April 21, 2025 • 31 mins
Nils Davis shares his extensive experience as an enterprise software product manager and the key go-to-market strategies that can make or break product launches. Gain valuable insights on market positioning, customer engagement, and the critical role of storytelling in leading successful product initiatives. Perfect for aspiring and seasoned product managers alike, this episode will empower you with actionable tactics for your next project!
Listen on Podbean:
https://brainworkframework.podbean.com/
Connect with Nils Davis:
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nilsdavis
Resume Coaching Site: https://perfectpmresume.com
Podcast: https://secretsofpm.com
Product Management Knowledge Hub: https://secretpmhandbook.com
Connect with Chris Troka:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopher-troka-3a093058/
Website: https://focused-biz.com/
Website: https://christroka.com/ #brainwork #framework #business #entrepreneurship #marketing #strategies #storytelling
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
If you're solving a problem that ismeaningful to people, you can't have
(00:02):
a product if you don't have that.
The next most importantthing is to go to market.
If you can convince people thatyou will solve that problem
for them, you can sell it.
You're listening to Brainwork Framework,a business and marketing podcast
brought to you by focused- biz.
com.
Welcome back to another episode.
With us today is the founder ofConfidence and Impact, Nils Davis.
We're going to be talking all aboutresumes, product management, go
(00:25):
to market and storytelling withinyour brand and your personal life.
Nils, thank you so much for joining us.
How are you today?
Hey, it's my pleasure to be here, Chris.
I'm feeling great and excitedto talk about all the different
topics that you just mentioned.
I love it.
Absolutely.
I know it's going to be a hugevalue add for our audience and
people listening out there.
We always like to get insidethe mind of the entrepreneur.
(00:45):
What were you doing before and howdid that kind of lead you and prepare
you for what you're doing today?
Yeah, so i've been an enterprisesoftware product manager for about
30 years until december 2023 andI was I had a number of jobs.
I was laid off a few times, tried afew businesses, this and that learned
a lot and did things like wrote a bookabout product management for people
that are getting into how to blog,have a podcast, all that kind of stuff.
(01:09):
But since December 2023, what Istarted to do was work with people
with product managers who are in thejobs hunt and having a problem having
problems not getting interviews.
And this started sort of just as doingsome nice stuff for people but I started
to see some patterns in people's resumes.
Essentially, they were really boringbasically and what was interesting
(01:30):
in the conversations I had with thesepeople is they all were amazing.
They all had done amazing things.
It had amazing accomplishmentsthat were worth talking about
and those accomplishments didn'treally show up on their resumes.
And so I applied someideas that I had learned.
A few years earlier about storytelling,I was never a natural storyteller and I
(01:52):
had to learn to do it but I was able toapply these ideas to help people make
resumes that are much more exciting andnot only are they more exciting and more
engaging for the reader, the people feelmuch better about their resumes when they
start to see how their stories really.
The things that they did, theytypically don't really understand how
to talk about the impact they've had.
(02:12):
So I have a story framework and a wayof eliciting the stories and we turn
that into resume stuff and that's whatI've been doing for the last year.
It's a small business so far growing and Icharacterize it as a go to market business
right?
So this is people goingto market for themselves.
(02:33):
I also work with companieswho are going to market with
their products and companies.
For example, they have a product,it hasn't really gotten traction
in the market but they havesome successful customers.
A lot of the problems those companieshave are really go to market problems,
partly they're not telling storiescorrectly, partly they're not targeting
their marketing correctly, et cetera.
(02:54):
So I help companies like that as well.
And the reason I call the companyConfidence and Impact is that In the
process of doing this, everybody gainsconfidence about their thing whether it's
a product or themselves and they startto talk about the impact they're having
as opposed to the features and functions.
Absolutely.
That is quite the journey and I love thatyou're just now getting into business.
It's never a bad time to get intobusiness, I feel like we all try these
(03:17):
different opportunities when we seethem, we want to take advantage of
them and try to have the most impact.
A lot of overlap between the go tomarket for a business and a person
we're really trying to presentourselves in the best way possible.
Make sure that message resonateswith that audience but we just
(03:37):
need that clarity sometimes to,okay, what job do I really want?
How do I really highlight whatI've done but it's hard for us
to self reflect on a lot of that.
Where do you see some of thatoverlap between the go to market
for a business and a person?
What should people be focusing on whenthey're really trying to put something
new out there or put themselves out there?
(03:57):
Well, so there's a number of differentoverlaps and aspects of this.
So you mentioned a couple of them.
One of them is when you're sellinga product, you need to sell it
to the right people and not tryto sell it to the wrong people.
This is a big waste ofmoney, waste of time.
You'll be unhappy and if yourmarketing is not targeting the right
segment, you won't be successful.
Or if the right segment can't recognizethemselves in your marketing, again,
(04:21):
you're not going to be successful.
So one of the things that I talkto people about is being very clear
on their resume about their valueproposition, which is a technical term.
It's from crossing the chasmmaybe earlier than that but it's
basically says I am a type of role.
I've got certain kinds of experience and Iknow the job and I have a differentiator.
(04:42):
Most people are very poorat that whole thing, right?
They don't say I'm a product, I'm asenior product manager with 10 years of
experience in a certain set of domains.
They say I'm a product leader or I'ma product strategist which is not
what somebody is hiring for, right?
So that's usually thefirst line of the resume.
And already you're off on the wrong footwith the hiring manager because they say,
I'm not looking for a product leader orwhat does product leader really mean.
(05:05):
So tell me if you're going for a seniorproduct manager role and you're qualified
for it, say I'm a senior product manager,the hiring manager then says, Oh, at least
the first two words are the right thing.
So that's the first thing.
Nobody ever puts a realdifferentiator on their resume.
They try but it's usually the same.
Well, all they're doing is they'resaying like in the product management
(05:25):
world, I'm customer obsessed.
I'm dynamic.
I'm self starter.
Well, Those are minimumqualifications for a product manager.
They're not differentiating at all.
So when I work with people, it'slike, what is your differentiator?
What makes you different?
What makes you somebody, thehiring manager might be a little
more interested in learning moreabout this turns out to be hard.
People mostly don't know what theirdifferentiators are but in the process
(05:47):
of going through the stories andwhatnot, we can often come up with them.
So that's just the first example.
The value propositions, the first threelines of the resume, most people's
are just terrible and interchangeableand don't tell the hiring manager
anything if they're not activelymaking the hiring manager annoyed.
Absolutely.
You need to have those keywordsspecific and crafted to that audience.
(06:07):
Otherwise the message will justdissipate false and deaf ears.
They have nothing to encourage themto continue reading your resume.
That is right.
And you mentioned the word keywordsand it's an interesting thing.
People always talk about, well,I have to have all the keywords
in my resume and that's actually
not literally true or it's literallytrue but in a way that most people don't
think about, they say, well, you needto match the job description but the
(06:29):
job description is really a minimum setof functionality that the person needs.
It's like, if you're doing an RFP, right?
If you have a product and you'refilling an RFP and the problem
with RFPs is they say, whetheryou have the basic functionality
but they don't allow you any placeto say how that impacts the customer.
(06:50):
It doesn't allow you to talk aboutdifferentiation anything like that.
The job description is the same way.
In the world of product management rightnow, it's a hugely competitive market.
Every job has hundreds ofqualified people applying for it.
Which means that if they justwork to the job description, all
those resumes are interchangeable.
That's not that interesting.
The other thing to think about is whenthe hiring manager and this is true
(07:12):
for going to market with anything butin this example, the hiring manager
has gone to market trying to findsomebody to be a product manager.
Well, in order to get that rec approved.
