Savita Kini

May be I am baised, but in the large Global 500 space, infrastructure -- I would say my experience at Cisco was the best. For me thats kind of the benchmark now - both in terms of strategy and execution cadence that I learnt. From products to solution to positioning platforms, working with ecosystem partners, ISVs, Channels. Website alone to me is not a good indication, yes, today it is, but the real value is in business that is driven and impact product marketing is having in driving that.  In ...Read More

I am writing this perspective from my recent experience on what was missing and how I would lead in the future as a product marketing leader. Given that most demand gen folks are well versed in campaign orchestration tools and mechanics, and less on the market/customer/segment/product fit, they need lot more guidance from product marketing leaders.  Also, given the content is now consumed 90% digitally, it would be more meaningful for product marketing needs to know what kind of content is neede ...Read More

Love your above answer.  Even campaign plans have to be defined together because demand gen team will need guidance on  - who to target  - type of customers - segments, size, revenue, etc  - what type of campaign - lead gen, awareness, account-based marketing campaign, nurturing existing customer contacts in the database etc  - Messaging and positioning briefs so demand gen can creative derivative pieces of content (infographics, banners, social media teasers etc).  On the campaign front as well ...Read More

I haven't seen a method per se at my previous companies, but going forward, ideally a internal dashboard, collaborative wiki which has the details of why we won, why we lost would help everyone. I have not seen a good internal collaboration tool which also has a website/wiki kind of look / feel for editing/posts etc. Slack not so good, I am realizing. Linking this to SFDC would also be helpful. Ability to research by segment, region, competition etc. Remember that every region, Win/loss might be ...Read More

Bulk of my career has been in mid-to-large enterprise solutions -- from engineering to marketing and sales enablement. I agree with Mike's commentary, it is super important to understand what is solution selling and the challenger framework can be very helpful. There's other tools that have come in -- I recently heard about MEDIPPIC at my previous company, believe SAP uses this methodology.  It is less about content because many of the folks you are targetting like senior executives (CIOs, Manag ...Read More

A strong software engineering and product development background is a good foundation to transition to a PM role. AI is a very broad field, and one can apply AI in many different applications and use-cases. Just as you would with any job search and transition -- take some foundational courses in AI/ML so you understand the basics of model development, data issues, ethical/responsible AI. There are many courses online, and you don't have to do actual coding, but since you are a software engineer, ...Read More

Seek to understand and clarify first before assuming you have learnt everything that is to know and propose solutions.  I see there are lot of online courses, documentation, articles -- you can do a lot of reading online to educate yourself about the complexities of model development, data gathering, data labeling, training and testing.  One of the big challenges for AI/ML PMs is understanding whether we have enough data for training the model, is it diverse enough to cover for the specific use- ...Read More

When you are getting ready for external launch, at least 2-3 months before that. REally depends on your target customer segment and industry. My experience is Enterprise, and usually I would recommend at least a 3 months prep time for a thourough launch plan. And the first thing you want to do is have brand and legal involved to do a thorough check on all trademarks, naming convention, any copyright issue you might have on messaging etc. The bigger/more complex the company, brand issues at stake ...Read More

I believe that many of the new gen companies might be using datasheet as a product overview document. Perhaps just calling it Product Overview or At-A-Glance versus Datasheet is better. Datasheet might need to be more in-depth and technical. Given the # of cycles of feature releases, datasheets become outdated pretty quickly. Also, there might be "legal binding" on datasheets as a factsheet for the product, in-sense, you could be sued if something doesn't work as you said it would. Product At-a- ...Read More