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Joshua Lory

AMA: VMware Sr. Director Product Marketing, Joshua Lory on Influencing the Product Roadmap

January 6, 2021 @ 10:00AM PT

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  1. What does your product management team expect out of your product marketers in product meetings, and how do you measure if your team is delivering this effectively to your product management team?

    Joshua Lory
    Joshua Lory

    VMware Senior Director, Blockchain Go To Market | Formerly Accenture, United States Air Force • 5y

    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 position to synthesize vast amounts of inputs to help leadership, product management and our partners in engineering to influence product direction. With that for context, my team is currently measured on t ...Read More

    797 Views
    1 request

  2. Who owns pricing? Product Marketing or Product Management? If both, how do you divide the responsibilities?

    Joshua Lory
    Joshua Lory

    VMware Senior Director, Blockchain Go To Market | Formerly Accenture, United States Air Force • 5y

    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 incremental offerings. We split pricing related responsibilities in the following way. Product Marketing: Customer & market intelligence i.e. customer segmentation, addressable market, competitve insights ...Read More

    2,509 Views
    2 requests

  3. Does your product marketing team have an efficient system for quantifying technical costs for new roadmap items that you request? If another team is required for estimating certain roadmap item costs, what's the best way to approach them?

    Joshua Lory
    Joshua Lory

    VMware Senior Director, Blockchain Go To Market | Formerly Accenture, United States Air Force • 5y

    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 is on product managament and engineering to determine exact costs and timing of features. 

    1,186 Views
    1 request

  4. How do I figure out a schedule for our revenue kickoff where marketing, sales, and customer success are all together?

    It would be where there are joint-sessions and then separate sessions for each group. I would love to see a sample schedule. I have done FKOs, but not RKOs.

    Joshua Lory
    Joshua Lory

    VMware Senior Director, Blockchain Go To Market | Formerly Accenture, United States Air Force • 5y

    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 out by the functions above to dive deep into each phase of the customer lifecycle. 

    1,052 Views
    1 request

  5. How do you hold the product team accountable for delivering on the product roadmap?

    Joshua Lory
    Joshua Lory

    VMware Senior Director, Blockchain Go To Market | Formerly Accenture, United States Air Force • 5y

    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 sales. Once you commit to a feature publically it is harder to back out of it.
    3. Hold regular product review sessions with exectuive staff to ensure commitments are being met.  
    687 Views
    1 request

  6. As a product marketer, how do you ensure that your customer research & insights are relevant and actually actionable/useful for product teams as they develop the product roadmap?

    Joshua Lory
    Joshua Lory

    VMware Senior Director, Blockchain Go To Market | Formerly Accenture, United States Air Force • 5y

    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 customers will this feature impact, how much perceived value will they gain, how much energy and cost will it take to build, etc. That way you can serve up feature requests on a silver platter for leadershi ...Read More

    760 Views
    1 request

  7. 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
    Joshua Lory

    VMware Senior Director, Blockchain Go To Market | Formerly Accenture, United States Air Force • 5y

    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’ .next. This means that partnership with Product Management is essential. Being able to synthesize all of the touchpoints for your extended product management team is a key service to your organization. ...Read More

    674 Views
    1 request

  8. How do you change the culture of your company so that product marketers have more of a voice to influence the product roadmap?

    Joshua Lory
    Joshua Lory

    VMware Senior Director, Blockchain Go To Market | Formerly Accenture, United States Air Force • 5y

    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 unique position to capture and unify qualitative and quantitative data to increase adoption and usage. This process never ends and should be injected in every step of the product life cycle not just the start ...Read More

    702 Views
    2 requests

  9. How do you get product management to buy into focusing the roadmap on a specific customer segment?

    Joshua Lory
    Joshua Lory

    VMware Senior Director, Blockchain Go To Market | Formerly Accenture, United States Air Force • 5y

    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, competitive positioning, company vision and customer satisfaction vs addressing other segments? 

    871 Views
    1 request