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The Secret PM Handbook
DECEMBER 12, 2017
I’m excited to announce The Secret Product Manager Handbook is available for pre-order ! I always wanted the “secret handbook” – so I wrote it. The Secret Product Manager Handbook i s all the things I wish someone had told me. The Secret Product Manager Handbook. To learn more about The Secret Product Manager Handbook , check out the book trailer (inserted above, as well).
Gainsight
NOVEMBER 10, 2021
Read on for an introductory taste of product-led success and a preview of our in-depth guide, “Product-Led Success: The Professional’s Handbook.”. Take a look at ‘Product-Led Success: The Professional’s Handbook.’.
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Inside Intercom
JUNE 27, 2018
We’ve just launched our latest book, The Growth Handbook. That’s what The Growth Handbook is all about. Grab your free copy of The Growth Handbook today , and best of luck on your own growth journey. The post Announcing our latest book – The Growth Handbook appeared first on Inside Intercom. If there’s one perennial problem all businesses face, it’s this: how do we grow?
UserInterviews
JUNE 13, 2019
What we believe, our mission statement, and what we're building for the future
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Adding embedded analytics to your software doesn’t have to be an overwhelming task. This guide is the perfect companion for SaaS product managers. It will walk you through the process of choosing the right analytics provider step by step.
UserInterviews
JUNE 13, 2019
What we believe, our mission statement, and what we're building for the future
The Secret PM Handbook
JANUARY 7, 2018
It’s exciting to see the first review of The Secret Product Manager Handbook ! The post “Compact, Immediately Useful, and Enough Depth” – The First Review appeared first on The Secret Product Manager Handbook
The Secret PM Handbook
MAY 5, 2017
” video , from my (still in production) Secret Product Manager Handbook series. Let me know in the comments what you think about the Secret Product Manager Handbook. One of the most challenging questions about product management has been – in my experience – “What is Product Management?”. In this post, I share a simple model or framework to answer this question. I talk about this model with lots of people, but I’ve never explicitly written it down in a post.
The Secret PM Handbook
AUGUST 27, 2018
The post “I Have An Idea” – How I Evaluate Product Ideas appeared first on The Secret Product Manager Handbook. People are always asking me “Hey, I have a product idea. May I run it by you and get your input?”. Of course, I say yes. They tell me the idea, and it’s usually “ a technical thing for some kind of team.”. And my response is, “Well, that sounds neat, but….” And then I ask some questions. The answers to those questions tell me if the idea is any good.
Inside Intercom
FEBRUARY 12, 2019
This post was excerpted from “The Sales Handbook” The post Why SaaS growth isn’t just about acquiring new customers appeared first on Inside Intercom. Sales SaaS sales sales handbook Sales StrategyUnless your business is transactional, nurturing your existing customers should be just as important as acquiring new logos. The way I see it, closing a deal is just the first step.
Speaker: Nils Davis, Principal, NPD Associates
Whether you manage a feature, a product, or a whole suite of products, you likely have some goals that you're trying to meet. But do you have a strategy? Strategy and goals are different. It's your strategy that allows you to make decisions that help you meet your goals in the first place. For example, if you want grow your revenue, your strategy may be to enter a new market - and you may decide to make your product stand out in that market by adding analytics. If you want to have an articulated strategy that you can use to make decisions, stay on-track, and meet your product goals, this is the webinar for you! Join Nils Davis, author of The Secret Product Manager Handbook, as he explains how you can get your team aligned to a practical product strategy.
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The Secret PM Handbook
NOVEMBER 11, 2017
appeared first on The Secret Product Manager Handbook Empathy is very important! You have to be willing and able to put yourself in the shoes of your customers. And since "your customers" is actually everyone in the organization, as well as the people who buy and evaluate your product, you have to be very flexible, and be able to hold multiple viewpoints in mind at the same time. Along with this, you need to be very flexible, mentally. There are dozens of things coming at you every day.
The Secret PM Handbook
JULY 13, 2018
The post The Secret Truth About Your Methodology and Processes appeared first on The Secret Product Manager Handbook. What are your goals? A product organization has three overarching goals: Deliver great value to our customers. Do it quickly, efficiently, and with high quality. Do it better over time. A product organization that achieves those goals is much more likely to be successful. Your methodology, your process, is a means to an end. It's not the end in itself.
The Secret PM Handbook
APRIL 18, 2018
The post Storytelling For Product Managers – The TL;DR Version appeared first on The Secret Product Manager Handbook In my last article , I covered a powerful storytelling technique in great detail. This article is the summary (the TL;DR ) version. Do you hem and haw when asked talk about one of your accomplishments? Do you stick to a “just the facts, ma’am” approach when telling a story? Are your stories falling flat and failing to have the effect you hoped?
The Secret PM Handbook
AUGUST 17, 2018
And you can find more on objection handling in any handbook on how to sell more effectively, like Dan Pink’s To Sell Is Human.”. The post Persuasion Tips: Pre-Handle Objections appeared first on The Secret Product Manager Handbook. (This is the third article in my Persuasion Tips series.). Pre-handling objections” is about showing empathy for your audience.
