Communities
Sign Up / Sign In
AMA: Splunk Sr. Director, Head of AIOps and IT Ops Products, Kara Gillis on Product Roadmap & Prioritization
November 1 @ 10:00AM PST
View AMA Answers
Splunk Sr. Director, Head of AIOps and IT Ops Products, Kara Gillis on Product Roadmap & Prioritization
Top Questions
Kara Gillis
Splunk Sr. Director of Product Management, Observability • October 31
In a perfect world, you want at least 80% of your roadmap to be applicable to both! But, we don't live in a perfect world, do we? Some startups focus on a small number of customers and really customize the product to the desired features of those early users, but I like to first go broad in a......Read More
520 Views
1 request
Kara Gillis
Splunk Sr. Director of Product Management, Observability • October 31
Prioritization is more art than science. My goal is to actively listen to all stakeholders and help communicate how I make tradeoffs and how that impacts timeline to deliver a requested feature. But as a rule... Customers have the most impact on roadmap. Then engineering (especially on t......Read More
458 Views
1 request
Kara Gillis
Splunk Sr. Director of Product Management, Observability • October 31
Executive alignment on your roadmap is pretty key to getting funding and resources to deliver on your roadmap. Your executive team probably cares about customer success, growth, and potentially things like margin/security/compliance. Tie your roadmap to these outcomes very clearly. If you c......Read More
522 Views
1 request
Kara Gillis
Splunk Sr. Director of Product Management, Observability • October 31
I tailor the product roadmap to the person / group with whom I'm communicating. I often will use Google Slides for a customer or sales facing presentation. With engineering, I'll often use a spreadsheet that lists roadmap initiatives in the order of priority and effort. Communicating with cust......Read More
632 Views
1 request
Kara Gillis
Splunk Sr. Director of Product Management, Observability • October 31
I think you say exactly that! "We're pivoting our product. There are a lot of unknowns. It's hard to plan our roadmap too far out. We're resetting expectations on how much we can communicate..." THEN, I would add this... "We are focusing on these 3 themes in this priority - 1... 2... 3...Ou......Read More
641 Views
1 request
Kara Gillis
Splunk Sr. Director of Product Management, Observability • October 31
I think it depends on what you mean by "building the roadmap." If you meant "how does product marketing help communicate the roadmap to sales and customers?" - this is a huge benefit to close partnership between product management and product marketing. Product marketing should be involved ear......Read More
396 Views
1 request
Kara Gillis
Splunk Sr. Director of Product Management, Observability • October 31
I typically advocate for using full-time engineering talent on the most innovative features, hardest problems to solve and outsource to third party services for things that I can depend on, not require a ton of updates to, and save me money. Your dedicated engineers are there because they're y......Read More
834 Views
1 request
Kara Gillis
Splunk Sr. Director of Product Management, Observability • October 31
I am a huge fan of public roadmaps! But, I think this is depends on: * Organizational cultural preference * Mission of the company / product (are you building a product to help companies provide public roadmaps, for instance?) * What industry you work in * If your product is open sourc......Read More
430 Views
1 request
Upcoming AMA's
Doppler Principal Product Manager, James Heimbuck on Product Roadmap & Prioritization
September 10 @ 10:00AM PST
Register
Show All