D Matthew Landry

VP Product Management, Cisco Wireless, Cisco

Content

What's your framework to prioritizing needs/deliverables when you're the first Product Manager at a company establishing the function?

D Matthew Landry

Cisco VP Product Management, Cisco Wireless • February 23

Honestly, the first product manager for a company is probably not ready to establish a prioritization framework. The first PM probably needs to focus on customer discovery, market discovery, MVP intuition, and experimentation. Until you have established product-market fit with enthusiastic custom......Read More

2610 Views

What are the key traits you look for in hiring enterprise PMs?

D Matthew Landry

Cisco VP Product Management, Cisco Wireless • February 23

Taking for granted a baseline of solid product management fundamentals and team simpatico, I feel the following play an outsize role in determining success in the enterprise: * Skeptical curiosity * Strong opinions, weakly held * Speaking and presentation skills, in front of senior execs & au......Read More

1544 Views

What do you look for while hiring a junior PM candidate, especially someone who might not have had a prior PM experience? What assignments would you typically ask as part of recruitment?

D Matthew Landry

Cisco VP Product Management, Cisco Wireless • February 24

Entry-level product managers for an enterprise product line tend to come in from two paths: technical background, and business background. Those with a stronger technical background might come from another part of the business, such as technical marketing or solution/sales engineering. They mak......Read More

1261 Views

How do you balance building for large potential customers before they buy vs having the sales team sell what you already have?

D Matthew Landry

Cisco VP Product Management, Cisco Wireless • February 23

Rule of thumb: don't build before they buy. If this whale wants something specific, they should put skin the game, either through a services/customization contract or a purchase contract contingent on a feature delivery. Of course, there's a lot of nuance to a situation like this. Maybe there'......Read More

1188 Views

Working on an enterprise product, how often do PMs get a chance to make a significant impact? (As opposed to work on small/specific features)

D Matthew Landry

Cisco VP Product Management, Cisco Wireless • February 24

The impact that a product manager has depends much more on the type of product team and its role in the company than on the product's market (B2B, B2C, SMB, mid-market, enterprise, &c). Even for a miniscule aspect of a product, the PM has an opportunity for tremendous impact when they have resp......Read More

1186 Views

Where can PM provide the most lift in the enterprise sales motion?

D Matthew Landry

Cisco VP Product Management, Cisco Wireless • February 23

Tactically, product managers can set the patterns that define successful customer accounts (e.g., via beta testing, early wins, clearly described use cases, &c.), engage with key customers to form lasting business relationships, and amplify the key customer problems. This is why customers love t......Read More

1038 Views

How does the product manager role change when you’re focused on enterprise customers vs mid-market and SMB?

D Matthew Landry

Cisco VP Product Management, Cisco Wireless • February 23

In the broadest sense, the role of the product manager doesn't change. The customer profile changes, the buying patterns change, and the routes to market change. The core PM responsibilities don't necessarily change. However, many of those customer changes have an impact on how the PM does thei......Read More

881 Views

How does product management differ when you are working to create a custom infrastructure platform?

D Matthew Landry

Cisco VP Product Management, Cisco Wireless • February 24

"Custom infrastructure platform" is nearly an oxymoron. :-) Anyway, it doesn't sound like a product; products are offered for sale to a market. A "custom infrastructure platform" is very likely an internal project. It will have organizational stakeholders, clearly defined objectives (be very cau......Read More