AMA: Twilio Principal Product Marketing Manager, IoT, Elizabeth Grossenbacher on Influencing the Product Roadmap
January 18 @ 10:00AM PT
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👋 Elizabeth Grossenbacher
👋 Hi everyone! I'm Elizabeth ("Elle") Grossenbacher, located near San Francisco!
💼 I'm just about to expand my role at Cisco where I'll lead Product Marketing for the Secure Routing portfolio.
👀 Top of mind for me right now: Positioning! "Reinventing" or "Reintroducing" your portfolio.
🤝 I can help others on all things competitive/market intelligence, customer insights, AR for PMM work, PMM Carer coaching, and messaging/storytelling.
🍦 Favorite ice cream flavor: Baskin Robins Love Potion! They only have it in February, it's amazing.
Fmr Product Marketing Leader, Cisco | Formerly Twilio, Cisco, Gartner • 3y
Anyone can lead a Customer Advisory Board (CAB). But when you put together the goals of the CAB, you’ll see that it’s more efficient for it to sit under PMM. Here are two...
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Fmr Product Marketing Leader, Cisco | Formerly Twilio, Cisco, Gartner • 3y
This will depend on how your organization defines the PMM vs PM role. While I’ve never seen PMM “owning” product-specific analytics, I’ve also never seen PMM function wit...
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Fmr Product Marketing Leader, Cisco | Formerly Twilio, Cisco, Gartner • 3y
Story time! I once worked at a small company where two stakeholders disagreed on the product roadmap. The CTO disagreed with the CPO. In that scenario, the CTO had the ex...
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Fmr Product Marketing Leader, Cisco | Formerly Twilio, Cisco, Gartner • 3y
Any time I’ve influenced the product roadmap, it was a direct result of a customer-centric research initiative. Here are two examples of this: Focus Groups! After dozens...
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Fmr Product Marketing Leader, Cisco | Formerly Twilio, Cisco, Gartner • 3y
I view these as two different things: (1) informing the future vision of the product roadmap and (2) impacting the roadmap in the short term to meet current customer requ...
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Fmr Product Marketing Leader, Cisco | Formerly Twilio, Cisco, Gartner • 3y
We have never quantified this, but I will say that we always start with assumptions (i.e., “the work of the designer”). But then we go on to validate (or disprove) and fu...
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What kinds of market research do you do to shape the product roadmap and build, buy, and partner strategy? And more tactically, what format do you share your analysis?
I'm tasked with doing market research -- voice of the customer, competitive intelligence, and doing internal interviews -- to segment a new market and what we need to invest in to increase market penetration.
Fmr Product Marketing Leader, Cisco | Formerly Twilio, Cisco, Gartner • 3y
I use both primary and secondary research. Here is a non-exhaustive list of research sources to help you get started: customer interviews, customer surveys, customer usag...
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How do you define between a customer(s) want or request and a feature that is actually needed?
Customers may want many things, but it might not always be the right feature to implement. How do you decide this?
Fmr Product Marketing Leader, Cisco | Formerly Twilio, Cisco, Gartner • 3y
My first thought is: Have you asked your PM this exact question? ;) In my experience, balancing customer wants and needs is typically handled by the PM, while PMM support...
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Fmr Product Marketing Leader, Cisco | Formerly Twilio, Cisco, Gartner • 3y
First I try to understand why it isn’t a priority. I’ve seen this happen a lot. Many times, it’s because our brilliant product managers are trying to build a better way t...
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