AMA: Splunk Director of Product Management, Subu Baskaran on Managing Mature Products

Stakeholders for mature products are typically large customers, experienced field teams (sales, engineering, support in B2B), and long-term product team members. Managing customer expectation: While there are many aspects to managing customer expectations, here are a few things that I have encountered working on mature products: Hundreds of users within a large customer organization use the product daily and expect it to scale and perform to their growing needs. As PMs, it's our job to ensure th ...Read More

Technology can be a real competitive advantage. If your industry needs sub-second latency to monitor their systems, having a streaming architecture that delivers can make your product a no-brainer. Often, what's cutting edge today can be a drag within a decade. I have always looked at it from a customer's standpoint. For, I prioritize new product development to replace anything that is considered "legacy" when one of the following happens: The overall market is shifting. Often, when a new techno ...Read More

There are many challenges when creating a roadmap for a mature product. But I feel it is no different from creating a roadmap for a new product. In the latter, you have so many new features to build within a given time, whereas, in the former, you need to balance new features with tech debt, customer asks, and new competition threats. E.g., in a mature product roadmap, there are always major themes, such as New features Customer asks Market threats Tech Debt Lack of test coverage Launch-driven p ...Read More

Tech debt becomes a looming issue in every quarterly planning. It manifests itself in many ways, such as: Rising customer escalations due to new code causing regression issues. This happens when there isn't enough unit or integration test coverage to test all the "legacy code." Launch-driven product development causes teams to "cut corners" and leverage technology that needs to be reversed, as it may not scale or work for all deployment types. A simple example would be using a cloud-native servi ...Read More

Mature products are used by customers across the spectrum from large enterprise customers to startups. Metrics can change based on state of business but in general I would track these metrics for a mature product: Engagement: Depending on the industry, measured as Active Users, Amount of content created/consumed measured over time, Amount of data ingested/accessed (queried) Business Metric: iACV: how much an existing customer has expanded their product usage to new use cases, churn (how many cus ...Read More

A product is mature when it is near the saturation level in its operating market, typically over 80-90% of the serviceable addressable market. In a B2B Enterprise market, at least 90% of the large enterprise customers in the Fortune 100 are using the product to solve primary use cases. Mature products are sustainable for a while with minor enhancements and without adding any new features since they are the best at solving the primary use case. Finally, successful mature products are feature-rich ...Read More