They had to go to leadership and say, Hey,we have this big problem and if I don't
get funding for a 200, 000 plus job rack,we're going to fail as a company or this
(07:35):
whole business is not going to succeed.
So imagine what type ofproblems those might be.
It might be competitive problems ormarket share problems or customers
unhappy, whatever they might be.
Guess what doesn't show up in the resume.
Guess what doesn't showup in the job description.
The hiring manager is not goingto put into the job description.
Oh, we are suffering so badly becausewe don't know how to do this thing.
So I need to get our product manager.
They're not going to put that.
(07:56):
So if you're building your resume offthe job description, you won't be talking
about the problems the hiring manager has,you'll be talking about things he doesn't
really care about he or she are requiredto in order to solve the problems.
So what do I recommend to do this?
To deal with this while you thinkabout the things that you did as
a product manager, the successesand your successes are always about
(08:17):
having solved problems like that.
Oh, I solved the market share problem.
I solved this.
We weren't selling and I reversed that.
And then you put that in asyour bullet point and you tell
us a little story about it.
The story becomes the thing that hookssomebody in and then the hiring manager
reads that bullet point and they say, oh.
I have that problem.
Chris knows how to fix it.
(08:38):
Maybe we should have Chrisin for a conversation, right?
That's your goal.
Simply saying, oh, I did athing and sales went up by 20%.
That doesn't address thatbecause I don't know if sales,
if the market was growing 20%.
In which case I get no credit for that.
But if I say, oh, we were losing marketshare, sales were declining and all
our customers were leaving and I didsome things and sales went up by 20
(09:00):
percent and oh, by the way, we startedregaining market share and I won an award.
That all fits in a three or fourline bullet and suddenly the hiring
manager says, Oh, this guy's a star.
And it's interesting because thatwas almost what you described as what
usually people do is what I've done.
Putting very short description that canfit on a single line saying it grew sales
by 20% but to actually put it into astory framework where you can describe
(09:23):
it in three to four short sentences.
I never realized how impactfulthat could be on the receiving
end, the hiring manager wonderingwho can solve our problems here.
So there's a bunch ofrules about resumes, right?
One of them is keep your bullet pointshort, always put a number in your
bullet point, start with an active verb,there's also try to keep it on one page.
All of these rules are basically wrong.
(09:45):
They guide you into making a worse resume.
Basically now shorter is maybebetter but not at the expense of
putting a number in is great but notif you don't put some context around
it, so I know whether it's good orbad starting with an action verb.
Okay, use action verbs but that'snot what often people do is they
put the action verb in which meansthat they don't then talk about
the problem that they were solving.
(10:06):
So nobody ever knows about the problem.
They don't know that youhad this amazing impact.
So I think all the rules are wrong.
Basically the one pageris also wrong, right?
Particularly if you're a product managerbecause you can't get a product management
job without multiple years of experienceas doing work typically as sort of
doing important work in a business.
Well, that means your resume, youhave a lot of stories to tell, a lot
(10:28):
of stuff to communicate about you.
And the hiring manager is only going toread the first half page but it needs
to be engaging and make them think,Oh, I should talk to this person and
then they might check out some of theother stuff and your education on that.
But they don't care about how long it is.
They're going to read the first half page.
They say, I think I'm scanthe rest, look at the end.
Do they have an education?
Okay, let's get this person.
(10:49):
They don't care how long it is.
That is some great information andit's important to know what things
we were taught that are wrong or justaren't relevant to us today anymore.
It's so important and that landscapeof just ever changing advice.
It's something that we need tokeep our ear to the ground with.
I wanted to ask more about the changesin the workforce since COVID because
(11:10):
it feels like for the last 50 to ahundred years, it was a privilege
and an honor to work for a companywhere the companies had leverage.
Now, since COVID working from home,it seems wages are finally starting to
increase for the lower middle class butbarely they seem to have a little bit
more leverage now where the companiesneed to court the employees a bit more.
(11:31):
As as well, do you kind ofsee this dynamic shift within.
I guess just the way that peoplepresent themselves, the storytelling,
the resumes, are you seeing any changeswithin workplaces in the workforce?
It's actually sort of the opposite,at least in product management
and a lot of these technical rolesbecause there's a couple reasons.
One is.
There was a big hiring bump inproduct managers in the early 2020s.
(11:53):
A lot of those people have been laid off.
So there's a bunch of experienced productmanagers in the market looking for work.
So you're competing with,and everybody wants the job.
It's the hottest job.
Everybody wants a job butpays well, it's very exciting.
It's the best job in theworld, in my opinion.
So there's a ton of competition forthis job and it's very qualified
as a rule, this competition.
So simply being a qualified candidate.
(12:15):
It doesn't get you veryfar in the job search.
It gets you out of a thousandresumes, maybe a hundred people
are highly qualified but the hiringmanager wants 10 to go further on.
So you have to set yourselfapart from highly qualified.
That is the situationin product management.
It's possible that's changingbut it's never going to go to
the point where you can get everyproduct management job you apply for.
(12:36):
If you have no spelling errors in yourresume, that's just not happening again.
Right.
Right.
You're telling me I can't walk intoa warehouse or a factory, shake the
manager's hand and get a job the same day.
Well, if you want to work in a factory,you might be able to, as a factory worker
but not as a product manager, right?
Product managers are one to 2 percentof the workforce in a high tech company
(12:56):
which means there's not very many of us.
It's like, we're not as rare as CEOsbut we're probably the next rarest role
with a company, maybe product marketing.
There should be more productmarketers than there are.
There should probably be moreproduct managers than there are
but they're both very rare jobs.
Absolutely.
And they're very overhead because thethings that we work on today don't
have an impact on the business oftenfor six months to a year to two years
(13:19):
depending on the size of the business.
So it's very easy for companiesto say, well, I'm going to get
rid of the product managers.
And so I can make my numberthis quarter and it's a bad idea
but you might potentially get abenefit out of it this quarter.
Yeah, unfortunately a lot of thosebusiness decisions are short sighted
where they're not looking at themedium and long term impact and
success that something can have.
They need instant results, theinstant gratification just to make
(13:42):
the numbers look good that quarter.
Like you said it's unfortunate.
Yeah.
I was thinking about this whole ideaof the resume is longer than a page.
And one of the things that we learnwhen we start talking about marketing or
learning about marketing is that the salespage for your product can be any length.
It doesn't have to be short.
It can be long.
It just has to be engaging.
Right?
(14:02):
And it has to do all the things itneeds to do to persuade the prospect
to buy or to click on the freetrial link or whatever it might be.
The resume is the same deal.
The resume is a sales page.
In fact, I even talk about theresume as not being a summary
section, an experience section.
I talk about it as there's a valueproposition and then there's the demo.
(14:23):
The experience section is a demo.
Let me show you all the cool things I'vedone for other people just like you.
It doesn't say, let me show youall the features and functions.
This is the file menu and you can go new.
You can go open, you don't do it that way.
And that's what most of them are.
You say, let me show you how I solvethis big problem that probably you
have or somebody who has that you mightfind interesting about how I went about
doing it and the impact was really big.
(14:45):
that is absolutely incredible.
Now with different tools that arecoming out there have always been
resume builders or services to whatsuccess you would have is up for debate.
But with some of the new AI tools andlarge language models there becoming
more sophisticated and advanced, doyou see AI as being a beneficial tool
(15:05):
for resume building or storytelling,if you can give it the right framework.
Yeah.
I use ChatGPT in my coaching.
What I've found though is it's notgood at, you have to give it the story.
If you give it the story maybe the bulletpoints are the highlights of the story.
There was this problem, hereare the symptoms, blah, blah.
Here's what I did, blah, blah.
Here's the impact that we had, blah, blah.
(15:26):
If you give it that storyit can do two things.
One is it can write a really goodnarrative version of that story.
