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

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.

Tom talks with Chuck Garcia, professional speaker, executive coach, best selling author, talk radio show host, Columbia University Professor, and avid mountain climber. Chuck helps executives transform themselves into better leaders.

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.