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Sailaja Kalle

Sailaja Kalle

Director, Product Management at Gainsight

Content

What resources would you recommend reading to learn more about outbound product management?

Sailaja Kalle
Sailaja Kalle

Gainsight Director, Product Management • 3y

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.

2,418 Views

What metrics or OKRs are associated with Outbound Product Management teams look at to define success?

Sailaja Kalle
Sailaja Kalle

Gainsight Director, Product Management • 3y

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. R ...Read More

1,567 Views

What skills do you look for in a good Outbound Product Manager?

Sailaja Kalle
Sailaja Kalle

Gainsight Director, Product Management • 3y

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.

1,524 Views

How do you measure the performance of the product team, considering only product managers, group product managers and product head?

Sailaja Kalle
Sailaja Kalle

Gainsight Director, Product Management • 2y

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. Being customer centric and vision alignment to Organization goals is something that this team needs to get right Empowering the team and identifying how well the team manages their Financial KPIS ...Read More

1,462 Views

When should product orgs think about adding an outbound product manager or team?

Sailaja Kalle
Sailaja Kalle

Gainsight Director, Product Management • 3y

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.

1,443 Views

What are the key traits you look for in hiring outbound product management team members?

Sailaja Kalle
Sailaja Kalle

Gainsight Director, Product Management • 3y

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.

1,324 Views

How did you get into Outbound Product Management?

Sailaja Kalle
Sailaja Kalle

Gainsight Director, Product Management • 3y

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.

1,315 Views

How to make sure KPIs are not 'proxies' to what we want to achieve but directly measure it?

Sailaja Kalle
Sailaja Kalle

Gainsight Director, Product Management • 2y

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. Having clear goals to achieve will provide a great way to avoid choosing the false "proxies". Choose KPIs that should be measuri ...Read More

1,128 Views

What hard skills are must haves to be a Product Management leader? What are nice to haves?

Sailaja Kalle
Sailaja Kalle

Gainsight Director, Product Management • 2y

Product Manager Leaders essentially act as CEO of their Product. They bring 5 key traits to the table 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 stakeh ...Read More

1,102 Views
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