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

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 dependencies as possible. How do I do this? It depends on the type of team I'm leading. For example - for customer facing products that my company sells, I first separate teams by the product on which th ...Read More

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 rewarded and promoted high potential team mates? Do I have development plans for each of my direct reports and are they on track for their next promotion cycle / role / increase in responsibility? Have I been able to su ...Read More

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 requirements customers need, and ensure all go-to-market functions sign off on the launch plan. There are two big influences on the cadence of gathering feedback: Which stakeholders - who are you referring to as ...Read More

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 product marketing as a function, and there is nothing more valuable to me than a strong product marketer. The triad model of product development often refers to Design, Product, and Tech/Engineering leads bu ...Read More

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 "storming and norming in order to perform." Your team will be made up of different types of people who must get used to each other, and it might not be smooth sailing initially. In general, it's good to cre ...Read More