Episodes

You Can’t Test Quality In In this episode, some thoughts about quality: Two different ways of thinking about quality and its flipside, waste Fit for purpose vs lack of defects Mura, Muda, and Mira – the 3Ms of Japanese industrial engineering – waste (mura), inconsistency (muda), and overburden (mira) Links Shigeo Shingo A very thin Read More

Build Your Own Product That’s the title of Andrew Bowker’s email newsletter, and his advice to anyone trying to get into product management. Andrew is a fast rising LinkedIn star, at least among the product management segment, focused on helping would-be product managers get their foot in the door of our amazing discipline. Links Andrew Read More

Product manager interview tricks – what are they? In this episode, I share my insights on product manager interview tricks. Bottom line? There aren’t really tricks. But if you approach the interview with a product management mindset, and think about what the customer really needs when they say “I want faster horses,” you might gain Read More

Never Assume You can’t trust anyone. Even yourself. Product managers have to keep an open mind, be empathetic, and work in a world of uncertainty. That uncertainty extends especially to ourselves and our own assumptions. So my guest John Fontenot has a warning – Never Assume! John’s new book Never Assume: 10 Fatal Assumptions Great Read More

Getting your first product management job without PM experience is hard. In episode 118 of The Secrets of Product Management, some ideas on how to navigate this challenge:

The Secret of Great Social Proof One of the main jobs of our rational brain is to justify the decisions of our emotional brain. As product managers, the decision that interests us the most is people deciding to buy our product. That means we need to understand how to make our product, our positioning, and Read More

Imposter Syndrome makes it tough to take on that next project, especially in an uncertain, complex domain like product management or product marketing. Here are some techniques you can use to get moving.

Why do we care about getting better at product management? There’s a mini-industry of people posting on LinkedIn, and writing Medium articles, and doing podcasts about improving your product management skills. But why? Who cares? In this episode, I drill down into this question. It’s an interesting question, not least because no one else seems Read More

The Questions You Ask Can Change Your Life This episode is a direct follow on to last week’s episode on asking great market discovery questions. Last week Craig Davis left a comment on a LinkedIn post that I really liked, and it ties directly into last week’s episode on questions. He mentioned a course from Read More

How to ask great questions for market discovery In this episode, some guidance on asking questions for market discovery, sales, prompting your own creativity, and just having conversations with other human beings. A lot of times you find guidance on market discovery where they “be sure to ask open-ended questions,” without explaining what that means Read More

Risks, challenges, and obstacles In this episode I propose a new mental model for product managers – we need to always be thinking about risks, challenges, and roadblocks. They’re components of all the different things we do – market discovery, selling, persuasion, storytelling. And if they are important to us, the product manager, they are Read More

In this episode, Seth Erickson, Webby award-winning web designer-turned-storytelling maven. With his design and marketing company Storify Agency, he combines design and storytelling to create beautiful websites that also sell extremely well.

Strategic Product Management Do you want to be a more strategic product manager? Step 1: Start asking Why? I explain what I mean in this episode. And then I go into a lot of depth about what is a strategy, how are tactics and strategies related, and other useful concepts. Summary Strategies and tactics are Read More

Adil Berdai, founder of Calido My guest on this episode is Adil Berdai, creator of the new product management tool Calido. I’m very excited about Calido – first – it’s a new product management tool, and we don’t have enough of them. And, it looks pretty great! As you know if you’ve listened to the Read More

The importance of psychological safety My guest on the podcast is Mehmet Baha. He’s an expert in psychological safety, and I wanted to bring him on the podcast to share some secrets of high performing teams. As Baha mentioned in the episode, prganizational behavioral scientist Amy Edmondson of Harvard first introduced the construct of “team Read More

Learning from failure I worked on a product back in the mid-2000s called Accept360. It was a product for product managers. There’s no question that using Accept360 would make product management orgs more effective in a lot of different ways. But Accept360 failed as a product, and so in 2011 I started to realize I Read More

How “Adversarial Product Management” helps us overcome biases Our cognitive – and other – biases can lead to bad decisions and poor product designs. You see the results in products that are hard to use, or that simply fail to make a dent in the market. But there are ways to overcome and manage these Read More

Joe Morone, master salesperson and master sales trainer I love to talk to salespeople about how product managers and sales can collaborate and synergize – in episode 100 I had John Simmons on, another great sales leader. In this episode I welcome Joe Morone, author of The Smart Sales Method, which I’ve already mentioned a Read More

From Individual Contributor to Product Leader My guest Katerina (or Katia) Suchkova talks to us about the challenges – and the solutions – that ambitious senior product managers have when making the transition to product leadership and moving up the career ladder. A longtime product management professional, Katia was a senior product manager at ServiceNow Read More

Complexity and consistency and other challenges In this episode of the Secrets of Product Management, a quick look back at 2021, that leads me directly into some thoughts about complexity – the domain of product management – and some mental models that I find useful. In short: A quick retrospective Leading into a discussion of Read More

Customer success stories are marketing and sales gold In this episode I show how to slice and dice a customer success story up into different components that can be used for creating great, engaging marketing content, for qualifying new prospects during discovery calls, and for handling sales objections. In the previous episode, episode 102, I Read More

Transforming a customer success story I happened across this customer success story on a random website I visited. When I read it, I thought there were some opportunities for improvement. So, with a little bit of anonymizing and changing of details, this episode shares the original story, my observations about it, and a newer version Read More

Even though it’s a “sales” book, product managers will find The Smart Sales Method by Joe Morone incredibly valuable. In this episode I share why.

“We’re All In Sales” My guest on the pod today is John Simmons. John is not a product manager. But he represents one of our most important “customers” – I’m using air quotes – he’s VP of North America Sales for Methodics, at Perforce. The sales team is our #1 most important ally in a Read More