
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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
Top Product Management Mentor List
Product Management AMA Contributor
Lives In Portland, OR
Knows About SMB Product Management, Product Marketing vs Product Management, Product Management v......more