Shannon Hooper, formally Chief Strategy and Product Officer at BehavVR and now President of Unlock Health, talks about how she improves her insight through contact with customers, colleagues, and people she admires — step 11 of the 12 Steps of Product Management. Tom and Shannon also talk about how stoicism inspires Shannon and how Shannon interviews for traits like curiosity.

Martin Eriksson traces the origin of product management to Neil McElroy of Procter & Gamble. We don’t think this goes back far enough. In our continuing effort to educate the public that product management is not a role, instead that it’s a set of principles, we present The Fortune’s Path List of Product Management Pioneers.

Tom demonstrates a simple way to match your products features to the needs of a market to identify strengths and gaps in your product. Helpful for priotization and building competitive advantage.

Acknowledging who you are with, their history, their struggles and triumphs, is graciousness, and it’s an awesome sales technique. We want to buy from people and products we trust. It’s hard to establish trust if you have no empathy, if you don’t acknowledge your audience. Why should I buy from someone who’s guiding principle is “I care nothing for you”?

Slaying your dragons doesn’t always mean having the courage to do what you love. Sometimes it means having the courage to do what you don’t want to do, but know needs to be done. Dragons are imaginary, but they still take courage to overcome. Less than 1% of all the things I worry about have happened, yet the fear is just as real as if I’d stepped into dragon slobber.

What makes for good design? How do you pursue your education when you hate school? What’s the key to becoming a beloved brand? These are some of the questions we ask Gavin Ivester, Creative Consultant, Strategic Advisor, veteran of Apple Computer and for three + years the Vice President of design at Bang & Olufsen.

Tom talks with Chris Boyd, head of product for Built Technologies, start-up advisor, mentor, and one of the wisest people we know working in product management. Built Technologies recently announced a series C round worth $88M.

Tom and Chris talk about Chris's transition from project manager to product manager and play a game of "spontaneous product development" to create a product to disrupt the U.S. education market.

Mohit Purbey is a long time leader and entrepreneur in food production. His deeply thoughtful and informed ideas about food, governance, and corporate success will open your eyes to the food crisis and what we can do about it. Mohit talks about why we need to get food production closer to the point of consumption to improve security and transparency in our food supply. See if you agree with him on this episode of the Fortune’s Path podcast.

Tom explains how he wrote his book Fortune's Path: How to Use the Principles of Recovery to Find Fortune and Happiness, why he wrote it, and how he feels now that it's done. Tom also reads the 12 Steps of Product Management (we all have to manage the products that are our lives), the Forward (written by his son Joe Noser, 23) and the Introduction.

What is performance marketing, and how do you incorporate data into your marketing? What are the jobs of marketing and sales? What’s it like to enter the workforce during an economic downturn? These are some of the questions we ask Joshua Oakes, Creator and Founder of the Who First Framework, an audience understanding, product development, and customer acquisition process for executives, investors and entrepreneurs.