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

It's tricky to define OKRs for Outbound Product Managers because traditionally we are not directly responsible for the launch of products/features but strategically sit to influence what features/products get built and work on advocacy of what is built. We agreed on 3 OKRs for Outbound Product Management 1. Enablement and Adoption - It is crucial to enable customer-facing teams - Sales, Implementation, Support and Customers for the success of the Product. So it's about how many videos, how 2. Revenue - Interact and engage with customers to improve the adoption of products. 3. Strategy - Unify the strategy across internal teams, partners, customers and engineering teams

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.