Marvin Green

Director, Product Management, Splunk

Content

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

Marvin Green

Splunk Director, Product Management • September 13

Great question! This is something most product teams wrestle with when only looking at the roadmap from a features perspective to balance what to build for existing vs prospective customers. What I’ve found very useful to address this is to revisit the product strategy and business drivers for th......Read More

2097 Views

How do you manage a roadmap when company leadership cannot or will not provide guidance? (e.g. the C-team is all newly hired and don't know enough about the product or customers)

Marvin Green

Splunk Director, Product Management • September 13

Thanks for the question! You, my friend, are in a coveted position. I would encourage you to shift your mindset and look at it as an opportunity to influence and educate your leadership team on what you know about your customers and create a vision and strategy for your product to share with them......Read More

1970 Views

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

Marvin Green

Splunk Director, Product Management • September 14

I appreciate this question! Generally speaking, we get inputs mostly from sales, customers and product/engineering. I’ve used the approach of building partnerships with stakeholders and that takes care of the influence vs control dilemma. When you have a strong partnership with your stakeholders,......Read More

1167 Views

How do you get autonomy for prioritizing your roadmap when your sales process is very sales heavy, and sales leadership wants to dictate priorities?

Marvin Green

Splunk Director, Product Management • September 13

I like this question because it is such a classic situation. I’ve seen this played out at companies and it’s likely a culture issue that it’s very hard to change unless the Product and Sales leadership teams get together and have a heart to heart about it and come to an agreement on the best path......Read More

1128 Views

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

Marvin Green

Splunk Director, Product Management • September 14

Thanks for the question! Earlier in my PM career, I used to keep my roadmap a “secret”. As I gain more experience, I realized that it’s valuable to share the roadmap openly with sales, marketing and key stakeholders to build a solid partnership. How I communicate the roadmap and the level of deta......Read More

888 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?

Marvin Green

Splunk Director, Product Management • September 13

I’m wishing you a successful product pivot! You got this! In this situation, you have your internal stakeholders (sales, marketing, GTM, etc) and you have your customers you need to reset expectations with (mostly for B2B products, less so for B2C) For your internal stakeholders, the best t......Read More

831 Views

When does it make sense to make your roadmap publically available, and what do you include (vs your internal roadmap)

Marvin Green

Splunk Director, Product Management • September 13

Interesting question! From my experience, there are two key questions to answer when thinking about going public with your roadmap. 1) Do we have a predictable sprint velocity? 2) Do we have a predicate delivery rate? Once you have a predictable sprint velocity and predictable feature delivery, ......Read More

395 Views

How does your product team usually work with your product marketing team with building the roadmap?

Marvin Green

Splunk Director, Product Management • September 13

At Splunk, we’ve built a tightly executed roadmap update process where we spend about 2 weeks each quarter to refresh our roadmap so our customers, sales and GTM teams have the latest and greatest roadmap info. In that 2-week process, our product managers and product marketing folks actively coll......Read More

353 Views

Credentials & Highlights

Director, Product Management at Splunk