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AMA: Optimizely Former Senior Director, Product Marketing, Robin Pam on Influencing the Product Roadmap
February 25 @ 10:00AM PST
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Optimizely Former Senior Director, Product Marketing, Robin Pam on Influencing the Product Roadmap
Top Questions
How do you manage launches when the product team has a difficult time sticking to timelines?
This makes launches pretty difficult to manage without creating large lapses in communication.
Robin Pam
Stripe Product Marketing Lead • February 25
Your product team is not unique! I've never heard of a product team that sticks to deadlines exactly. The best lesson I've learned on how to mitigate this in enterprise software is that you can launch a product many times. There are different ways to do this: pre-announce at your conference w......Read More
1401 Views
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Robin Pam
Stripe Product Marketing Lead • February 25
Become an expert in a data set that's close to revenue. Knowing as much as you can about how market interest turns into revenue (i.e. your entire marketing & sales funnel) is the easiest way to make yourself indispensible to both product and company strategy. When you know more than anyone el......Read More
2331 Views
1 request
Robin Pam
Stripe Product Marketing Lead • February 25
We have a few processes for this at Optimizely. First, the sales team provides feedback directly, primarily through our sales engineering team who document feature requests and gaps in sales cycles within a Salesforce workflow that connects to Jira tickets. PMM isn’t too involved in this (we don’......Read More
1355 Views
3 requests
Robin Pam
Stripe Product Marketing Lead • February 25
* Be objective: Use customers' exact words and quotes as much as possible. Be the notetaker, the objective observer, and people will start to trust your observations. * Be concise: Once you've listened, sat in on meetings, taken good notes, get good at synthesizing them into short summ......Read More
1186 Views
2 requests
Have you found a good framework to communicate your product roadmap to customers?
We're trying to strike a balance of communicating high priority initiatives without getting caught up in exactly timelines.
Robin Pam
Stripe Product Marketing Lead • February 25
Our amazing product team maintains a public facing product roadmap. And by “public facing”, we mean a slide deck that is presented to customers and prospects only in 1:1 meetings by a salesperson or customer success manager. It gets a major overhaul once a year, and small updates 1-3x/quarter bas......Read More
1369 Views
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Robin Pam
Stripe Product Marketing Lead • February 25
I just finished reading Obviously Awesome by April Dunford, and really enjoyed it. She’s a good Twitter follow too. I get most of my info from Twitter these days instead of blogs/bloggers, and find good insights from product management experts as well. I like Marty Cagan (good blog posts too), Me......Read More
1762 Views
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Robin Pam
Stripe Product Marketing Lead • February 25
Focus on what your team can deliver on with your current staffing, and be very clear about what’s not possible to cover. It may be doing your team a favor to have these other teams taking some responsibility, since it frees you to focus. Now the challenge is to define the areas you want to have a......Read More
1068 Views
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Robin Pam
Stripe Product Marketing Lead • February 25
In enterprise software, you can usually let the product and engineering team push new features when they are ready, as long as sales training is coming soon. Adoption of new features tends to be slower in enterprise software, particularly if using those new features depends on getting through a s......Read More
1143 Views
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