It's usually a little bit overblown right?
It said, oh, the results wereremarkable, you have to start to tone
that down a little bit but you canessentially use that story in the
interview, if somebody says, well,tell me about this bullet point.
You can essentially use thatstory that ChatGPT wrote.
(15:46):
You have to be very careful of coursebecause it might have made some things
up or whatever but the other thing itcan do and this is because I have my
ChatGPT, Instance knows how I do this.
It can create a draft bulletpoint for you and here's what
the format of the bullet point is
there's a problem.
There's something you did and it hadthese results and it does an okay
(16:08):
job about 80 percent of the time.
Always needs work.
Sometimes it leaves out the problemand then if you ask it to about
what it's doing, it will be wrong.
It will say, oh, it knows so much aboutresumes from the internet that are wrong.
It says, well, I always start with anactive verb and I use a quantitative.
It's like, that's not what you'redoing actually but it doesn't
(16:28):
know that it's not doing that.
That's very true.
The model can be only as good asthe information that it's fed.
So it's using some
information that is not actually correctin my view, but that's very common.
So the bottom line is.
From my experience so far, it is notgood at eliciting the story but it's
good at, once you have the story,helping you turn it into a bullet point.
(16:48):
The other thing I use it for is ifI write the bullet point myself, I
will have it help me shorten it andit does a good job of that, often.
Again, you have to try multipletimes and sometimes It leaves out
things that I don't want it to.
So I have to be sternwith it but generally it's
definitely a tool that I use.
And I find it very valuable for that.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Just like any other tool out there,it's how you as a user use it.
(17:11):
What is your intended end result?
What are you trying to get out of it?
And that can determine yourresults from the tools that you use.
It's how you use it.
Just something in our arsenal witheverything that you're building.
Even though you're just in for a year,what are you most excited for going
into 2025, are you planning anythingnew or exciting, or are you kind of
doing the same of everything that'sbeen working for you the last year?
(17:32):
So my big goal for 2025 iscoming up with some scale.
So figuring out what that is,though, because one thing I found is
people don't really want to buy, forexample, a resume writing course.
They want to be one on one withme which it makes total sense.
I mean, there's a huge amount of value inthat but it's just me and my time and I'd
rather have a little bit more scale there.
The other thing is I really want towork on this go to market for companies
(17:57):
component of the business and expand that.
I think there's a huge amount ofopportunity for how many times I
talk to somebody who needs theirresume done because they're the
company they're working for,they think is going to go under.
And I go look at their website andI say, I have no idea if I was the
exact right client for this web,this company, I would have no idea by
(18:17):
looking at the website and I feel like,well, that's low hanging fruit, right?
For a lot of companies, if theycould fix that and I suspect that
their demos are not good, right?
So you go to the demo and they'reprobably just demoing features and
functions that is where I would like tosee some growth in the business as well.
Cause I think, I just want there to bemore successful products, particularly
products that are good but theyhaven't figured out how to sell cause
(18:37):
I've been in that situation before.
I worked on a product backin the early two thousands.
That was an amazing product.
It was fantastic productfor product managers.
We never figured out how to sell it andone of the reasons I got so into go to
market and nobody had taught me the stuffthat we didn't do and so we didn't do it.
And as a result, the companyfailed and I want to prevent that.
(19:00):
I want to help other companies andproduct managers avoid that outcome.
That's kind of my goal in life, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
Because there's a lot of products outthere that never even get the chance
to really make it because unfortunatelya lot of those important foundational
pieces aren't laid properly for them.
And unfortunately, we also see alot of terrible products that are
(19:22):
wildly successful but they don'tdeliver on their promise at the end.
The thing that people tend to forget andthat's the exact right example to use.
The idea behind the product,the problem that you're solving
is the most important thing.
If you're solving a problem that ismeaningful to people, you can't have
a product if you don't have that.
The next most importantthing is to go to market.
If you can convince people thatyou will solve that problem
(19:42):
for them, you can sell it.
You don't need a product.
And obviously products that arelike fraudulent or things, that's
what they, how they sell, right?
The product doesn't really existbut people are sold on the value.
The problem with product companiesis that we tend to think that
the product is the most importantthing and it's really not right.
The other two things are more important.
The technology is notinteresting really to buyers.
(20:04):
It's what problem are you solving?
And are you reaching the people thathave that problem to tell them that
there's a solution that's betterthan their other alternatives?
And if you can do that, it doesn'tmatter that much about the product
in the middle, obviously, to be anethical company, you have to solve that
problem in reality but the problem issort of the third leg of that stool
(20:24):
and it's not the most important one.
I know there's lots of products out therethat solve problems that are worth solving
but the market doesn't know about them.
And so they fail.
Absolutely.
And nowadays because you've worked withproducts and companies services, I feel.
They're removing value.
They're moving features.
They're removing benefits.
They're increasing the prices.
There's a lack of competition.
(20:46):
What the heck can we do to help theseunderdog products out there get their
time to shine so we have more competitionso that Everyone can have more features,
more benefits and more competitive prices.
Yeah, it's a great question.
And there's lots ofdifferent levels of answer.
There are certainly markets where thereare effective monopolies, which is hard.
(21:08):
It's going to be hard to fightagainst those for the little guy
but one thing, there's lots ofproblems that aren't yet solved.
There's lots of companies out theresolving problems but nobody knows it.
You can't just blame competition fornot being successful if you're not
actually getting out to the peoplethat have the problem you solve and
telling them why your solution isa better one for them than their
alternatives, you have to do that andyou have to have some proof about it.
(21:30):
You have to be able to talkabout your successful customers.
Most customer success stories areabout the company and the product.;
They're not about the successfulcustomer and the pain that they are
in because what you want to be able todo, this goes back to the storytelling.
A good customer success story isall about how before they were a
customer, they were in terrible pain.
They searched for solution aftersolution, everything failed.
(21:50):
Then they found us.
Now their life is wonderful.
We're one line in that story.
One line is all we need to have inthat story because what you want
the prospect to come in and say, oh.
I'm suffering that same,I tried all those things.
My life is horrible.
These people did one thingand now their life is great.
I want to be like them.
This is the secret of go to market.
(22:10):
That's why the storiesare so important, right?
You, this, that does not work.
If you don't have the story ofthe tragedy of the prospect.
That's what gets people excited aboutnew products and me excited, obviously.
I mean, I'm getting mytalking, I'm talking faster.
I'm getting louder.
It's like, I love this stuff.
I think it's so frustrating to me tosee how many companies fail at this.
(22:31):
Absolutely.
I think Google has literally pushedevery known product available in the
universe to market and I don't knowif it's because they have such a name
brand but they seem to kill off certainproducts when things aren't hitting just
right or it's not an instant success.
Do you find that as an issue with productmanagement and go to market, whether
for business or for a career, justknowing when maybe the audience or the
(22:54):
job I'm going for isn't the right fit.
Or maybe I need to re-look at themessaging or what my offer is.
Well, Google's a veryinteresting example of this.
Google essentially has a coupleof successful products and has
had many fail failed products.
Why is this?
I always think of Google Wave.
I dunno if you even remember that.
You might be too young but GoogleWave, they released this years ago.
It was a very successful internal toolthat they built and it was kind of a chat.
(23:18):
Messaging this and that.
It's probably kind of like notionor slack or something like that.
And they released it to the market andthey said, Hey, look at this cool tool.
We did.
It has all these features andthey didn't say who it was for.
It didn't say anything about usecases that were ideal for it.
It didn't give you predefined setupsfor particular types of interactions.
So basically it did everythingwrong and go to market.
(23:40):
Guess what happened to that product?
It failed.
The only reason we remember thisis because Google is so big that
the launch was actually somethingthat kind of landed on our brains.
