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Kara Gillis

Sr. Director of Product Management , Splunk

About

I lead "AIOps" product management at Splunk, focusing on products that help IT Operations and Observability teams reduce noise, reduce MTTR, and intelligently remediate incidents.

Content

What are the most important inputs to take into consideration when thinking through product differentiation?

Kara Gillis

Splunk Sr. Director of Product Management • June 1

There are several inputs I think about when considering product differentiation: 1. Specific target customer - There are many types of customers in a market. Who are you serving? Try to narrow your focus as far as you can to understand the specific problems faced by this customer to be as tail......Read More

903 Views

What framework should I use to prioritize either dedicating engineering resources to build out product functionality or just using a 3rd party service?

Kara Gillis

Splunk Sr. Director of Product Management • October 31

I typically advocate for using full-time engineering talent on the most innovative features, hardest problems to solve and outsource to third party services for things that I can depend on, not require a ton of updates to, and save me money. Your dedicated engineers are there because they're y......Read More

714 Views

What's your ideal working model between product management and product marketing?

Kara Gillis

Splunk Sr. Director of Product Management • June 1

I used to be a product marketer. My ideal working relationship is to view product marketing as my key partner in product development, launch, and iteration. We are both stewards of the product success. I try to involve product marketing into the very beginning stages of product development - t......Read More

692 Views

We have a competitor that copies our features, and often says they can do the same thing as us, even if they cannot. How do you approach this?

Kara Gillis

Splunk Sr. Director of Product Management • June 1

This is a tale as old as time. There are many ways to approach this. I have seen vendors heavily bid on the AdWords of their competitor names and promote alternative solutions (trials or marketing content). I have seen vendors who are challengers in mature markets create "Us vs. Them" web page......Read More

621 Views

We’re pivoting our product, and it’s difficult to plan the roadmap too far out. How do we reset expectations on what product communicates?

Kara Gillis

Splunk Sr. Director of Product Management • October 31

I think you say exactly that! "We're pivoting our product. There are a lot of unknowns. It's hard to plan our roadmap too far out. We're resetting expectations on how much we can communicate..." THEN, I would add this... "We are focusing on these 3 themes in this priority - 1... 2... 3...Ou......Read More

585 Views

How do you think about communicating your roadmap to other teams? What level of detail do people need?

Kara Gillis

Splunk Sr. Director of Product Management • October 31

I tailor the product roadmap to the person / group with whom I'm communicating. I often will use Google Slides for a customer or sales facing presentation. With engineering, I'll often use a spreadsheet that lists roadmap initiatives in the order of priority and effort. Communicating with cust......Read More

498 Views

How do you determine how much of your roadmap should be focused on existing customers vs prospects?

Kara Gillis

Splunk Sr. Director of Product Management • October 31

In a perfect world, you want at least 80% of your roadmap to be applicable to both! But, we don't live in a perfect world, do we? Some startups focus on a small number of customers and really customize the product to the desired features of those early users, but I like to first go broad in a......Read More

448 Views

What framework(s) do you use to evaluate how to differentiate your product?

Kara Gillis

Splunk Sr. Director of Product Management • June 1

While I don't use an existing framework specifically for product differentiation, I do use a variety of inputs to determine what lever to pull or what decision to make. These inputs can be found in the answer to the question, "What are the most important inputs to take into consideration when thi......Read More

434 Views

How do you handle exec input in the roadmap, and convey a point of view while also accommodating?

Kara Gillis

Splunk Sr. Director of Product Management • October 31

Executive alignment on your roadmap is pretty key to getting funding and resources to deliver on your roadmap. Your executive team probably cares about customer success, growth, and potentially things like margin/security/compliance. Tie your roadmap to these outcomes very clearly. If you c......Read More

420 Views

Which stakeholders have input into your roadmap, and how to balance giving them influence vs control?

Kara Gillis

Splunk Sr. Director of Product Management • October 31

Prioritization is more art than science. My goal is to actively listen to all stakeholders and help communicate how I make tradeoffs and how that impacts timeline to deliver a requested feature. But as a rule... Customers have the most impact on roadmap. Then engineering (especially on t......Read More

418 Views

Credentials & Highlights

Sr. Director of Product Management at Splunk