Rinita Datta

AMA: Splunk Director, Product Marketing, Rinita Datta on Influencing the Product Roadmap

December 10 @ 9:00AM PST
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Rinita Datta
Splunk Director, Product Marketing | Formerly Morgan StanleyDecember 11
I would first interview some sales reps, customer success managers, and customers to validate and possibly support the competitive intelligence received with data and quotes. This research will help you gain more depth on the situation and build a comprehensive case to influence the product roadmap and address the competitive threat more strategically. Here are some things to look for in your research: * The competitor could be solving customer pain points using a feature that is either nonexistent or not highlighted in your product. In either situation, consider balancing showing feature parity with making the case for long-term innovation. * Look for win/loss stories, changes in market share, shifting inquiries with analysts, changes in press mentions, and other quantitative markers to help prioritize new development work. Your CI team might already have a lot of this. * Identify if there are any opportunities to shift GTM strategies and tactics to address the intel. This could include messaging and pricing/packaging changes or more focused sales enablement for a particular solution or in a specific geography. 
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Rinita Datta
Splunk Director, Product Marketing | Formerly Morgan StanleyDecember 11
Keep showcasing your technical/non-technical expertise, market understanding, and value as a cross-functional collaborator to build credibility and rapport. Here are some tactical things you can try to get looped in earlier: * Establish a 1:1 cadence with your PM counterparts to share top-of-mind priorities, customer insights from various sources, and product direction. * Proactively seek new sources of feedback and customer input that you can synthesize and market research that can help influence the roadmap. * During yearly and quarterly planning, align your OKRs for achieving revenue, adoption and satisfaction targets. Also, plan for major marketing milestones aligned with projected product/feature launches. * Offer to lead cross-functional brainstorming, new projects/initiatives, or GTM sync meetings. * Ask to be included in planning and business review meetings, as well as a reviewer for any roadmap documents and PRDs as key stakeholders. * Work with your leadership to ensure PMM is seen as a strategic partner.
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Rinita Datta
Splunk Director, Product Marketing | Formerly Morgan StanleyDecember 11
I’d meet your immediate PM counterparts at least once every week and talk about the roadmap at least once every month. If you support multiple PMs, having a monthly sync with leadership helps everyone stay aligned. Try to join any quarterly or yearly product initiatives/roadmap planning and QBR meetings.
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Rinita Datta
Splunk Director, Product Marketing | Formerly Morgan StanleyDecember 11
We’ve typically done this by cataloging every idea and piece of feedback from various sources in a backlog and assigning a weighted score to each for prioritization. The weighting factors can be business impact (new market entry/revenue growth/retention or satisfaction play, etc.), customer impact, alignment with market trends and leadership OKRs, ease and length of implementation, frequency of the request, etc. Doing this exercise collaboratively with your PM counterparts will help you understand the urgency of the requirements and categorize them into short-term enhancements vs long-term strategic innovation opportunities. It would also help to vet this list and your thinking by SMEs in your sales and customer success organizations.
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Rinita Datta
Splunk Director, Product Marketing | Formerly Morgan StanleyDecember 11
This is often the case at larger companies, and your expected outcome requires a lot of relationship building, regular communication, and tight alignment on OKRs and ongoing research projects. Here are some tactics you can try to drive this successfully: * Set up monthly syncs with the customer research team to share top-of-mind goals, identify new research opportunities or gaps, and discuss insights. * Ask to get included in ongoing research projects. You can review the methodology, participate in the response analysis process, bring your unique perspectives about the market and what you hear from sales and customer success, and align the insights with business goals to effectively influence the roadmap. * Showcase any past experiences where a research project or experiment you did positively impacted business goals. * Educate the research team on the competitive landscape and collaborate with them on the outreach/channel strategy for the target audience using your budget and PMM expertise.
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Rinita Datta
Splunk Director, Product Marketing | Formerly Morgan StanleyDecember 11
Haha, good question! Here are some things I can think of: * Don’t do the PM’s job for them. If you have an idea, recommend and discuss it rather than force it. * Don’t recommend something without due diligence. Ensure you can answer ‘Why is this so important,’ ‘Why now?’ and ‘How does it align with our goals.’ * Don’t be biased. Just because it didn’t work for you or for that one very vocal customer doesn’t mean that the world is ending and the roadmap needs to be changed now. Proactively build a case for the change with your research. * Don’t burn cross-functional bridges. Collaborate with sales, CS, design/UX, community, support, and other potential counterparts to support new ideas and show alignment. * Don’t overload requests. The product team almost always has a feature backlog and tech debt to work on. Strive to balance break-fixes, incremental enhancements, and longer-term innovation while considering customer needs.