Many little companies do the same thing.
They launch a cool technology.
They don't say who it'sfor, why it's useful.
They don't help people get started andof course they go away and we don't
ever remember them because they were notimportant enough to impinge on our brain.
(24:03):
They might have been if they'd done goto market better and I suspect there's
a lot of other things at Google wherethey've tried to launch and failed.
We just don't remember them.
But Google is that unusual kindof beast that when they launch
something and it fails, we rememberit because it was big enough, right?
Google Glass, same kind of deal, Googlecircles or whatever that thing was called.
Say G plus, whatever itwas called, it was circles.
(24:24):
You know that the problem withcircles was they didn't give us a
reason to use it rather than Facebook.
There probably was one.
They didn't articulate it.
They didn't make it like, oh,this is the obvious choice.
I mean, lots of failures on the Google'spart for sure and we can all learn, we
can learn from them if we take the rightlessons which I think most people don't.
The lesson of Google glass wasnot that it wasn't a good product.
(24:45):
The lesson was Google released itand said, here's a thing, try and
figure out what to do with it.
That's not the way you market a product.
You say, oh, here's a thing.
Anybody can buy it but if you're inthis particular industry and you're
not using it, you're going to loseout because we built all this stuff
that make your life 20 times better.
It is on the onus of Google to figure out.
(25:05):
If you remember the book, crossing thechasm, it's the bowling pin strategy, the
bowling alley strategy, what is the headpin, the market segment that needs your
product so badly, they will pay a premiumto use it because they're in so much
pain or Google doesn't seem to do that
and it means that their products,their product launches fail.
We would be using AR in our lives.
If Google had not failed withGoogle Glass 10 years ago?
(25:27):
It's very frustrating to me.
I really want AR to be workingand Google messed that up for us.
Darn you, Google.
It would be really cool to have just theworld popping up price tags on things or
the history of something or click to learnmore blink your right eye if you want
audio to play something cool like that.
Exactly.
Yeah, I would love that.
I think that would be great but I do thinkGoogle messed it up for the rest of us
(25:50):
with their launch Apple kind of did too.
And with their headset, theyneeded to have also same thing.
They needed to have a use case thatwas so compelling for a segment.
They could make enough money to keepthe product going based on that segment.
And then they keep investing.
It gets better and better andit gets more and more applicable
to the rest of the market.
That is what happened withall the successful disruptive
innovations, they started that way.
(26:12):
They started as not very goodfor most things but really
good for one particular thing.
And I mean, we've got a long way fromresumes at this point but go to market
is, it's the go to market, you have toknow who your target segment is, for
whom your solution is the best solutionway better than the alternatives.
If you haven't figuredit out, you will fail.
I mean, we see it, we'veseen it a million times
so
(26:33):
you have to figure that out.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I'm sorry to take it away from resumesbut it was your past background and
experience that I knew you would havesome very insightful input into that.
And just knowing, hey, you really haveto solve a very big problem for a market
that's willing to pay a premium, usethat bowling alley strategy to knock that
first pin down and then do things better.
I think that's a really overlookedstrategy and very smart.
(26:55):
And obviously I didn't make it up butI do see most people not doing it.
So I think the successful companies do.
They either have done that or theyhave come up with an innovation that
I've been like the other exampleI always like to use is Instagram.
So Instagram, when it came out, I don'tknow if you remember the days before
Instagram, all the photo apps had lotsof dials and sliders and they said,
(27:16):
well, you can make your photo look asgood as you want dials and sliders.
Instagram came out and said, wedon't have dials and sliders.
We have filters that are prebuilt.
If you click on a filter,your photo will look better.
And sliders, your photo alwayslooks worse when you do it, right?
Unless you're a professional, your photolooks worse when you try to edit it.
So what was the big difference betweenInstagram and other photo editors?
(27:37):
Well, there's two, there wereother differences but one of
the big ones was Instagram wouldmake your pictures look better.
The other ones made your pictures lookworse which one are you going to choose?
You're going to choose the one thatmakes your pictures look better.
Even if in reality, mostpeople didn't even use filters.
I mean, other advantages of Instagramas well but to me, I saw that and I
thought, okay, that's going to win.
No question.
Absolutely.
(27:57):
And it's important to take a look at thepast wins and failures of other product
launches just to see what is workingand what isn't, and try to analyze that.
So we can use that forour benefit to help us.
Can I give you my other favoriteexample of storytelling and marketing?
Please do, that would be great.
So, you know how Apple they had theiPod billboards with the person,
(28:19):
they were black and white originallywith the white headphones and they
were like dancing, it was a staticpicture, all it said was iPod.
Advertising works betterwhen there's a story.
That when you can identify there'ssome kind of a pain, somebody got
a solution that makes them happy.
Well, the Apple iPod adsare exactly that, right?
Somebody is dancing around.
And you know what the story is becausein those days we all had Walkmans, which
(28:41):
meant that we had about a dozen songswe could carry around or 20 and if we
wanted to have a different record, we hadto get a different cassette or whatever.
We couldn't mix them up.
We couldn't shuffle them with the cassetteones and then here comes the problem.
So this is a big pain.
If you like music, you want to listento what you want to listen to right
now, you're in the mood for something.
So the iPod says, just in thatone picture says, I can listen to
(29:01):
whatever I want, whenever I wantand I'm dancing all the time, right?
That's a great outcome.
That's a great story.
Sometimes Apple has these otherads, which are pictures of what
I call beauty shots of the phone.
And if you look at the sales processprofile of Apple, when they market
with beauty pictures, sales go downwhen they market with stories, which is
(29:21):
also shot on iPhone sales go up, downwith Judy pictures up with stories.
The shot on iPhone is also a storytelling.
There's a picture what'shappening in that picture.
I don't know but somebodythought it was interesting
enough to take a picture of it.
So I'm going to believe that there'sa story behind it as a human being.
Stories really work and Appleforgets it every now and then
when they start using beauty shots
(29:42):
and then they go back to shot on iPhone.
I mean, look at how often they'vegone back to shot on iPhone.
This is why.
I really love those commercials becauseI was fascinated with the fact that
you could have that sort of outputat end result from just an iPhone.
I was like, wait, what?
You're doing that with that?
Well, everybody has some problemthat some story they can create.
On top of that, it's like, oh, thinkabout what I would've had to do to take
(30:05):
that picture with a camera versus aphone or something interesting happened
here and they were able to capture that.
I wanna be able to do that.
That's been a challenge,that's a problem in my life.
Whatever it might be or itmight just be, there's something
interesting happening in there.
I wonder what it is.
Right?
I mean, it just creates that senseof wonder and obviously because
somebody took a picture that meansit was worth taking a picture of and
(30:25):
so that it intrinsically creates astory, even though you don't know what
the story is, it's really amazing.
That is awesome.
I love how the story kind of buildsitself just through our own imagination,
kind of similar to how reading does.
We're kind of reading thisour own reality, our own
fantasy land within the story.
That's incredible.
Exactly.
Now, for those who are interestedin getting connected with you,
(30:46):
where can they find out more andget connected with you online?
So the best place to connect with me is onLinkedIn and I'm Nils Davis on LinkedIn.
And I'm sure there'll be links.
And if you are interested in theresume work, you can schedule a free
resume review call with me by clickingon the link and my LinkedIn profile
that says, make your resume amazing.
So that's how to connect.
(31:06):
That's how to get the resume side.
I post lots of stuff about resumes, aboutproduct management, about storytelling,
all kinds of different things.
I have a newsletter and so lots ofways to connect with me but LinkedIn
is the sort of the central hub.
I love that.
Absolutely.
And we will have those linksavailable down in the show
notes and the description.
I'm already subscribed.
