The Secrets of Product Management Podcast by Nils Davis

By Nils Davis

Business

What's The Secrets of Product Management Podcast by Nils Davis about?

The Secrets of Product Management podcast by Nils Davis is for all product manager, product marketers, innovators who want to create more value in the world through successful products. (Formerly known as The All The Responsibility, None Of The Authority podcast.)

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136: How To Increase Your L...

03.28.2023

Increasing your luck surface area “Chance favors the prepared mind.” From Louis Pasteur, the famous 19th century biologist and biochemist. Having a “prepared mind” is one way to increase your luck surface area. It gives you “more opportunities to be ...

The Secrets of Product Management Podcast by Nils Davis episodes:

03.28.2023 136: How To Increase Your Luck Surface Area Increasing your luck surface area “Chance favors the prepared mind.” From Louis Pasteur, the famous 19th century biologist and biochemist. Having a “prepared mind” is one way to increase your luck surface area. It gives you “more opportunities to be ...
03.21.2023 135: Dan Balcauski On Pricing For Product Managers – Part 2 Dan Balcauski, the product pricing guru (part 2) Dan’s interview is excellent – and long. It’s going to expand your mind on how to think about pricing – so much so, in fact, that I have to air the interview ...
03.14.2023 134: Dan Balcauski on Pricing For Product Managers Dan Balcauski, the product pricing guru Dan’s interview is excellent – and long. It’s going to expand your mind on how to think about pricing – so much so, in fact, that I have to air the interview in two ...
02.28.2023 108: Rerun – Learning From Failure Rerun of episode 108 This episode is a rerun of episode 108, Learning From Failure, and you can find the complete show notes at https://secretsofpm.com/108. Rerun of episode 108 This episode is a rerun of episode 108, Learning From Failure, ...
02.07.2023 133: Irene Yu is Helping Product Managers Become More Technical Irene Yu is Helping Product Managers Become More Technical (Without Learning To Code) Irene is a former developer turned founder of SkipLevel, a consulting and training company focused on improving the interface between product managers and developers. Specifically, by helping ...
01.31.2023 132: The Secrets of Leading Impactful Product Teams Leading impactful product teams If you’re a product leader, then you probably have a few goals for yourself and your team: * Having a big impact on the business. * Increasing sales, revenue, and profits. * Perhaps you aspire to ...
01.10.2023 131: How To Make More Money 5 Ways Product Managers Can Make More Money Software product managers are responsible for $5-$10 million in new revenue over the next 12 months. How do you get that? There are five ways your revenues can increase: * Your market ...
01.03.2023 130: 2022 Retrospective + 2023 Planning A look back, a look forward for the podcast In this episode I look back at 2022 and its highlights on the podcast, and what you can expect for 2023. Episodes I mentioned * 121: Andrew Bowker on “Build Your ...
12.20.2022 129: How To Put Knowledge In Your Product So Your Customers Love It Putting knowledge in your product creates happier customers and great differentiation Even if it’s basic knowledge that everyone knows, putting it in your product will make your product more valuable. And of course, the more knowledge you can embed, the ...
12.13.2022 128: What Does ChatGPT Know About Product Management? ChatGPT is surprisingly knowledgeable about product management I’ve been playing around with ChatGPT, a new conversational AI that has been the talk of Twitter and other social media sites. Basically, you ask it questions, and it responds with very well-written ...
12.06.2022 127 – A Repeatable Sales Process – And Why You Don’t Have One The goal is a repeatable sales process, but… One of the goals of a relatively early stage company is to establish some sales and marketing traction. This is often called “a repeatable sales model.” Which means that a trained sales ...
11.29.2022 126: The Value Inequality – Part 2 – Rerun The Value Inequality is about Risk vs Price vs Value This is the second of two episodes (here’s part one) centered around what I call the Value Inequality. It’s a way of thinking about your customer’s perception of risk versus ...
11.22.2022 125: The Value Inequality – Part 1 (Rerun) The Value Inequality is the reason your juicer is in your closet This episode is about a new way of thinking about pricing, value, and the customer’s perception of risk. I call it the Value Inequality. It’s powerful, and it ...
11.15.2022 124: Unconventional Perspectives on Product Roadmaps Product Roadmaps – can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em Facts about roadmaps * They are predicting the future * As Neils Bohr said, “Prediction is hard, especially about the future.” * A roadmap is interpreted as a commitment ...
11.01.2022 123: Value Proposition Considered Problematic? Is the Value Proposition problematic? Shreyas Doshi wrote in a post on LinkedIn a few months ago: In product management, it is easy to BS yourself (and others) when framing a proposal in terms of “Value Proposition”. Any proposal with ...
10.25.2022 122: You Can’t Test Quality In 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 ...
10.11.2022 121: Andrew Bowker on “Build Your Own Product” 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 ...
10.04.2022 120: Product Manager Interview Tricks 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 ...
