What Can I Tell You - a conversational guide to product management Nicholas Kanhai

The product manager job market can be highly competitive and difficult to navigate. This episode's guest, Heidi Ram, helps us cut through these challenges and identifies what she, as a 20 year veteran recruiter who specializes in finding product talent, looks for when filling exciting industry roles. Heidi provides deep insight into the world of product management from the perspective of companies looking to hire, and gives some amazing tips on how to improve your chances at standing out from the crowd when vying for an attractive product job. 

As a bonus, I share my own experience interviewing for a product manager role very early in my career, what I learned from it, and how I used my failures to craft a more cohesive 'Product Story' that would eventually get me hired in the industry. I also provide some insight into my own interviewing style, and what I look for now that I am the one conducting the interviews. 

Heidi Ram:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/heidiram/

Martyn Bassett Associates:

https://www.mbassett.com/



For more episodes, visit:

www.nicholaskanhai.com/episodes

This episode's guest lives, breathes, and teaches Product Management like it's everybody's business. Quadri has literally written a book on the subject of product management, and in this episode shares with us insight into his own path towards becoming a senior product manager, why and how he wrote his book, and what some of his most valuable lessons that he shares in the classroom. 

Quadri's passion, great sense of humor, and depth of knowledge on the subject of product management make this episode crucial for anyone looking to learn more about what it takes to become an amazing PM. 

To be a good product manager, you have to think like a product manager. You have to have a product mentality. Now what exactly does that mean? What is a product mindset? Can it be taught? Is it something that is developed over time? Or is it simply a state of mind that one must be in in order to sharpen their abilities and skills when starting out their career as a product manager?

In today's episode, we dive into these question and more with Muneera Qureshi, who is the Director of Product Development at TVO, which is a public agency and registered charity that focuses on providing opportunities for education inside and outside the classroom through digital technology.

In this interview, James Costa shares stories from his days running a digital agency, and draws connections between thinking like a founder and a product manager. James provides deep insights into how to develop a partnership-like relationship with clients, building in a vision for growth for their product at the outset so that it can guide the development process as well as the post-launch measurement strategy.

In our third episode, we’re chatting with Nahla Salem, a senior technical product manager who has a tonne of experience in bringing machine learning capabilities to enterprise products.

Over the course of our chat, Nahla shares what it takes to plan for and build out an entire team of machine learning product managers. She highlights some of the challenges that come with the role, such as dealing with bad data, and what to do when your machine learning model does not give you the results that you were hoping for. As a mentor to PMs, she also gives valuable advice on how to break into product management, and explains what it means to be a PM focused on building enterprise-level products.

On today's episode we're chatting with Claudia Cornali-Motta, who is a technical product owner at FinanceIt, a lending solutions company with a focus on digital products. 

We'll learn about the path she took to first becoming a Product Manager, as well as how she transitioned into her current role as technical product owner and what the key differences are between the two. We'll also touch on a subject that has been on my mind for years, which is to address the question: how technical do you have to be to be a technical product owner.

 Enjoy the show!