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Julian Dunn

Senior Director of Product Management, GitHub

About

I am head of product management for GitHub Actions. In my career I've flipped between doing product management and product marketing, so my special power is to bridge the gap between product development and go-to-market. Prior to these roles, I wo......more

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GitHub Senior Director of Product Management, Julian Dunn on Building a Product Management Team

July 30 @ 10:00AM PST

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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

2007 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

1331 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

1044 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

914 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

877 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

725 Views

What advice would you give to a product marketer looking to transition to product management, or vice versa?

Julian Dunn

GitHub Senior Director of Product Management • July 13

This is a great question. I've transitioned from PM to PMM and back again, so I can give you my perspective on both. The biggest challenges for anyone moving into PM, whether that be from PMM or other roles, are the following: * deeply understanding the domain; * leading by influence; and ......Read More

639 Views

How technical are you with any given solution you are working with the team on?

Julian Dunn

GitHub Senior Director of Product Management • April 3

It can vary from not-terribly-technical to quite technical. This depends on how complex your product is and how much the nuances of that complexity matter to the user's success with it. As an example, GitHub Actions has sophisticated features like matrix builds for parallelization, required and r......Read More

628 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

612 Views

Who should own pricing? Product management or product marketing? And what role should each play?

Julian Dunn

GitHub Senior Director of Product Management • July 13

I used to be very much on the side of "PMM should own pricing" but I will now caveat this with a couple considerations. First off, though, I think at a smaller company, say a startup where you're the only PMM, PMM should still own pricing. That's because there's both a strategic ("how should w......Read More

599 Views

Credentials & Highlights

Senior Director of Product Management at GitHub