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Stephen Baloglu

AMA: Adobe Director of Product Marketing, Stephen Baloglu on Influencing the Product Roadmap


November 13, 2025 @ 11:00AM PT

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Stephen Baloglu

Director of Product Marketing · Adobe

Hi all, I'm Stephen Baloglu, Director of Product Marketing @ Adobe:

👋 Based in:
San Francisco
🧠 Top of mind:
AI...in the products we're selling and as a superpower for Product Marketers
💬 Ask me about:
Building a $.5B business as a startup inside a larger company. And...just about anything related to Sailing!
🍦 Fun fact:
My last name is Turkish, but I'm actually Greek.
  1. What customer feedback loops and channels have you found to be the most impactful in your efforts to influence the roadmap?

    Stephen Baloglu
    Stephen Baloglu

    Adobe Director of Product Marketing • 7mo

    As we all recognize, the voice of the customer is one of the most powerful influences on shaping strategy and, ultimately, the product roadmap. Over time, methods for gathering meaningful, representative feedback have evolved, but nothing replaces direct, human connections with customers. Here are what I consider the top five customer feedback loops today: Customer Interviews: Nothing beats direct conversations with customers. These provide rich, nuanced insights that often reveal underlying mot ...Read More

    2,615 Views
    1 request
  2. How would you recommend a PMM influence the product team to think more about longer term value rather than just always building products geared towards low hanging fruit/quick money?

    Stephen Baloglu
    Stephen Baloglu

    Adobe Director of Product Marketing • 7mo

    Who doesn't love low hanging fruit...but sometimes it can feel like we're not delivering on the bigger picture and innovating to take a bite of a big, juicy opportunity. My favorite framework to overcome this is an investment portfolio approach where a mix of resourcing is spread across different risk/return investments. From core, incremental improvements to low risk experiments and ultimately higher risk big bets. For an established product, that might look something like 70/20/10.To put more ...Read More

    1,619 Views
    1 request
  3. How do you balance relying on customer feedback to influence the product roadmap vs identifying innovation opportunities?

    Stephen Baloglu
    Stephen Baloglu

    Adobe Director of Product Marketing • 7mo

    To create a winning product, you can’t just build a roadmap based on feature requests in customer feedback. As a product marketer, you need to understand motivations, job to be done, pain points worth solving and unmet needs In my opinion, there’s no difference in the types of roadmap items you can prioritize based on customer feedback and it doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. Innovation is fundamentally informed by customer feedback. It’s a matter of how deeply you listen to customers, how clo ...Read More

    1,614 Views
    1 request
  4. What insights/ data should I gather to share with the Product team when we meet to do quarterly roadmap planning?

    Stephen Baloglu
    Stephen Baloglu

    Adobe Director of Product Marketing • 7mo

    Never go into roadmap planning empty handed! Great product development takes time and these planning cycles set teams off to work. Whether it’s a 2-week sprint or a 2 quarter cycle, you want to make sure that work is directed in the most valuable direction for the business and your customers. And that it gives you what you need to deliver a compelling story to customers. Product teams may use different frameworks such as RICE scoring, Kano modeling, there are many others. So, be ready with relev ...Read More

    1,594 Views
    1 request
  5. How do you influence the roadmap at an enterprise company where product managers have long tenure?

    Stephen Baloglu
    Stephen Baloglu

    Adobe Director of Product Marketing • 7mo

    I’ve worked at multiple companies that have had long-tenured product teams as well as startups where we’re all fresh to the team. So, i’ve seen both sides here. In the case of long tenured teams, you have the opportunity to reignite fresh, day-1 thinking across the team. But, one of the biggest challenges to joining a team that has been working on a product for a long time is having an equal seat at the table to partner on product strategy. They’ve “seen it all” and “already tried that and it di ...Read More

    1,811 Views
    1 request