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Julian Dunn

Senior Director of Product Management, GitHub

About

I do enterprise B2B product marketing for PagerDuty, working all the way down to the product/feature level and up to corporate positioning and messaging for both buyers and users. My background is technical and I have experience as a product manag......more

Content

How do you draw the line between sales enablement that product marketing is responsible for vs. sales ops?

Julian Dunn

GitHub Senior Director of Product Management • June 13

I break it down as follows: product marketing's main role in sales enablement is to educate salespeople on the target customers/market segments/buyer personas & needs, etc., how to position value (not benefits or feature/function) for those customers, and provide competitive intelligence (battlec......Read More

1581 Views

What are the pros and cons of getting an MBA when you're already in product marketing/marketing and looking to stay in this field and under what circumstances does an MBA help?

Julian Dunn

GitHub Senior Director of Product Management • June 24

If you are literally looking to stay in product marketing or marketing (and already have a job in the field) then I would agree with the other posters that an MBA is not going to get you much. However, if you have designs to move into (strategic) product management, start your own company, or ......Read More

1024 Views

Should product marketing report into Product management or Marketing?

Julian Dunn

GitHub Senior Director of Product Management • June 13

I've reported into both in my career and the best I can come up with is "it depends". As an overall philosophy, I would generally prefer to report into marketing, because it creates the right level of healthy conflict between the CMO and CPO (Chief Product Officer or SVP Product) that you need in......Read More

733 Views

What are the most valuable things a PMM can give PM to improve product development, discovery and go to market but not limited to those? I feel the relationship is imbalanced since the PMM consumes more from PM than it gives back.

Julian Dunn

GitHub Senior Director of Product Management • July 13

As a PMM, I was always conducting my own wide-ranging research about competitors and market dynamics (competitive and market intelligence) and providing this to PM. This included reading a lot of analyst reports, both about our category and adjacent categories, meeting with industry analysts to c......Read More

582 Views

How do you get your product team to involve product marketing early enough in the strategy and product planning phases?

Julian Dunn

GitHub Senior Director of Product Management • July 10

We have had some success in educating the PM team to start with positioning before they build anything. We use a modified version of the product positioning document (PPD) from Pragmatic Marketing and are asking them to write one before they build anything. It has to be the foundation for a discu......Read More

541 Views

How do you structure your Product team? How big is it, what does everyone do? How do you measure success of each function/person?

Julian Dunn

GitHub Senior Director of Product Management • September 8

My current product team consists of four direct reports who are all senior product managers. My job as a director is to create distinct areas of responsibility (AoRs) for these PMs to deeply understand customer problems, conduct discovery and research with their design and engineering (tech lead)......Read More

441 Views

How different are the product management KPIs from the product marketing KPIs?

Julian Dunn

GitHub Senior Director of Product Management • July 13

In general, PM KPIs tend to be further down-funnel and PMM KPIs are further up-funnel. PM's KPIs are about utilization / adoption of products or features, including repeat usage ("stickiness" or "MAUs/DAUs"). PMM's KPIs are about clarity & effectiveness of messaging and positioning, which you can......Read More

439 Views

Do you think it makes sense to grow PM competence within the organization or hire people from the broader market to succeed faster?

Julian Dunn

GitHub Senior Director of Product Management • December 1

This is a tough question to answer because it is so situational. For example - I have seen organizations where PM is so immature that it is essentially a project management function. Melissa Perri even uses such an example in her excellent book Escaping the Build Trap! While in Perri's fictional ......Read More

428 Views

How do you think about staying within a company versus looking for opportunities outside? When do you know it's time to leave?

Julian Dunn

GitHub Senior Director of Product Management • December 1

There are a couple of factors to consider here: * Are you learning anything new in your current role? If not, would staying with the company, even if it is in a different role, or a more senior role (be that IC or management), satisfy your learning? * Do you enjoy the domain, vertical, a......Read More

415 Views

What's something that you didn't know it took to become a Director back when you were a senior product manager?

Julian Dunn

GitHub Senior Director of Product Management • December 1

A few of things: * Know what, when and how to delegate. Delegation has such a negative connotation in industry (being seen as letting garbage flow downhill) but I believe this is because so many managers are poor at the mechanics of delegation. As a PM director, you have to learn how t......Read More

384 Views

Credentials & Highlights

Senior Director of Product Management at GitHub