Speaker: Nils Davis, Principal, NPD Associates
Don’t miss this surprising webinar from Nils Davis, author of The Secret Product Manager Handbook! As a Product Manager, a big part of your job will always be to balance which features to develop, and which to scrap.
The Secret PM Handbook
OCTOBER 9, 2018
The post 3 Proven Ways To Help Your Sales Team Beat Quota appeared first on The Secret Product Manager Handbook. Co-opting product management into sales. My good friend Geoffrey Anderson ( @ganders2112 ) recently wrote about a situation we product managers sometimes find ourselves in. When sales are not going well, company leadership might ask product management come in to help hit the numbers. This can be a bad thing or a good thing.
The Secret PM Handbook
AUGUST 7, 2018
The post Persuasion Tips: Have A Goal appeared first on The Secret Product Manager Handbook. Understand and articulate what you’re trying to achieve. This article is a follow-on to my overview article on persuasion tips for product managers.). Every presentation or opportunity for persuasion has a goal, or possibly a few goals. Are you trying to get some executives to make a decision in your favor? Are you aiming to protect yourself from potential blowback from something that went wrong?
The Secret PM Handbook
FEBRUARY 9, 2018
The post What Successful Companies Do To Get Better Leads appeared first on The Secret Product Manager Handbook (This is the second post in my series about using product knowledge to create better sales enablement and jumpstart a repeatable sales process. Read the first post, on the overall topic.). “I Need Better Leads!” ” Does your salesforce complain “We don’t get enough leads from Marketing, and the leads we get aren’t any good?”.
The Secret PM Handbook
JULY 20, 2018
The post Mental Models Applied: Using A 2×2 Chart For Handling Competitive Objections appeared first on The Secret Product Manager Handbook. In some earlier articles and in a talk I gave at a local product management meetup , I’ve shared about the importance of having a toolkit of mental models. They help with decision making, problem solving, communication, plus every other thing we do as product managers. A good mental model can help you see things in a different way.
The Secret PM Handbook
SEPTEMBER 1, 2017
The post How To Say “No” To A Feature Request appeared first on The Secret Product Manager Handbook. No (picture credit at the bottom). Sometimes No Is The Right Answer. Can you talk to me about a time when you had to say no to a customer? Why did you have to say no? How did you handle it? Customers often make feature requests that seem obvious on the surface, but which in fact are misguided or a bad idea.
The Secret PM Handbook
SEPTEMBER 7, 2018
The post Start Doing These 10 Things Today To Be A Better Product Manager appeared first on The Secret Product Manager Handbook Take Action Today With These Product Management Tips. I love lists, and the Internet loves lists. And I love immediately actionable product management tips that I can start using today to become better at my job. It just so happens that I include tons of immediately actionable guidelines in my articles on this site. There are over 50 at last count.
The Secret PM Handbook
MARCH 28, 2018
The post 3 Simple Steps To Make Your Customer Stories 10x Better appeared first on The Secret Product Manager Handbook. How To Accelerate Sales With Great Storytelling. In my articles about go to market , I always mention the importance of “customer stories.” These stories are a critical component of the knowledge that product management can provide to sales and marketing and sales engineers to help ensure sales success.
The Secret PM Handbook
OCTOBER 1, 2017
appeared first on The Secret Product Manager Handbook. Have you built something? Have you led a team? Product management is a hot, hot profession right now. It’s one of the most important roles in a product company , especially in high tech. But is it right for you? If you’re wondering about this, or want to scope yourself against a basic set of guidelines for product managers, this post is for you. What I’m looking for in a new product manager.
The Secret PM Handbook
MAY 18, 2017
This guy might have too much knowledge. Knowledge is power. Most of our tools and applications deliver capabilities, but users and buyers are always hoping that what they’re buying is knowledge. Knowledge of how to do the job. How to do the job faster, or with fewer errors, or with better outcomes. If we don’t put the knowledge in, the our users have to figure it all out themselves. They have to become experts in our tools when they really just want to be experts in their job.
The Secret PM Handbook
AUGUST 4, 2017
The post A New Focus On Product Management Opportunity appeared first on The Secret Product Manager Handbook. Looking through to the next stage. A long work in progress. This blog has been going for a long long time. It started as a site to share ideas and lessons I’ve learned in my career as a product manager for enterprise software products. Recently a bigger theme has started to emerge and coalesce. It’s more ambitious than my initial (lack of) vision.
The Secret PM Handbook
JUNE 16, 2017
The post To 10x Your Profits Start With Retrospectives appeared first on The Secret Product Manager Handbook. 20% is boring. As many of you know, there’s a technique called a “ retrospective ” in scrum, or you might call it a debrief. After each sprint the team spends a short amount of time reviewing what went well, what could be improved, and what they should stop doing. The goal is for the team to learn quickly from each sprint.
