AMA: Gainsight Director, Product Management, Sailaja Kalle on Outbound Product Management

This particular role is not always needed but if your product is technical in nature, having this role to evangelize your product definitely helps in Adoption. Also if there are product managers in your team to prioritize and build features but they need constant feedback from customers, then having an Outbound PM helps in advocacy and quick feed and intel on product market fit.

Outbound PMs take what we learn and feed it back into our overall portfolio and product strategy. So keep reaching out to customers, and internal team members to understand the overall strategy and share the vision helps in building skills needed for this role. 

I believed our customer base was the biggest support group and they helped build this muscle for me.

Apart from this continuing to invest to stay tech savvy and on soft skills will always help.

Outbound Product managers also have foundational product management skills, technical expertise, and a focus on product success like traditional Product managers. However, the best outbound PMs are continuous learners who are good communicators, customer-focused, and technically savvy. Ideally, I look for candidates who have meaningful product management experience, worked in the enterprise software space before, know the industry landscape, and have outstanding soft skills.

It came as a natural transition between building features, and products and sharing what we built and its purpose with others and feeding the learnings back to the product. The goal of “increasing the adoption and fit of our products.” aligned with my love for learning every day. This part of my role requires the combination of every professional skill I’ve developed to this point, while still teaching me new ones.

Innate quality to be a continuous learner along with being a seasoned PM. Having industry experience in the area of the product and good soft skills helps in this role. If there is a broad portfolio of products and outbound PM is needed to help with the market positioning, then maybe internal team members from other departments with skills to unify internal strategy helps.