I'm excited to see more ofyour content and learn more.
Very exciting.
Nils, appreciate taking the time,sharing these tips and tricks with us.
(31:29):
Congratulations on yournew business venture.
Excited to see where this growsand you're going to do fantastic.
Just keep up the great work out there.
Thank you very much.
It's been delightful to be here.
You are a great interviewerand I've really enjoyed it.
I appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
Congratulations.
Thanks, Chris.
If you're solving a problem that ismeaningful to people, you can't have
(00:02):
a product if you don't have that.
The next most importantthing is to go to market.
If you can convince people thatyou will solve that problem
for them, you can sell it.
You're listening to Brainwork Framework,a business and marketing podcast
brought to you by focused- biz.
com.
Welcome back to another episode.
With us today is the founder ofConfidence and Impact, Nils Davis.
We're going to be talking all aboutresumes, product management, go
(00:25):
to market and storytelling withinyour brand and your personal life.
Nils, thank you so much for joining us.
How are you today?
Hey, it's my pleasure to be here, Chris.
I'm feeling great and excitedto talk about all the different
topics that you just mentioned.
I love it.
Absolutely.
I know it's going to be a hugevalue add for our audience and
people listening out there.
We always like to get insidethe mind of the entrepreneur.
(00:45):
What were you doing before and howdid that kind of lead you and prepare
you for what you're doing today?
Yeah, so i've been an enterprisesoftware product manager for about
30 years until december 2023 andI was I had a number of jobs.
I was laid off a few times, tried afew businesses, this and that learned
a lot and did things like wrote a bookabout product management for people
that are getting into how to blog,have a podcast, all that kind of stuff.
(01:09):
But since December 2023, what Istarted to do was work with people
with product managers who are in thejobs hunt and having a problem having
problems not getting interviews.
And this started sort of just as doingsome nice stuff for people but I started
to see some patterns in people's resumes.
Essentially, they were really boringbasically and what was interesting
(01:30):
in the conversations I had with thesepeople is they all were amazing.
They all had done amazing things.
It had amazing accomplishmentsthat were worth talking about
and those accomplishments didn'treally show up on their resumes.
And so I applied someideas that I had learned.
A few years earlier about storytelling,I was never a natural storyteller and I
(01:52):
had to learn to do it but I was able toapply these ideas to help people make
resumes that are much more exciting andnot only are they more exciting and more
engaging for the reader, the people feelmuch better about their resumes when they
start to see how their stories really.
The things that they did, theytypically don't really understand how
to talk about the impact they've had.
(02:12):
So I have a story framework and a wayof eliciting the stories and we turn
that into resume stuff and that's whatI've been doing for the last year.
It's a small business so far growing and Icharacterize it as a go to market business
right?
So this is people goingto market for themselves.
(02:33):
I also work with companieswho are going to market with
their products and companies.
For example, they have a product,it hasn't really gotten traction
in the market but they havesome successful customers.
A lot of the problems those companieshave are really go to market problems,
partly they're not telling storiescorrectly, partly they're not targeting
their marketing correctly, et cetera.
(02:54):
So I help companies like that as well.
And the reason I call the companyConfidence and Impact is that In the
process of doing this, everybody gainsconfidence about their thing whether it's
a product or themselves and they startto talk about the impact they're having
as opposed to the features and functions.
Absolutely.
That is quite the journey and I love thatyou're just now getting into business.
It's never a bad time to get intobusiness, I feel like we all try these
(03:17):
different opportunities when we seethem, we want to take advantage of
them and try to have the most impact.
A lot of overlap between the go tomarket for a business and a person
we're really trying to presentourselves in the best way possible.
Make sure that message resonateswith that audience but we just
(03:37):
need that clarity sometimes to,okay, what job do I really want?
How do I really highlight whatI've done but it's hard for us
to self reflect on a lot of that.
Where do you see some of thatoverlap between the go to market
for a business and a person?
What should people be focusing on whenthey're really trying to put something
new out there or put themselves out there?
(03:57):
Well, so there's a number of differentoverlaps and aspects of this.
So you mentioned a couple of them.
One of them is when you're sellinga product, you need to sell it
to the right people and not tryto sell it to the wrong people.
This is a big waste ofmoney, waste of time.
You'll be unhappy and if yourmarketing is not targeting the right
segment, you won't be successful.
Or if the right segment can't recognizethemselves in your marketing, again,
(04:21):
you're not going to be successful.
So one of the things that I talkto people about is being very clear
on their resume about their valueproposition, which is a technical term.
It's from crossing the chasmmaybe earlier than that but it's
basically says I am a type of role.
I've got certain kinds of experience and Iknow the job and I have a differentiator.
(04:42):
Most people are very poorat that whole thing, right?
They don't say I'm a product, I'm asenior product manager with 10 years of
experience in a certain set of domains.
They say I'm a product leader or I'ma product strategist which is not
what somebody is hiring for, right?
So that's usually thefirst line of the resume.
And already you're off on the wrong footwith the hiring manager because they say,
I'm not looking for a product leader orwhat does product leader really mean.
(05:05):
So tell me if you're going for a seniorproduct manager role and you're qualified
for it, say I'm a senior product manager,the hiring manager then says, Oh, at least
the first two words are the right thing.
So that's the first thing.
Nobody ever puts a realdifferentiator on their resume.
They try but it's usually the same.
Well, all they're doing is they'resaying like in the product management
(05:25):
world, I'm customer obsessed.
I'm dynamic.
I'm self starter.
Well, Those are minimumqualifications for a product manager.
They're not differentiating at all.
So when I work with people, it'slike, what is your differentiator?
What makes you different?
What makes you somebody, thehiring manager might be a little
more interested in learning moreabout this turns out to be hard.
People mostly don't know what theirdifferentiators are but in the process
(05:47):
of going through the stories andwhatnot, we can often come up with them.
So that's just the first example.
The value propositions, the first threelines of the resume, most people's
are just terrible and interchangeableand don't tell the hiring manager
anything if they're not activelymaking the hiring manager annoyed.
Absolutely.
You need to have those keywordsspecific and crafted to that audience.
(06:07):
Otherwise the message will justdissipate false and deaf ears.
They have nothing to encourage themto continue reading your resume.
That is right.
And you mentioned the word keywordsand it's an interesting thing.
People always talk about, well,I have to have all the keywords
in my resume and that's actually
not literally true or it's literallytrue but in a way that most people don't
think about, they say, well, you needto match the job description but the
(06:29):
job description is really a minimum setof functionality that the person needs.
It's like, if you're doing an RFP, right?
If you have a product and you'refilling an RFP and the problem
with RFPs is they say, whetheryou have the basic functionality
but they don't allow you any placeto say how that impacts the customer.
(06:50):
It doesn't allow you to talk aboutdifferentiation anything like that.
The job description is the same way.
In the world of product management rightnow, it's a hugely competitive market.
Every job has hundreds ofqualified people applying for it.
Which means that if they justwork to the job description, all
those resumes are interchangeable.
That's not that interesting.
The other thing to think about is whenthe hiring manager and this is true
(07:12):
for going to market with anything butin this example, the hiring manager
has gone to market trying to findsomebody to be a product manager.
Well, in order to get that rec approved.
They had to go to leadership and say, Hey,we have this big problem and if I don't
get funding for a 200, 000 plus job rack,we're going to fail as a company or this
(07:35):
whole business is not going to succeed.
So imagine what type ofproblems those might be.
It might be competitive problems ormarket share problems or customers
unhappy, whatever they might be.
Guess what doesn't show up in the resume.
Guess what doesn't showup in the job description.
The hiring manager is not goingto put into the job description.
Oh, we are suffering so badly becausewe don't know how to do this thing.