The Secret PM Handbook
JULY 30, 2018
The post Persuasion Tips For Product Managers appeared first on The Secret Product Manager Handbook. After a few well-received presentations to senior executives, a few colleagues at my new company asked me, based on the positive effect I got, “Can you give us some tips on persuasion?”. I’ve been doing product management a long time, and over time my presentation skills have just naturally gotten more polished. A lot of it seems like second nature to me.
The Secret PM Handbook
SEPTEMBER 1, 2017
No (picture credit at the bottom). Sometimes No Is The Right Answer. Can you talk to me about a time when you had to say no to a customer? Why did you have to say no? How did you handle it? Customers often make feature requests that seem obvious on the surface, but which in fact are misguided or a bad idea. My goal is to be able to tell them that we won’t implement that feature, and have them thank me for that answer. I do that by leading them to make the decision themselves.
The Secret PM Handbook
FEBRUARY 20, 2018
The post The Secrets of Highly Successful Products: The Sales Discovery Call appeared first on The Secret Product Manager Handbook. When the sales team has the right product knowledge, they will be much more successful. Which means they sell a lot more of your product. This starts from the first call with the prospect. If a sales person asks the wrong questions during that first call…. then even a good prospect can turn into total loss. But, ask the right questions …. …
The Secret PM Handbook
MAY 5, 2017
” video , from my (still in production) Secret Product Manager Handbook series. Let me know in the comments what you think about the Secret Product Manager Handbook. One of the most challenging questions about product management has been – in my experience – “What is Product Management?”. In this post, I share a simple model or framework to answer this question. I talk about this model with lots of people, but I’ve never explicitly written it down in a post.
The Secret PM Handbook
OCTOBER 21, 2017
appeared first on The Secret Product Manager Handbook. Nothing Important Happens In The Office. We product managers are always told that we need to spend a lot of time with customers, and with the market, to create successful products. This advice, while good, is not actionable. It’s vague and aspirational. And, indeed, you might even ask “ why is this good advice?”.
The Secret PM Handbook
MARCH 28, 2018
The post 3 Simple Steps To Make Your Customer Stories 10x Better appeared first on The Secret Product Manager Handbook. How To Accelerate Sales With Great Storytelling. In my articles about go to market , I always mention the importance of “customer stories.” These stories are a critical component of the knowledge that product management can provide to sales and marketing and sales engineers to help ensure sales success.
The Secret PM Handbook
AUGUST 18, 2017
The post A Better Approach To Demoing Can Turn Sales Around appeared first on The Secret Product Manager Handbook. A Sales Demo Challenge. At one of my previous companies our new logo sales – that is, new customers – were tanking. The account reps were not hitting quota on new logos. The sales engineers felt this was due to a large degree to our “story” on agile. Our product was not as strong as some of our competitors for managing agile projects.
The Secret PM Handbook
AUGUST 11, 2017
appeared first on The Secret Product Manager Handbook. You have a team of engineers and a three month runway – how are you going to fix onboarding? That’s a question I actually got in a product management job interview a while ago. My answer was, “that’s a really good question but I have no way of answering yet.”. Operating room or aspirin? This is the same question as “Here’s a team of surgeons, and I’ve booked an operating room. We have a patient with a pain in his foot.
The Secret PM Handbook
AUGUST 4, 2017
The post This Framework Gives You Product Management Super Powers appeared first on The Secret Product Manager Handbook. Breakthrough! The Secret Product Management Framework. Finally writing down the Secret Product Management Framework was a revelation for me. It put all the activities I do as a product manager into perspective. We find and validate market problems for which customers will pay for a solution. We then guide the creation of solutions to the problems.
The Secret PM Handbook
FEBRUARY 21, 2019
The Secret PM Handbook
SEPTEMBER 16, 2016
Brain Wiring (by Wellcome Images, CC licensed). In part 1 I introduced mental models and some reasons they are important. And I provided a few “general purpose” examples. In this part we dive into what you really came here for – product management-specific mental models. Why are product management-related mental models different? The mental models I’m going to talk about share two key characteristics: They are about about products. They are not used enough.
The Secret PM Handbook
NOVEMBER 29, 2017
How To Use Open-Ended Questions For Market Discovery appeared first on The Secret Product Manager Handbook. In my last post I talked about the importance of “talking to customers.” ” In that post I focused especially on what you do with the market discovery knowledge you get from customers once you found it. The “product management system of record,” I called it.). In this post I’ll be more to the point: How do you actually have these conversations?
The Secret PM Handbook
JUNE 2, 2017
People have asked me “How can I get my execs to support an agile transformation? They don’t like that they can’t predict anything.”. Reframe the Agile conversation around value. Orient the conversation around value, not around methodologies. Picture credit below). This is never going to be an easy conversation, but I recommend reframing it from the outset. Don’t talk about scrum or methodologies or the Agile Manifesto.
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