AMA: Cisco Meraki, Sr Dir Product Management, Networking and Security, Matt Landry on Enterprise Product Management

Honestly, the first product manager for a company is probably not ready to establish a prioritization framework. The first PM probably needs to focus on customer discovery, market discovery, MVP intuition, and experimentation. Until you have established product-market fit with enthusiastic customer demand, rigorous prioritization is probably bikeshedding. Once you have that fit, that's when you'll start to get inbound requests/ideas/complaints from current customers, potential customers, new mar ...Read More

Taking for granted a baseline of solid product management fundamentals and team simpatico, I feel the following play an outsize role in determining success in the enterprise: Skeptical curiosity Strong opinions, weakly held Speaking and presentation skills, in front of senior execs & audiences Ability to simplify and explain technical concepts Interest in customers' industries and their end customers Empathy for the sales team and how they sell Familiarity with routes to market and channel e ...Read More

Rule of thumb: don't build before they buy. If this whale wants something specific, they should put skin the game, either through a services/customization contract or a purchase contract contingent on a feature delivery. Of course, there's a lot of nuance to a situation like this.  Maybe there's an obvious gap in the product offering that the competition universally satisfies. It's probably something already on your backlog, and so you know it will unlock multiple incremental sales opportunities ...Read More

 Entry-level product managers for an enterprise product line tend to come in from two paths: technical background, and business background. Those with a stronger technical background might come from another part of the business, such as technical marketing or solution/sales engineering. They make up for a relative lack of experience in product strategy with deeper knowledge of product specifics (or demonstrated ability to learn), understanding of the industry & market (or demonstrated abilit ...Read More

 The impact that a product manager has depends much more on the type of product team and its role in the company than on the product's market (B2B, B2C, SMB, mid-market, enterprise, &c). Even for a miniscule aspect of a product, the PM has an opportunity for tremendous impact when they have responsibility for the full lifecycle and access to the end customer/user. They will be able to generate real insights, solve real problems, and deliver real value. The best product management teams delib ...Read More

Tactically, product managers can set the patterns that define successful customer accounts (e.g., via beta testing, early wins, clearly described use cases, &c.), engage with key customers to form lasting business relationships, and amplify the key customer problems. This is why customers love to speak with PMs. What's best for the customer is what's best for the product, so PMs are seen as sources of truth. The PM will listen for problems, won't egregiously oversell the product, and speak t ...Read More

"Custom infrastructure platform" is nearly an oxymoron. :-) Anyway, it doesn't sound like a product; products are offered for sale to a market. A "custom infrastructure platform" is very likely an internal project. It will have organizational stakeholders, clearly defined objectives (be very cautious here!), and a budget based on a (likely inflated) forecasted operating outcome. A project or program manager will be responsible for delivery here, and they partner closely with a technical architec ...Read More

 In the broadest sense, the role of the product manager doesn't change. The customer profile changes, the buying patterns change, and the routes to market change. The core PM responsibilities don't necessarily change. However, many of those customer changes have an impact on how the PM does their job. For example, enterprises often separate the end user (the person who wants to use your product), the decision maker (often someone higher in the user's reporting chain), and the economic buyer (usu ...Read More