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Jacqueline Porter

AMA: GitLab Director of Product Management, Jacqueline Porter on Enterprise Product Management

June 25, 2024 @ 10:00AM PT

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  1. How do you think about the differences between "enterprise" product management and SMB or mid-market?

    Jacqueline Porter
    Jacqueline Porter

    IBM Product Management • 2y

    SMB, or small-medium business, and enterprise segments may have different requirements along a few dimensions: Scale - how much of a load a system needs to handle Concurrency - how many of a single event at one time needs to be supported Fit and Finish - how comprehensive and complete are the experiences Ecosystem support - how extensive is the list of integrations required to support the JTBD for the target For the enterprise segment, they will often have the extreme of the highest requirements ...Read More

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  2. What are the key traits you look for in hiring enterprise PMs?

    Jacqueline Porter
    Jacqueline Porter

    IBM Product Management • 2y

    I have not been in an organization that used size segments for Product Manager hiring. As a result, I would imagine I would leverage the same key traits I look for in all PMs I hire: Bias for action - proactively seeks to implement solutions for our customers' and users' pain points Starts small - Interest in making as little of a disruption to the customer's workflow while improving the quality of life and business results Awareness - this is broad self-awareness and situational awareness. A pr ...Read More

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  3. How do you balance building for large potential customers before they buy vs having the sales team sell what you already have?

    Jacqueline Porter
    Jacqueline Porter

    IBM Product Management • 2y

    My answer would be don't balance it - just sell what you have. The most successful product-led companies I have been at are ones that are not chasing a vision of what was sold to a customer but can focus on building a vision that is compelling and solves real problems for the customer and market. Maybe the question is, how do I get my sales team to sell what we have? Create usecase based wins and artifacts showcasing your product in winning position Deeply understand where the sales teams are lo ...Read More

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  4. What is your strategy for how much engineering resources you dedicate to custom work for large enterprise accounts vs core roadmap?

    Jacqueline Porter
    Jacqueline Porter

    IBM Product Management • 2y

    This is a great question! In the 5 B2B enterprise SaaS organizations I have worked practiced no custom development! Although we may build specific features for target customers and in that case, each company has done this differently and all of the strategies have pros and cons. My favorite method is to have each product group or squad dedicate a portion of their roadmap to support revenue or Paid Monthly Active users. In practice, this would look like making sure the capacity of the engineering ...Read More

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  5. Working on an enterprise product, how often do PMs get a chance to make a significant impact? (As opposed to work on small/specific features)

    Jacqueline Porter
    Jacqueline Porter

    IBM Product Management • 2y

    Product managers often get to make massive impacts when there is product market fit - regardless of segment. With enterprise products, sometimes seeing those impacts can take awhile depending on the product, vehicle for consumption, deal cycles, and sales process.

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  6. Where can PM provide the most lift in the enterprise sales motion?

    Jacqueline Porter
    Jacqueline Porter

    IBM Product Management • 2y

    Product managers can be particularly useful thought leaders when impacting deals. Most importantly, in strategic deals it helps to have someone advocating and explaining the product that is not a sales person - because the customer or prospect feels they can trust the expert and not feel like they are being sold to. In this situation, you can represent a vision and product depth while also doing early selling.

    549 Views
    1 request