So I need to get our product manager.
They're not going to put that.
(07:56):
So if you're building your resume offthe job description, you won't be talking
about the problems the hiring manager has,you'll be talking about things he doesn't
really care about he or she are requiredto in order to solve the problems.
So what do I recommend to do this?
To deal with this while you thinkabout the things that you did as
a product manager, the successesand your successes are always about
(08:17):
having solved problems like that.
Oh, I solved the market share problem.
I solved this.
We weren't selling and I reversed that.
And then you put that in asyour bullet point and you tell
us a little story about it.
The story becomes the thing that hookssomebody in and then the hiring manager
reads that bullet point and they say, oh.
I have that problem.
Chris knows how to fix it.
(08:38):
Maybe we should have Chrisin for a conversation, right?
That's your goal.
Simply saying, oh, I did athing and sales went up by 20%.
That doesn't address thatbecause I don't know if sales,
if the market was growing 20%.
In which case I get no credit for that.
But if I say, oh, we were losing marketshare, sales were declining and all
our customers were leaving and I didsome things and sales went up by 20
(09:00):
percent and oh, by the way, we startedregaining market share and I won an award.
That all fits in a three or fourline bullet and suddenly the hiring
manager says, Oh, this guy's a star.
And it's interesting because thatwas almost what you described as what
usually people do is what I've done.
Putting very short description that canfit on a single line saying it grew sales
by 20% but to actually put it into astory framework where you can describe
(09:23):
it in three to four short sentences.
I never realized how impactfulthat could be on the receiving
end, the hiring manager wonderingwho can solve our problems here.
So there's a bunch ofrules about resumes, right?
One of them is keep your bullet pointshort, always put a number in your
bullet point, start with an active verb,there's also try to keep it on one page.
All of these rules are basically wrong.
(09:45):
They guide you into making a worse resume.
Basically now shorter is maybebetter but not at the expense of
putting a number in is great but notif you don't put some context around
it, so I know whether it's good orbad starting with an action verb.
Okay, use action verbs but that'snot what often people do is they
put the action verb in which meansthat they don't then talk about
the problem that they were solving.
(10:06):
So nobody ever knows about the problem.
They don't know that youhad this amazing impact.
So I think all the rules are wrong.
Basically the one pageris also wrong, right?
Particularly if you're a product managerbecause you can't get a product management
job without multiple years of experienceas doing work typically as sort of
doing important work in a business.
Well, that means your resume, youhave a lot of stories to tell, a lot
(10:28):
of stuff to communicate about you.
And the hiring manager is only going toread the first half page but it needs
to be engaging and make them think,Oh, I should talk to this person and
then they might check out some of theother stuff and your education on that.
But they don't care about how long it is.
They're going to read the first half page.
They say, I think I'm scanthe rest, look at the end.
Do they have an education?
Okay, let's get this person.
(10:49):
They don't care how long it is.
That is some great information andit's important to know what things
we were taught that are wrong or justaren't relevant to us today anymore.
It's so important and that landscapeof just ever changing advice.
It's something that we need tokeep our ear to the ground with.
I wanted to ask more about the changesin the workforce since COVID because
(11:10):
it feels like for the last 50 to ahundred years, it was a privilege
and an honor to work for a companywhere the companies had leverage.
Now, since COVID working from home,it seems wages are finally starting to
increase for the lower middle class butbarely they seem to have a little bit
more leverage now where the companiesneed to court the employees a bit more.
(11:31):
As as well, do you kind ofsee this dynamic shift within.
I guess just the way that peoplepresent themselves, the storytelling,
the resumes, are you seeing any changeswithin workplaces in the workforce?
It's actually sort of the opposite,at least in product management
and a lot of these technical rolesbecause there's a couple reasons.
One is.
There was a big hiring bump inproduct managers in the early 2020s.
(11:53):
A lot of those people have been laid off.
So there's a bunch of experienced productmanagers in the market looking for work.
So you're competing with,and everybody wants the job.
It's the hottest job.
Everybody wants a job butpays well, it's very exciting.
It's the best job in theworld, in my opinion.
So there's a ton of competition forthis job and it's very qualified
as a rule, this competition.
So simply being a qualified candidate.
(12:15):
It doesn't get you veryfar in the job search.
It gets you out of a thousandresumes, maybe a hundred people
are highly qualified but the hiringmanager wants 10 to go further on.
So you have to set yourselfapart from highly qualified.
That is the situationin product management.
It's possible that's changingbut it's never going to go to
the point where you can get everyproduct management job you apply for.
(12:36):
If you have no spelling errors in yourresume, that's just not happening again.
Right.
Right.
You're telling me I can't walk intoa warehouse or a factory, shake the
manager's hand and get a job the same day.
Well, if you want to work in a factory,you might be able to, as a factory worker
but not as a product manager, right?
Product managers are one to 2 percentof the workforce in a high tech company
(12:56):
which means there's not very many of us.
It's like, we're not as rare as CEOsbut we're probably the next rarest role
with a company, maybe product marketing.
There should be more productmarketers than there are.
There should probably be moreproduct managers than there are
but they're both very rare jobs.
Absolutely.
And they're very overhead because thethings that we work on today don't
have an impact on the business oftenfor six months to a year to two years
(13:19):
depending on the size of the business.
So it's very easy for companiesto say, well, I'm going to get
rid of the product managers.
And so I can make my numberthis quarter and it's a bad idea
but you might potentially get abenefit out of it this quarter.
Yeah, unfortunately a lot of thosebusiness decisions are short sighted
where they're not looking at themedium and long term impact and
success that something can have.
They need instant results, theinstant gratification just to make
(13:42):
the numbers look good that quarter.
Like you said it's unfortunate.
Yeah.
I was thinking about this whole ideaof the resume is longer than a page.
And one of the things that we learnwhen we start talking about marketing or
learning about marketing is that the salespage for your product can be any length.
It doesn't have to be short.
It can be long.
It just has to be engaging.
Right?
(14:02):
And it has to do all the things itneeds to do to persuade the prospect
to buy or to click on the freetrial link or whatever it might be.
The resume is the same deal.
The resume is a sales page.
In fact, I even talk about theresume as not being a summary
section, an experience section.
I talk about it as there's a valueproposition and then there's the demo.
(14:23):
The experience section is a demo.
Let me show you all the cool things I'vedone for other people just like you.
It doesn't say, let me show youall the features and functions.
This is the file menu and you can go new.
You can go open, you don't do it that way.
And that's what most of them are.
You say, let me show you how I solvethis big problem that probably you
have or somebody who has that you mightfind interesting about how I went about
doing it and the impact was really big.
(14:45):
that is absolutely incredible.
Now with different tools that arecoming out there have always been
resume builders or services to whatsuccess you would have is up for debate.
But with some of the new AI tools andlarge language models there becoming
more sophisticated and advanced, doyou see AI as being a beneficial tool
(15:05):
for resume building or storytelling,if you can give it the right framework.
Yeah.
I use ChatGPT in my coaching.
What I've found though is it's notgood at, you have to give it the story.
If you give it the story maybe the bulletpoints are the highlights of the story.
There was this problem, hereare the symptoms, blah, blah.
Here's what I did, blah, blah.
Here's the impact that we had, blah, blah.
(15:26):
If you give it that storyit can do two things.
One is it can write a really goodnarrative version of that story.
It's usually a little bit overblown right?
It said, oh, the results wereremarkable, you have to start to tone
that down a little bit but you canessentially use that story in the
interview, if somebody says, well,tell me about this bullet point.
You can essentially use thatstory that ChatGPT wrote.
(15:46):
You have to be very careful of coursebecause it might have made some things
up or whatever but the other thing itcan do and this is because I have my
ChatGPT, Instance knows how I do this.
