To discern the truth in a headline, think like Edward Tufte, founder of information design and hero to Fortune’s Path: look at the context.

Eric Carroll learned valuable lessons from his father’s career as an entrepreneur, and he’s applied them to his own work in non-traditional ways. Eric is a product leader with experience in education, consumer goods, and healthcare. Tom and Eric discuss deciding what kind of leader you want to be — Step 4 of the 12 Steps of Product Management. And Eric talks about managing your family as a product, complete with off-site meetings and goal-setting with your partner. Tom slips in a casual reference to reading Seneca.

Bill Horne has always wanted to be a CEO but says it’s not a job for everybody. After a decade in sales for IBM, he began his journey as President/CEO or board member at eight different companies. Bill was recently the chief executive at Quovant, a legal spend management and data analytics business, and now heads 88 Keys, an executive coaching firm. Tom and Bill talk about improving the things you can control and accepting the things you can’t, step 2 of the 12 Steps of Product Management. And Bill explains how he brings customers into board meetings.

The function of competitive intelligence is to help organizations make critical decisions. But it’s often trapped in silos that keep it from being the reliable, actionable and timely resource it needs to be. Fortune’s Path breaks your CI out of silos so you can put it into action.

Fortune’s Path brought its product marketing and product management skills to help Quovant achieve success at a pivotal moment in the company’s growth.

CloudCME knew they had a great potential leader among their sales team, and Fortune’s Path created a successful leadership coaching program just for her. But FP didn’t stop there; it also provided CloudCME with two highly impactful sales enablement tools to propel sales momentum.

Anne Chaconas isn’t brave, she just has a lot of practice putting herself out there. As a marketing leader, Anne has run her own firm and earned positions of increasing responsibility at a variety of tech companies. Tom and Anne talk about loving your customers — step 3 of the 12 Steps of Product Management. And Anne explains how marketing a business is like setting up a profile on a dating app.

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.

Consider this your product strategy / product launch / market strategies cheat-sheet:

1. Choose a smallish well defined market and dominate it

2. Solve a known problem within a larger vision

3. Achieve must-have status — no ROI required

4. Straddle the line between enterprise software and consumer software

5. Don’t sell to CIOs

6. Keep refining your pitch until a 24 year-old can say it over the phone in a first conversation and set the hook for a long sale

7. Keep selling more stuff to the same people