Sr. Product Line Manager | VMware
“What needle are you trying to move?”
21:22
Joining me today is Oren Root, who is a product line manager at VMware. I’ve always found it challenging to deploy and manage products with big companies. Enterprise software in particular, with all its various facets, is particularly challenging. I’ve spoken with Oren before, and he is particularly thoughtful and successful in this area so we’re going to talk a little bit about his experience at VMware with a particular product line. We’re going to talk about how he managed his product to make it more valuable to not just his contact at the large customer, but all the users that were actually using it.
Announcer: Alex Cowan: Oren Root: Alex Cowan: Oren Root: Alex Cowan: Oren Root: Alex Cowan: Oren Root: Alex Cowan: Oren Root: Alex Cowan: Oren Root: Alex Cowan: Oren Root: Alex Cowan: Oren Root: Alex Cowan: Oren Root: Alex Cowan: Oren Root: Alex Cowan: Oren Root: Yes, you have a lot of those and now, how do you tell a very large customer, potentially even your largest, “This is very interesting, thank you, but I think it’s relevant for either only your use case or I don’t think anybody is going to use that.” You can’t really. Alex Cowan: Oren Root: The product itself, people do that. People use that, and the product itself did not naturally support it, but there was a way to kind of put stuff in your profile and it will come up in search. They wanted something natively that will actually allow them to search by skill sets and so we had – you can either say, “Okay, the customer’s valuable enough. I’m willing to – here’s the cost analysis and if we think about the lifetime value of the customer, we can do this.” What I chose to do is more of kind of a Lean Startup approach. Let’s go and do something very lean. I won’t go and implement the full broad set of what they asked for. Let me do something like a pilot. Let’s put a very simple way to be able to search per skills, and let’s let instead of asking everybody to go through filling out those details, let’s go through the admin and pick some key people that are influentially, you can actually use to see that [skill set] in the data. Pick those, have the admin fill out stuff and let’s see if actually, people get to them better through that search. As it turns out, that didn’t really move the needle, and so we actually paused on the rest of the roadmap. Alex Cowan: Oren Root: Alex Cowan: Oren Root: Alex Cowan: Oren Root: Alex Cowan: Announcer:
Welcome to the Interdisciplinarian where product managers share their stories and insights from the field.
Hi, I’m your host, Alex Cowan. Joining me today is Oren Root, who is a product line manager at VMware. I always found it challenging to sell and then deploy, and manage products with big companies. Enterprise software in particular, with all its various facets, I always found particularly challenging. I have spoken with Oren before, and he is particularly thoughtful and successful in this area so we’re going to talk a little bit about his experience at VMware with a particular product line and how he managed his product to make it more valuable to not just his counterparty at the large customer, but all the users that were actually using it. Thanks, Oren, for joining us. Tell us about your work on Socialcast, this was a product at VMware. What was it, and how did it relate to the bigger picture at VMware?
I actually joined Socialcast because I was using the product at a small startup before VMware. I was very excited about the product, and so I found my way into Socialcast. The thing I liked really about Socialcast is that it has all the benefits of working for a small startup with the benefits of working for a large company. Socialcast was acquired by VMware a bunch of years ago, and it was part of a broader productivity applications acquisitions. I came into Socialcast and it’s really what I’d hoped it to be from a quick and agile, and ability. They execute, not a lot of the big dependencies from the big parent company but you also have large customers, large enterprise customers, so you have kind of the good of both.
What was your definition of success at that time? What did VMware want Socialcast to deliver for them?
I can’t speak on behalf of VMware, but really where VMware is going with it right now is really part of a broader offering that includes mobility, management, enterprise mobility to management, and a suite of productivity applications like a recent Boxer acquisition and so you have social, e-mail, pretty much everything run together.
In the basic idea with Socialcast is that it’s social networking for inside the company to help managers and employees focus where their skill sets and things. Is that more or less somewhat accurate?
Correct. Right, so enterprise social networking is really – I hate to use the term of Facebook for the enterprise because it has a lot of negative connotations, but really what you get when you bring consumer-like experience to enterprise, to foster collaboration really helps with productivity, so like cases like when you come into a new company and then you’re given the book and here’s everything you need to know and you start researching and all of the information are in people’s heads. With Socialcast, you have everything like all the knowledge and the know-how’s in one place, and when people leave the company, the information stays. It’s really about how to find information, sharing information, finding the experts and it really helps cut time and a proven on innovation.
In VMware – Socialcast was kind of a startup within VMware, you were kind of an entrepreneur, what was it like operating as a product manager inside the venture? What interfaces did you have to the rest of the business that you needed to do your job?
Yeah, so you have I guess kind of typical enterprise software. You have sales, obviously. You have global customer support, global services. You have professional services sometimes. You have customers, and really that’s what we live for in product management is really talking to customers on understanding how to meet their needs and how to monetize on that, obviously. As the engineering team, which is probably – is the best engineering team I’ve ever worked with, and then because it’s a service, there’s also the customer success managers.
