AMA: Splunk Director of Product Management, Richard Shum on Product Roadmap & Prioritization

Ideas can come from many places. They include customer feedback calls, customer troubleshooting sessions, customer submitted ideas (at Splunk, we have an idea submission portal called ideas.splunk.com), conferences (at Splunk, we host .conf where we have the opportunity to meet many customers in person), ideas from your engineering team (they generate some of the best ideas), and ideas you dream up yourself.   Once there’s a list of ideas, we typically do a full re-prioritization at annual plann ...Read More

It's always good to review roadmaps with leadership on an ongoing basis. These touchpoints allow you to keep your leadership informed and give you the opportunity to solicit feedback.  At the end of the day, gaining alignment is key to getting funding and resources. The leadership team is often looking to understand how your product is doing (e.g., usage, adoption, success stories) and how your roadmap can deliver additional impact (e.g., growth in usage, adoption, customer happiness). Clearly c ...Read More

When I prioritize or stack rank a list of items, I typically find it helpful to understand how each item can (a) deliver customer impact and (b) increase engineering happiness. Additionally, I also find it helpful to understand each item's level of (c) feasibility, (d) urgency and (e) effort.  I weigh customer impact and engineering happiness at 50:50 -- after all, you need to make your customers happy while also keeping your team excited. Things that are less feasible are often pulled down the ...Read More

In my mind, several groups of stakeholders often influence the roadmap. They include your customers (both internal and external), your product team (e.g., engineering, design, data science), your internal non-product stakeholders (e.g., legal, compliance, sales) and your leadership.  From these stakeholders, it's important to put most of your focus on the ideas coming from your customers and ideas generated by your team. While we all like to work on things that benefit the customer, it is equall ...Read More

Say exactly that "We're pivoting our product. There are a lot of unknowns and it's difficult to plan too far out." It's perfectly fine to communicate honestly. If there's a good reason for the pivot, no one will fault you for it.  If you're able to have direct conversations with customers, it's important that you set up these conversations. Having open and honest conversations is important to build trust despite the pivot. It is also an opportunity to solicit feedback and listen to your customer ...Read More

Before jumping into the "must do" work, it's best to understand the reason for doing the work.  Sometimes the "must do" work is warranted. For example, compliance could have high customer impact which naturally means that it'll get prioritized anyways. Sometimes the "must do" work is not impactful. For example, there might be a set of maintenance tasks that is necessary but it's highly manual and repetitive. While it needs to be done, it's more exciting for the team to reduce/eliminate this work ...Read More