AMA: Splunk Director, Product Marketing, Rinita Datta on Product Marketing Productivity Hacks

Use quarterly planning to move from reactive task management to proactive prioritization. Every quarter, we write down our 3 key priorities and cascade them to initiatives and tasks with KPIs. Once these are aligned with your key stakeholders, they become your must-dos. If a new request or task doesn’t align with this plan, it becomes a nice-to-have. Another key thing to do quarterly is to revisit your always-on initiatives and tasks and decide if anything can be paused, automated or delegated. ...Read More

Driving clarity is very important when you have to manage multiple stakeholders and their varied expectations and agendas. Here are some tips to help figure things out: Write down an exec summary that has the goal(s) of your initiative, success metrics and a high level overview on timeline and tactics. Keep this updated with status, open questions, risks and dependencies as the project progresses so everyone can stay on the same page. Think through your stakeholder list and decide who needs to b ...Read More

I block time first thing in the morning and again before I log off for the day to go through emails. Unread non-promotional emails in my inbox at the end of the day stress me out! There are many filters I have set up for organizing emails that I do not need to look at immediately but will catch up on later eg. newsletters. Urgent asks from leadership or key stakeholders get starred and long emails with a ton of context get flagged for later reading. As much as I can, I will try to act and reply, ...Read More

A very common and successful practice is to categorize your launches in tiers.  Tier 1 is for strategic launches i.e. major new products or rebrands. You would do a full GTM plan, messaging write/re-write, content, PR, analyst outreach, sales and partner enablement etc. Tier 2 is for new features and use cases. You would create some new content, do email outreach, some sales enablement and blog posts. Tier 3 is for minor updates. Updates to release notes and community posts typically suffice her ...Read More

Maintain a ‘good slides’ deck and ‘top demos’ list that you can pull from. Use AI to brainstorm the outline of your presentation or demo and build on it. Write what you want to convey in notes below a slide before building it. Keep a story framework in mind as you’re delivering so you can keep yourself on track - RSTAR, SCQA or the usual pitch framework of Problem > Solution > Key Value > Proof > Call to Action. Record yourself and jot down notes on what worked/didn’t work whenever y ...Read More

Invest time in understanding, connecting and stitching data automatically from different systems so you can save time on moving from signal to action. Build dashboards to track your KPIs and set up thresholds and alerts for things that you may have to act on periodically eg. usage or conversion drops below a certain level. Not every signal is worth your time and effort. Design experiments to test your hypotheses if possible before doing a full scale strategy shift. There’s more volume to work wi ...Read More

Here's my stack today: At work:  Internal Cisco AI Assistant for brainstorming, copywriting, feedback synthesis, metrics analysis, generating slides, deep research (market, competitive), brand guidelines and finding the right icons, logos and photos. Slack and certain community tools for automated workflows on sales enablement, request intake, content moderation, personalized customer outreach, KPI measurement and summarizing unread messages. WebEx, Asana, Sharepoint and M365 for project managem ...Read More