Product: All The Responsibility

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

In this episode, my guest Jose Platero tells the story of how he created the Aspiring Product People community on Clubhouse.

JJ Rorie started out in sales and marketing My guest on the podcast this week is JJ Rorie. Like many of us, she transitioned into product management from a non-technical role, in her case sales and marketing. Since that initial transition, JJ moved up in responsibility to product management leadership. Then, for the last six Read More

In this Halloween-themed episode Kurt Stangl helps us understand how we can learn about lean software development from the zombie apocalypse-based video game "7 Days To Die."

Innovation is important, but how do you measure it? Mostly in this episode I actually talk about what innovation is, and some history of innovation in tech and other domains, but it all started with a LinkedIn post about “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Resources for this episode A web site Read More

Laplace’s Rule, aka The Rule of Succession I don’t know why it’s called the “rule of succession.” But it’s called Laplace’s Rule because it was developed by Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1774. It’s also called the Laplace-Bayes Estimator, because it’s related to, or a result derived from, Bayes’ Theorem of 1764. Say there is a event Read More

Product management and rules of thumb A rule of thumb is defined as “a broadly accurate guide or principle, based on experience or practice rather than theory.” A lot of what we “know” in product management is actually a “rule of thumb.” In this episode, I talk about three product management rules of thumb I Read More

This episode is a follow-on to last week’s. Andy Bowden asked the following on LinkedIn a few weeks ago: Do you show your value through quantifiable results? If so, how? If not, why not? Many of us struggle coming up with numbers that reflect what our employers seek from us. In last week’s episode I Read More

“Data-driven” Product Management Andy Bowden raised a great question for product managers on LInkedIn last week: Do you show your value through quantifiable results? If so, how? If not, why not? Many of us struggle coming up with numbers that reflect what our employers seek from us. That question was the springboard to this episode Read More