The Secrets of Product Management Podcast by Nils Davis: tips for product managers, covering storytelling, go to market,innovation, resumes, job interviews, PRDs, working with developers, persuasion and influence

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.