, a retrospective of this podcast's 2019.

Product management suffers from tool problems - we don't have a system of record. In this episode I describe the problem, its impact on us, and how to cobble a basic system of record together using tools and materials you probably have lying around the house.

10 tips you can start using today to become a better product manager, get your sales people to love you, win more deals, and watch your profits soar.

In this episode, a common product management metaphor that’s actually terrible, plus two GOOD metaphors you can use to help you create better products. We use lots of metaphors for understanding, justifying, and explaining the things we do as product managers. Whether it’s our analytics as “the cockpit of a plane,” or comparing design constraints Read More

Even highly cognitively capable people - including product managers - can forget to do simple things that they know they should do. In this episode I discuss the power of checklists in general, a product management-related checklist you can start using right away, and some ideas for how you can embed checklists in your products to help your customers solve their problems.

Product managers are unicorns - simply based on the numbers we are rare. But in another sense too - there's no formula for "great product manager."