Sailaja Kalle

Outbound PMs take what we learn and feed it back into our overall portfolio and product strategy. So keep reaching out to customers, and internal team members to understand the overall strategy and share the vision helps in building skills needed for this role. I believed our customer base was the biggest support group and they helped build this muscle for me. Apart from this continuing to invest to stay tech savvy and on soft skills will always help.

It's tricky to define OKRs for Outbound Product Managers because traditionally we are not directly responsible for the launch of products/features but strategically sit to influence what features/products get built and work on advocacy of what is built. We agreed on 3 OKRs for Outbound Product Management 1. Enablement and Adoption - It is crucial to enable customer-facing teams - Sales, Implementation, Support and Customers for the success of the Product. So it's about how many videos, how 2. Revenue - Interact and engage with customers to improve the adoption of products. 3. Strategy - Unify the strategy across internal teams, partners, customers and engineering teams

This particular role is not always needed but if your product is technical in nature, having this role to evangelize your product definitely helps in Adoption. Also if there are product managers in your team to prioritize and build features but they need constant feedback from customers, then having an Outbound PM helps in advocacy and quick feed and intel on product market fit.

Outbound Product managers also have foundational product management skills, technical expertise, and a focus on product success like traditional Product managers. However, the best outbound PMs are continuous learners who are good communicators, customer-focused, and technically savvy. Ideally, I look for candidates who have meaningful product management experience, worked in the enterprise software space before, know the industry landscape, and have outstanding soft skills.

Innate quality to be a continuous learner along with being a seasoned PM. Having industry experience in the area of the product and good soft skills helps in this role. If there is a broad portfolio of products and outbound PM is needed to help with the market positioning, then maybe internal team members from other departments with skills to unify internal strategy helps.

It came as a natural transition between building features, and products and sharing what we built and its purpose with others and feeding the learnings back to the product. The goal of “increasing the adoption and fit of our products.” aligned with my love for learning every day. This part of my role requires the combination of every professional skill I’ve developed to this point, while still teaching me new ones.

Product Manager Leaders essentially act as CEO of their Product. They bring 5 key traits to the table 1. Product and User Sense - Good Product Leaders have the talent to 'easily' obtain a holistic, strategic view of what the right product might be for a given problem space; they can identify the riskier assumptions and they know how to test them, learn and adapt; Successful Product Leaders demonstrate a ‘user mentality’ and use empathy to relate to user problems, frequent customer needs, and stakeholder expectations; they are able to feel the pain points and deeply understand the problem and the ecosystem in which it exists. 2. Innovation Mindset - Successful Product Leaders realize the value of innovation for product development and establish the right processes to empower a special culture — fostering ideas sharing, collaboration, creativeness, and experimentation. 3. Entrepreneurial Thinking - Product Leaders demonstrate a special mindset that sets the basis for success: they are enthusiastic about designing and building products people love; they are always looking for opportunities to create value and solve big problems in novel and effective ways; 4. Cross-domain Knowledge - Modern digital products are complex: their success depends on a mix of technology, usability, business models, marketing, and operational excellence — they must all work together in harmony to drive user engagement, value creation, and sufficient monetization. 5. Commercial Acumen - The commercial element is key. Good Product Leaders are able to identify the right business models, monetization strategies, pricing structures, and growth mechanisms to ensure the viability of the product;

KPI’s are measured and recorded to track performance and business decisions are rendered with the use of this supporting data. The intent behind this movement is to provide managers and leaders with more information and drive better decision making. While there is a need for Proxies in some cases, it is very important to choose these with utmost care and deliberation. 1. Having clear goals to achieve will provide a great way to avoid choosing the false "proxies". 2. Choose KPIs that should be measuring the actual objective itself and any other key actions or outcomes that will lead to that objective. 3. Ensure the sanity of Data used so that when relying on data to make decisions, then what is being utilized needs to be accurate.

An ideal Product team would be the one which is aligned and transparent to larger organisation in terms of where they are, where they are going and how they plan to go there. The team is complementary to one another, have great e people skills, have the right process and one that challenges assumptions. 1. Being customer centric and vision alignment to Organization goals is something that this team needs to get right 2. Empowering the team and identifying how well the team manages their Financial KPIS, Customer Satisfaction KPIs, User Engagement KPIs etc is something that will need to measured. 3. How well they complement and work as a team is super crucial especially if the team has high skilled members. One bad apple will spoil the whole lot. So trying to keep an eye on this and managing it is something that ensures the success of team and Organisation as a whole.

What are some challenges you handled and how? What are some errors you made and what did you learn from them? How do we set goals?