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AMA: VMware Sr. Director Product Marketing, Joshua Lory on Influencing the Product Roadmap
January 6 @ 10:00AM PST
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VMware Sr. Director Product Marketing, Joshua Lory on Influencing the Product Roadmap
Top Questions
Joshua Lory
VMware Senior Director, Blockchain Go To Market • January 5
By presenting a particular customer segement in the light of the total addressable market. You'll be in good shape if you can clearly show a business case that carries signifigance in the following areas. For example, how does addressing a particular segment move the needle on revenue, competitiv......Read More
833 Views
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Joshua Lory
VMware Senior Director, Blockchain Go To Market • January 5
First, changing a culture is hard. You can do your best by setting an example, being curious, solving hard problems and helping your peers grow the business. Second, you do not have a product without adoption. PMMs usually own or share the adoption goals with product management. PMM is in a uniqu......Read More
665 Views
2 requests
Should product marketers be "influencers" or "partners" in product roadmap decisions?
As an influencer you might just share market and customer research, competitive intel, etc. as another input for PM to consider in their own decision making; whereas if you're a true partner, you're discussing and debating with them, as equals, what product roadmap decisions should be and why, where PMs and PMMs bring different inputs and value to the table as equals. Thoughts on being an "influencer" vs. being a "partner" in guiding the product roadmap? Thank you.
Joshua Lory
VMware Senior Director, Blockchain Go To Market • January 5
If you're doing your job right, both. I believe everything PMM does should end up in the product at some point. Marketing doesn't have to be external or disconnected from the product. If you have this in mind, you can take the vast amounts of knowledge and insights and turn it into your companies......Read More
645 Views
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Joshua Lory
VMware Senior Director, Blockchain Go To Market • January 5
Product marketing should understand product requirements and feature velocity at a high level i.e. how hard it is to deliver a solution and how many features can your team deliver in a quarter. That way you can bucketize feature requests into t-shirt sizes; small, medium large efforts. The onus i......Read More
731 Views
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Joshua Lory
VMware Senior Director, Blockchain Go To Market • January 5
In partnership with the product leadership team, establish a 360 degree feedback loop that takes the plethora of feedback channels and terminates them into one like AHA or Jira. Once you have all the feedback and requests in one place for all to see, develop a criteria to prioritize. How many cus......Read More
735 Views
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Joshua Lory
VMware Senior Director, Blockchain Go To Market • January 5
A few thoughts on delivering roadmap commitments: 1. Get the product leaders involved in direct customer feedback sessions and events. Hearing customer problems and requests directly from the horses mouth requires response head on. 2. Publish your high level roadmap for customers and s......Read More
648 Views
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Joshua Lory
VMware Senior Director, Blockchain Go To Market • January 5
In many cases product marketers are the window to the customer. We’ve walked a mile in the customer’s shoes. We have our fingers on the pulse of their needs, problems and feedback. We meet with customers, sales and partners regularly to understand the market forces at play. We are in the best pos......Read More
743 Views
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Joshua Lory
VMware Senior Director, Blockchain Go To Market • January 5
Great question with the most votes. In my experience, Product Marketing owns a large percentage of the market analysis, pricing and packaging effort. At VMware, Product Marketing works hand in hand with Product Management, executive staff, finance and sales to carve out pricing for new and increm......Read More
1964 Views
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Joshua Lory
VMware Senior Director, Blockchain Go To Market • January 5
Yes, at VMware this is called Sales Kickoff. It usually consists of sales, technical pre-sales, professsional services and customer success gathering for a few days to discuss the company's strategic priorities, solution areas, product positioning, roadmaps and relationship building. It is split ......Read More
817 Views
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