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Rinita Datta
Splunk Director, Product Marketing | Formerly Morgan StanleyDecember 11
* Have a learner’s mindset. In your spare time, keep reading technical briefs, whitepapers, documentation, and even JIRAs to understand your products' architecture and technical details. This will help you better understand and better position yourself when discussing the feasibility of a new roadmap item with your PMs. * You can also ask to be a fly on the wall for product and support ticket review meetings to familiarize yourself with the terminology. * I’ve also made it a personal goal for my team and me to attend a few technical workshops and complete product courses every quarter to stay updated with the latest happenings. My team hosts monthly office hours for customers with product SMEs, too, where they hear directly about how the customer uses the product, what problems they face, and what could be done better. * Beyond learning things yourself, give back to your technical counterparts by educating them on the competitive landscape, customer insights, market research, etc., and showing how their work aligns with the business goals. * Subscribe to relevant tech newsletters and blogs and follow key tech influencers in your industry. If you find something worth including in your roadmap, develop your hypothesis on ‘why’ and ‘how’ and take it to your PMs for early vetting. * Ask to present in engineering, sales engineering, or support/PS meetings. In these meetings, you can showcase an initiative and solicit feedback to build a case for influencing the roadmap.
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Rinita Datta
Splunk Director, Product Marketing | Formerly Morgan StanleyDecember 11
PMs with long tenure will have established perspectives on various things and deep domain knowledge. Influencing the roadmap here requires you to collaborate closely with the PMs, respect their experience, adapt to their working style, and focus on building trust with them. * Start with the basics: aligning on product goals, positioning yourself as a partner, and having an open conversation about how you can add value to any ongoing or new initiatives. * Proactively ask to join and learn from planning and retro meetings, such as product backlog grooming, PI planning, and product QBRs. To show value, start bringing in your market knowledge and voice of the customers/sales/partners/customer success. * As you make recommendations for the roadmap, tie them to business impact and use data to back up your hypotheses. Show alignment with the PM’s long-term vision where possible. * Offer to run research surveys, workshops, or advisory boards to achieve shared product goals. This could also mean using your marketing budget to drive awareness and adoption of products.
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Rinita Datta
Splunk Director, Product Marketing | Formerly Morgan StanleyDecember 11
This is common, and you should start defining R&R with your PM counterparts. Common knowledge states that PMs should do customer-focused research, and PMMs should do market trends and competitive research. But this varies in reality as many companies have research happening in silos, and it depends on who has the need, budget, and capacity to do it. * Emphasize that no matter who conducts the research, both PMs and PMMs can benefit from and act on the insights. While PMs can use the insights to shift product direction and develop enhancements, PMMs can use them to change messaging and positioning and create new content and programs. * Thus, you can argue for building a central repository of all past and upcoming research projects accessible to various stakeholders. Offer to categorize it based on product areas, themes, personas, etc. This provides visibility and avoids duplicate work. * Set up a core research council or working group to discuss research projects and insights regularly. Offer to be the showrunner for this. This would ensure that everyone feels involved, and you can also use these channels to drive accountability for the next steps.
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Rinita Datta
Splunk Director, Product Marketing | Formerly Morgan StanleyDecember 11
Budget is not the only resource at your disposal; I’d encourage you to get creative and find more avenues to contact prospects, customers, partners, and sales. A simple Google form survey can go a long way. There may be many other low-to-no-cost options for outreach, e.g. your company’s email orchestration system, outreach on LinkedIn, direct outreach through sales reps, analyzing support tickets, running workshops and advisory boards on Zoom meetings. You can also sign up for your competitor’s products, engage with their content and programs, and read customer reviews for your product as well as adjacent/competitive products to get more market context. Once you have built a corpus of research and data-driven hypotheses, synthesize and validate them with your friendly internal stakeholders and categorize them into quick wins vs long-term innovation. Lastly, offer to run cross-functional research insight readout meetings and make sure you have leadership visibility into your efforts.
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