09.27.2022 119: John Fontenot and The Urgency of “Never Assume” 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 ...
09.14.2022 118: The Chicken and Egg Problem – Getting A Product Management Job With No PM Experience Getting A Product Management Job With No PM Experience This is a hard problem – getting that first product management job without product management experience is one of the harder challenges of the product management career. In this episode, some ...
09.06.2022 117: The Secret of Great Social Proof 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 ...
08.23.2022 Episode 65: Tricks and Techniques For Outsmarting Imposter Syndrome (Rerun) You are great, you really are! Do you suffer from “imposter syndrome” – feeling like at any moment someone’s going to realize you don’t really know what you’re doing, and all your touted accomplishments were luck or chance? If so, ...
08.18.2022 116: The Impact of Getting Better at Product Management 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 ...
08.09.2022 115: The Questions You Ask Can Change Your Life 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, ...
08.02.2022 114: Great Questions for Market Discovery 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 ...
06.07.2022 113: Risks, Challenges, and Obstacles 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, ...
06.03.2022 112: Seth Erickson On Storytelling Seth Erickson on Storytelling My guest on this episode is Seth Erickson (LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/setherickson/), head of the design and marketing company Storify Agency. Seth is a Webby award-winning web designer-turned-storytelling maven. Storify Agency combines design and storytelling to create beautiful ...
05.24.2022 111: How To Master Strategic Product Management 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, ...
05.17.2022 110: Adil Berdai Tells Us About Calido 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 ...
05.10.2022 109: Mehmet Baha On Psychological Safety 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 ...
05.03.2022 108: Learning From Failure 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. ...
04.27.2022 107: Overcoming Biases Using Adversarial Product Management, with Chris Butler 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 ...
01.31.2022 106: Product Management And The Smart Sales Method, with Joe Morone 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 ...
01.18.2022 105: Katia Suchkova on Making The Transition to Product Leadership 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 ...
01.06.2022 104: 2021 Retrospective, the Challenges of Complexity, and Cynefin 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 ...
12.30.2021 103: The Many Uses of A Customer Success Story 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 ...
12.07.2021 102: How To Transform A Customer Success Story From Meh to Wow! 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 ...
11.30.2021 101: The Smart Sales Method – Sales Fundamentals for Product Managers The Smart Sales Method – a short book review “When done effectively, sales closure rates move from the estimated 3-10% to 70% or more.” That’s a quote from The Smart Sales Method To Improving Sales Results for B2B Technology Sales ...
11.23.2021 100: “We’re All In Sales” with John Simmons “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 ...
11.16.2021 99: Aspiring Product People On Clubhouse With Jose Platero Aspiring Product People flock to this Clubhouse club My guest on this episode is Jose Platero (LinkedIn and aspiringproductpeople.com) with a cool story about how he started a popular club for people wanting to get into product management and product ...
11.09.2021 98: The 5 Immutable Truths of Great Product Managers with JJ Rorie 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 ...
11.02.2021 97: Zombies and Product Management with Kurt Stangl Zombies and product management 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.” Links for the show * Kurt’s LinkedIn profile. * ...
10.20.2021 96: Let’s Talk About Innovation 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 ...
10.05.2021 95: Laplace’s Rule And Your Customer Interviews 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 ...
09.22.2021 94: Product Management Rules of Thumb for Decision Making and Persuasion 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 ...
09.07.2021 93: How To Show Quantifiable Results – Even If You Don’t Have The Numbers 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 ...
08.30.2021 92: Get “Data-Driven” With The The Most Powerful Computer For Analytics “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 ...
08.19.2021 Retrospectives, Math, and The Secrets of Influence To 10x Your Profits Start with Retrospectives Well-run retrospectives can lead to a 20-25% average improvement in team performance. And yet most teams don’t do regular retrospectives. Why? It’s because 20% is boring. A 20% improvement isn’t enough to get ...
08.04.2021 90: Agile Product Management From First Principles What Is Agile Product Management? “Agile Product Management” is a common job description nowadays. What does it mean? In this episode let’s drill into the mental model of “agile,” how it arose, why it’s better than the alternatives, why it’s ...
07.21.2021 89: 3 Decision-Making Hacks for Product Managers Decision-making is a core competency for product managers Greg Prickril, who’s been a guest on the podcast, just did a LinkedIn post about the most important competency for product managers. He said it was “prioritization” – which I don’t disagree ...

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