AMA: Splunk Director of Product Management, Subu Baskaran on Product Development Process

In B2B environments, AI can dramatically simplify complex workflows—whether through chat-based interfaces, dynamic wizards, or fully contextual recommendations. But context is everything. In technical products that deal with terabytes or even petabytes of data, AI’s effectiveness depends heavily on personalization, training data quality, and latency expectations. Without these, AI can produce suboptimal results or slow experiences that degrade user trust. When deciding whether to use AI or a tra ...Read More

The strategy really depends on where you are in the journey. Competing with established players looks very different for a startup versus a scaled company. For startups, it’s challenging to go head-to-head with an entrenched competitor unless you’re offering something uniquely differentiated. The most effective path is often to: Identify a beachhead customer with an acute pain point. Co-develop an MVP that solves that problem exceptionally well. Iterate rapidly while staying true to the long-ter ...Read More

I evaluate the performance of the product team—IC PMs, GPMs, and product leads—across five core dimensions: customer satisfaction, quality of deliverables, clarity of strategy, engineering productivity, and product telemetry: Customer Obsession & Satisfaction For IC PMs, this is the ultimate indicator of effectiveness. The strongest PMs are maniacally customer-focused—meeting customers regularly, not just when there is an escalation or a launch. My team maintains a steady cadence of conversa ...Read More

Strategic alignment is not a one-time activity—it’s a continuous operating rhythm. In an era of AI-driven acceleration and rapidly evolving customer expectations, agility matters more than ever. I typically maintain a rolling 3-year vision document that sets the long-term direction and doesn’t change frequently. However, the Year-1 product strategy evolves much more dynamically as we learn from customer signals, shifting market conditions, and new data. This ensures we stay anchored to our North ...Read More

My role isn’t to dictate features but to provide the strategic context, air cover, and cross-functional alignment the team needs to make confident decisions that drive the business. I set the guardrails for monetization and work with PMs to pressure-test decisions so they: Don’t slow early adoption Remain consistent with company pricing and packaging guardrails Deliver meaningful business impact without compromising long-term customer value I stay accountable through structured operating rhythm. ...Read More

AI has fundamentally accelerated and elevated our product planning process. If you haven’t revisited your strategy through the lens of AI—whether to build new capabilities or augment existing ones—you risk falling behind. AI has pushed us to re-examine our roadmap end-to-end, and we’ve been intentional about incorporating AI-driven features where they meaningfully improve the user experience or increase productivity. While our roadmap has evolved, we’ve stayed anchored to our long-term vision so ...Read More