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Kara Gillis

AMA: Splunk Sr. Director of Product Management , Kara Gillis on Stakeholder Management

November 2 @ 10:00AM PST
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Splunk Sr. Director of Product Management , Kara Gillis on Stakeholder Management
Top Questions
How do you go about resolving conflict between team members?
Kara Gillis
Kara Gillis
Splunk Sr. Director of Product Management, Observability • November 2
If this is an HR issue - please involve HR right away. I'm intentionally going to assume it's not for this question. As a people leader, your role is to provide a psychologically safe environment for your team to strategize, collaborate, discuss, disagree, and align. A lot of people call this "s......Read More
379 Views
1 request
How do you build better relationships with product marketing? I feel like this is the most complicated relationship out of all cross-functional partners. How do you constantly stay aligned?
Kara Gillis
Kara Gillis
Splunk Sr. Director of Product Management, Observability • November 2
TLDR: Stay aligned by clearly defining your roles and responsibilities. There are published RACI models on the role of PMM. Align on a RACI and stick to it. Then establish a continuous cadence for staying in contact throughout product development to ensure PMMs are always in the loop. I love p......Read More
375 Views
1 request
How do you structure your Product team? How big is it, what does everyone do? How do you measure success of each function/person?
Kara Gillis
Kara Gillis
Splunk Sr. Director of Product Management, Observability • November 2
I have led different sizes of product teams and single product teams or multiple product teams within an org. My philosophy is to structure a team to make ownership and decision making very clear; I use the MECE (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive) framework to reduce as many inter-team......Read More
414 Views
1 request
How do you measure your own success in your role? How much have those performance indicators evolved as you grew within your role?
Kara Gillis
Kara Gillis
Splunk Sr. Director of Product Management, Observability • November 2
If I am in my current role managing PMs, I care about the following success metrics: * How are each of the team members progressing on their areas of ownership, achievement of their own OKRs? * How are my team members progressing in their career development plans? Have I successfully re......Read More
384 Views
2 requests
What is the best cadence for gathering stakeholder feedback in preparation for a launch?
Kara Gillis
Kara Gillis
Splunk Sr. Director of Product Management, Observability • November 2
TLDR: get as much feedback as early as you can from your customers to validate the use case you're solving and your approach to solving it, validate the solution with product leadership, as well as with sales and marketing in terms of messaging, make sure the product can be built to the requireme......Read More
401 Views
1 request