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

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