It can create a draft bulletpoint for you and here's what
the format of the bullet point is
there's a problem.
There's something you did and it hadthese results and it does an okay
(16:08):
job about 80 percent of the time.
Always needs work.
Sometimes it leaves out the problemand then if you ask it to about
what it's doing, it will be wrong.
It will say, oh, it knows so much aboutresumes from the internet that are wrong.
It says, well, I always start with anactive verb and I use a quantitative.
It's like, that's not what you'redoing actually but it doesn't
(16:28):
know that it's not doing that.
That's very true.
The model can be only as good asthe information that it's fed.
So it's using some
information that is not actually correctin my view, but that's very common.
So the bottom line is.
From my experience so far, it is notgood at eliciting the story but it's
good at, once you have the story,helping you turn it into a bullet point.
(16:48):
The other thing I use it for is ifI write the bullet point myself, I
will have it help me shorten it andit does a good job of that, often.
Again, you have to try multipletimes and sometimes It leaves out
things that I don't want it to.
So I have to be sternwith it but generally it's
definitely a tool that I use.
And I find it very valuable for that.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Just like any other tool out there,it's how you as a user use it.
(17:11):
What is your intended end result?
What are you trying to get out of it?
And that can determine yourresults from the tools that you use.
It's how you use it.
Just something in our arsenal witheverything that you're building.
Even though you're just in for a year,what are you most excited for going
into 2025, are you planning anythingnew or exciting, or are you kind of
doing the same of everything that'sbeen working for you the last year?
(17:32):
So my big goal for 2025 iscoming up with some scale.
So figuring out what that is,though, because one thing I found is
people don't really want to buy, forexample, a resume writing course.
They want to be one on one withme which it makes total sense.
I mean, there's a huge amount of value inthat but it's just me and my time and I'd
rather have a little bit more scale there.
The other thing is I really want towork on this go to market for companies
(17:57):
component of the business and expand that.
I think there's a huge amount ofopportunity for how many times I
talk to somebody who needs theirresume done because they're the
company they're working for,they think is going to go under.
And I go look at their website andI say, I have no idea if I was the
exact right client for this web,this company, I would have no idea by
(18:17):
looking at the website and I feel like,well, that's low hanging fruit, right?
For a lot of companies, if theycould fix that and I suspect that
their demos are not good, right?
So you go to the demo and they'reprobably just demoing features and
functions that is where I would like tosee some growth in the business as well.
Cause I think, I just want there to bemore successful products, particularly
products that are good but theyhaven't figured out how to sell cause
(18:37):
I've been in that situation before.
I worked on a product backin the early two thousands.
That was an amazing product.
It was fantastic productfor product managers.
We never figured out how to sell it andone of the reasons I got so into go to
market and nobody had taught me the stuffthat we didn't do and so we didn't do it.
And as a result, the companyfailed and I want to prevent that.
(19:00):
I want to help other companies andproduct managers avoid that outcome.
That's kind of my goal in life, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
Because there's a lot of products outthere that never even get the chance
to really make it because unfortunatelya lot of those important foundational
pieces aren't laid properly for them.
And unfortunately, we also see alot of terrible products that are
(19:22):
wildly successful but they don'tdeliver on their promise at the end.
The thing that people tend to forget andthat's the exact right example to use.
The idea behind the product,the problem that you're solving
is the most important thing.
If you're solving a problem that ismeaningful to people, you can't have
a product if you don't have that.
The next most importantthing is to go to market.
If you can convince people thatyou will solve that problem
(19:42):
for them, you can sell it.
You don't need a product.
And obviously products that arelike fraudulent or things, that's
what they, how they sell, right?
The product doesn't really existbut people are sold on the value.
The problem with product companiesis that we tend to think that
the product is the most importantthing and it's really not right.
The other two things are more important.
The technology is notinteresting really to buyers.
(20:04):
It's what problem are you solving?
And are you reaching the people thathave that problem to tell them that
there's a solution that's betterthan their other alternatives?
And if you can do that, it doesn'tmatter that much about the product
in the middle, obviously, to be anethical company, you have to solve that
problem in reality but the problem issort of the third leg of that stool
(20:24):
and it's not the most important one.
I know there's lots of products out therethat solve problems that are worth solving
but the market doesn't know about them.
And so they fail.
Absolutely.
And nowadays because you've worked withproducts and companies services, I feel.
They're removing value.
They're moving features.
They're removing benefits.
They're increasing the prices.
There's a lack of competition.
(20:46):
What the heck can we do to help theseunderdog products out there get their
time to shine so we have more competitionso that Everyone can have more features,
more benefits and more competitive prices.
Yeah, it's a great question.
And there's lots ofdifferent levels of answer.
There are certainly markets where thereare effective monopolies, which is hard.
(21:08):
It's going to be hard to fightagainst those for the little guy
but one thing, there's lots ofproblems that aren't yet solved.
There's lots of companies out theresolving problems but nobody knows it.
You can't just blame competition fornot being successful if you're not
actually getting out to the peoplethat have the problem you solve and
telling them why your solution isa better one for them than their
alternatives, you have to do that andyou have to have some proof about it.
(21:30):
You have to be able to talkabout your successful customers.
Most customer success stories areabout the company and the product.;
They're not about the successfulcustomer and the pain that they are
in because what you want to be able todo, this goes back to the storytelling.
A good customer success story isall about how before they were a
customer, they were in terrible pain.
They searched for solution aftersolution, everything failed.
(21:50):
Then they found us.
Now their life is wonderful.
We're one line in that story.
One line is all we need to have inthat story because what you want
the prospect to come in and say, oh.
I'm suffering that same,I tried all those things.
My life is horrible.
These people did one thingand now their life is great.
I want to be like them.
This is the secret of go to market.
(22:10):
That's why the storiesare so important, right?
You, this, that does not work.
If you don't have the story ofthe tragedy of the prospect.
That's what gets people excited aboutnew products and me excited, obviously.
I mean, I'm getting mytalking, I'm talking faster.
I'm getting louder.
It's like, I love this stuff.
I think it's so frustrating to me tosee how many companies fail at this.
(22:31):
Absolutely.
I think Google has literally pushedevery known product available in the
universe to market and I don't knowif it's because they have such a name
brand but they seem to kill off certainproducts when things aren't hitting just
right or it's not an instant success.
Do you find that as an issue with productmanagement and go to market, whether
for business or for a career, justknowing when maybe the audience or the
(22:54):
job I'm going for isn't the right fit.
Or maybe I need to re-look at themessaging or what my offer is.
Well, Google's a veryinteresting example of this.
Google essentially has a coupleof successful products and has
had many fail failed products.
Why is this?
I always think of Google Wave.
I dunno if you even remember that.
You might be too young but GoogleWave, they released this years ago.
It was a very successful internal toolthat they built and it was kind of a chat.
(23:18):
Messaging this and that.
It's probably kind of like notionor slack or something like that.
And they released it to the market andthey said, Hey, look at this cool tool.
We did.
It has all these features andthey didn't say who it was for.
It didn't say anything about usecases that were ideal for it.
It didn't give you predefined setupsfor particular types of interactions.
So basically it did everythingwrong and go to market.
(23:40):
Guess what happened to that product?
It failed.
The only reason we remember thisis because Google is so big that
the launch was actually somethingthat kind of landed on our brains.
Many little companies do the same thing.
They launch a cool technology.
They don't say who it'sfor, why it's useful.
They don't help people get started andof course they go away and we don't
ever remember them because they were notimportant enough to impinge on our brain.
(24:03):
They might have been if they'd done goto market better and I suspect there's
a lot of other things at Google wherethey've tried to launch and failed.
We just don't remember them.
