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Kara Gillis

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

Kara Gillis
Kara Gillis
Splunk Sr. Director of Product ManagementJune 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
Kara Gillis
Kara Gillis
Splunk Sr. Director of Product ManagementOctober 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
Kara Gillis
Kara Gillis
Splunk Sr. Director of Product ManagementJune 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
Kara Gillis
Kara Gillis
Splunk Sr. Director of Product ManagementJune 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
Kara Gillis
Kara Gillis
Splunk Sr. Director of Product ManagementOctober 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
Kara Gillis
Kara Gillis
Splunk Sr. Director of Product ManagementOctober 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
Kara Gillis
Kara Gillis
Splunk Sr. Director of Product ManagementOctober 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
Kara Gillis
Kara Gillis
Splunk Sr. Director of Product ManagementJune 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
Kara Gillis
Kara Gillis
Splunk Sr. Director of Product ManagementOctober 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
Kara Gillis
Kara Gillis
Splunk Sr. Director of Product ManagementOctober 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
Top Product Management Mentor List
Lives In San Francisco, CA
Knows About Product Differentiation
Speaks English, Spanish