But Google is that unusual kindof beast that when they launch
something and it fails, we rememberit because it was big enough, right?
Google Glass, same kind of deal, Googlecircles or whatever that thing was called.
Say G plus, whatever itwas called, it was circles.
(24:24):
You know that the problem withcircles was they didn't give us a
reason to use it rather than Facebook.
There probably was one.
They didn't articulate it.
They didn't make it like, oh,this is the obvious choice.
I mean, lots of failures on the Google'spart for sure and we can all learn, we
can learn from them if we take the rightlessons which I think most people don't.
The lesson of Google glass wasnot that it wasn't a good product.
(24:45):
The lesson was Google released itand said, here's a thing, try and
figure out what to do with it.
That's not the way you market a product.
You say, oh, here's a thing.
Anybody can buy it but if you're inthis particular industry and you're
not using it, you're going to loseout because we built all this stuff
that make your life 20 times better.
It is on the onus of Google to figure out.
(25:05):
If you remember the book, crossing thechasm, it's the bowling pin strategy, the
bowling alley strategy, what is the headpin, the market segment that needs your
product so badly, they will pay a premiumto use it because they're in so much
pain or Google doesn't seem to do that
and it means that their products,their product launches fail.
We would be using AR in our lives.
If Google had not failed withGoogle Glass 10 years ago?
(25:27):
It's very frustrating to me.
I really want AR to be workingand Google messed that up for us.
Darn you, Google.
It would be really cool to have just theworld popping up price tags on things or
the history of something or click to learnmore blink your right eye if you want
audio to play something cool like that.
Exactly.
Yeah, I would love that.
I think that would be great but I do thinkGoogle messed it up for the rest of us
(25:50):
with their launch Apple kind of did too.
And with their headset, theyneeded to have also same thing.
They needed to have a use case thatwas so compelling for a segment.
They could make enough money to keepthe product going based on that segment.
And then they keep investing.
It gets better and better andit gets more and more applicable
to the rest of the market.
That is what happened withall the successful disruptive
innovations, they started that way.
(26:12):
They started as not very goodfor most things but really
good for one particular thing.
And I mean, we've got a long way fromresumes at this point but go to market
is, it's the go to market, you have toknow who your target segment is, for
whom your solution is the best solutionway better than the alternatives.
If you haven't figuredit out, you will fail.
I mean, we see it, we'veseen it a million times
so
(26:33):
you have to figure that out.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I'm sorry to take it away from resumesbut it was your past background and
experience that I knew you would havesome very insightful input into that.
And just knowing, hey, you really haveto solve a very big problem for a market
that's willing to pay a premium, usethat bowling alley strategy to knock that
first pin down and then do things better.
I think that's a really overlookedstrategy and very smart.
(26:55):
And obviously I didn't make it up butI do see most people not doing it.
So I think the successful companies do.
They either have done that or theyhave come up with an innovation that
I've been like the other exampleI always like to use is Instagram.
So Instagram, when it came out, I don'tknow if you remember the days before
Instagram, all the photo apps had lotsof dials and sliders and they said,
(27:16):
well, you can make your photo look asgood as you want dials and sliders.
Instagram came out and said, wedon't have dials and sliders.
We have filters that are prebuilt.
If you click on a filter,your photo will look better.
And sliders, your photo alwayslooks worse when you do it, right?
Unless you're a professional, your photolooks worse when you try to edit it.
So what was the big difference betweenInstagram and other photo editors?
(27:37):
Well, there's two, there wereother differences but one of
the big ones was Instagram wouldmake your pictures look better.
The other ones made your pictures lookworse which one are you going to choose?
You're going to choose the one thatmakes your pictures look better.
Even if in reality, mostpeople didn't even use filters.
I mean, other advantages of Instagramas well but to me, I saw that and I
thought, okay, that's going to win.
No question.
Absolutely.
(27:57):
And it's important to take a look at thepast wins and failures of other product
launches just to see what is workingand what isn't, and try to analyze that.
So we can use that forour benefit to help us.
Can I give you my other favoriteexample of storytelling and marketing?
Please do, that would be great.
So, you know how Apple they had theiPod billboards with the person,
(28:19):
they were black and white originallywith the white headphones and they
were like dancing, it was a staticpicture, all it said was iPod.
Advertising works betterwhen there's a story.
That when you can identify there'ssome kind of a pain, somebody got
a solution that makes them happy.
Well, the Apple iPod adsare exactly that, right?
Somebody is dancing around.
And you know what the story is becausein those days we all had Walkmans, which
(28:41):
meant that we had about a dozen songswe could carry around or 20 and if we
wanted to have a different record, we hadto get a different cassette or whatever.
We couldn't mix them up.
We couldn't shuffle them with the cassetteones and then here comes the problem.
So this is a big pain.
If you like music, you want to listento what you want to listen to right
now, you're in the mood for something.
So the iPod says, just in thatone picture says, I can listen to
(29:01):
whatever I want, whenever I wantand I'm dancing all the time, right?
That's a great outcome.
That's a great story.
Sometimes Apple has these otherads, which are pictures of what
I call beauty shots of the phone.
And if you look at the sales processprofile of Apple, when they market
with beauty pictures, sales go downwhen they market with stories, which is
(29:21):
also shot on iPhone sales go up, downwith Judy pictures up with stories.
The shot on iPhone is also a storytelling.
There's a picture what'shappening in that picture.
I don't know but somebodythought it was interesting
enough to take a picture of it.
So I'm going to believe that there'sa story behind it as a human being.
Stories really work and Appleforgets it every now and then
when they start using beauty shots
(29:42):
and then they go back to shot on iPhone.
I mean, look at how often they'vegone back to shot on iPhone.
This is why.
I really love those commercials becauseI was fascinated with the fact that
you could have that sort of outputat end result from just an iPhone.
I was like, wait, what?
You're doing that with that?
Well, everybody has some problemthat some story they can create.
On top of that, it's like, oh, thinkabout what I would've had to do to take
(30:05):
that picture with a camera versus aphone or something interesting happened
here and they were able to capture that.
I wanna be able to do that.
That's been a challenge,that's a problem in my life.
Whatever it might be or itmight just be, there's something
interesting happening in there.
I wonder what it is.
Right?
I mean, it just creates that senseof wonder and obviously because
somebody took a picture that meansit was worth taking a picture of and
(30:25):
so that it intrinsically creates astory, even though you don't know what
the story is, it's really amazing.
That is awesome.
I love how the story kind of buildsitself just through our own imagination,
kind of similar to how reading does.
We're kind of reading thisour own reality, our own
fantasy land within the story.
That's incredible.
Exactly.
Now, for those who are interestedin getting connected with you,
(30:46):
where can they find out more andget connected with you online?
So the best place to connect with me is onLinkedIn and I'm Nils Davis on LinkedIn.
And I'm sure there'll be links.
And if you are interested in theresume work, you can schedule a free
resume review call with me by clickingon the link and my LinkedIn profile
that says, make your resume amazing.
So that's how to connect.
(31:06):
That's how to get the resume side.
I post lots of stuff about resumes, aboutproduct management, about storytelling,
all kinds of different things.
I have a newsletter and so lots ofways to connect with me but LinkedIn
is the sort of the central hub.
I love that.
Absolutely.
And we will have those linksavailable down in the show
notes and the description.
I'm already subscribed.
I'm excited to see more ofyour content and learn more.
Very exciting.
Nils, appreciate taking the time,sharing these tips and tricks with us.
(31:29):
Congratulations on yournew business venture.
Excited to see where this growsand you're going to do fantastic.
Just keep up the great work out there.
Thank you very much.
It's been delightful to be here.
You are a great interviewerand I've really enjoyed it.
I appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
Congratulations.
Thanks, Chris.
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