I mean something like enterprise social networking touches in theory just about everyone. How did you create the right interfaces for yourself at the customer so that you really knew what were those interfaces like, and how did you try to evolve them to get more of the information and the insight that you needed?
At VMware and I guess at a lot of other large companies, you have briefings that you have with customers so these are touch points where customers typically come on campus, but you can also do them online or customer visits and provide the customer with an overview about the solution and also talk about roadmap, under NDA, you can tell them what’s coming. As part of this, you also get to talk to the customer and figure out- What’s going on there? What are their pain points?
And when you say the customer, I mean who is it that you would typically talk to?
Yeah, so in a admin kind of role, for the productivity or specifically for the enterprise social network.
What was it like getting the right insights through that admin on behalf of all the users that were kind of inside the company?
When you have enterprise software, the user is not a lot of times, the buyer. You have on the CIO level maybe, they have a budget for productivity. You have the champion, which is typically the enterprise social network admin or somebody involved in that area, who owns that, owns the budget sometimes, and you have the end users. Think large numbers of an enterprise social networks, so a lot of users. You have those, and so the touch points typically would be with those admins or you get it through end users, through feedback and so on. If you think about getting touch points with customers, some are actual talking to customers and a lot of this comes from product data and usage.
What did you do to evolve the types of interfaces that you have with your customers to get more of the information you wanted? What was hard and what was easy about that?
Talking to customers is great. It’s insightful. It gives you oftentimes, so one point of view, so the pain points of the admin are not always the pain points of the end user. How do I get more of that? Really I had to go through the customer success managers who had the users as customers.
The customer success managers is someone on your end or on the customer end?
They’re on our end, the part of our team and their jobs is really to make the customer successful. To make sure that usage increases, that the customers don’t churn, basically so that they implement their use cases. They’re happy, we know what’s going on and we’re alerted to when there’s risk or when there’s an opportunity for expansion.
How do you work with those customers success managers to get through good employees with the product?
As I mentioned, their job is really to understand and help the customer be successful. It’s quite naturally that they, a lot of times take the point of view of the customer. As a product manager, it’s almost like dealing with a customer directly, so as a product manager, you have to balance the needs and wants of different customers versus what’s going to be beneficial for the product as a whole.
When we talk about the point of view of the customer, I think it’s deceptively challenging when we have an enterprise customer. My friend, and sometimes collaborator, David Bland, has this anti-pattern. It’s a little bit of a joke but it’s called the product death cycle and I think it goes something like,
“We ask the customers what features they want. They tell us. We build it for them. Then still no one uses the product.”
It’s sometimes easy to go and say, “Hey, what do you want?” They sort of know maybe to an extent, what they think they want, or maybe they don’t because not to say this applies to necessarily to VMware, but, in my experience, you have a counterpart and there, a project manager or an area admin, they have a lot going on. They’re busy, so they may or may not have the time to get really deep insights into why what’s happening is happening. How do you avoid that? How do you sort of buck that into pattern?
Yeah, and so been there, done that, have the T-shirt.
Or worse, how do you explain to them, this feature that you’ve come up with that you think is going to be great, but they think they don’t care about it at all. How do you do that?
Yeah, and you have to balance this because you don’t want to outright call them out, and tell them, “Thanks, but your opinion doesn’t matter.” Because it does, it’s just how do you balance this? Another question is, you know, a lot of times you’d see something and you think you have the answer or you think you understand what their problem is, but you’re just looking at a symptom. An example would be how, one of our large customers, that asked, you know I mentioned earlier that a big use case for enterprise social networks is finding the person with the right skill set. They’re on the right track and they said, “You know, what we really want is to be able to allow users to search specifically by skill set.” I was like, “Okay. That kind of makes sense, so you want to be able to find a person that can help you with say, virtualization. How do I find that person in the company?”
It sounds like a good experiment. Was it hard to kind of sell that approach to your customer counterpart?
Yes, yes. It’s hard to sell this to the customer. It’s hard to sell this internally to the customer success folks. You have to kind of come from a point of, “Okay, let’s.” I mean initially obviously, I try to – my hypothesis was you actually need some AI and some automatic insights that come into play here because people are not good at manually putting in, describing what their skill sets are. People don’t like to do manual work. Your power users are going to do that and a lot of times, the people you interact with at the company are power users or influenced by power users because these are ones who are most vocal and that’s kind of what drives the requirements. It works for them, sure. How do you make it work for the other hundreds of thousands of users that they have in their community?
Does it get easier? I mean once you initiate one of these hypothesis-driven pilots, does it get easier to sell this internally to the customer?
Yeah, you have to set up KPIs and goals with the customer upfront. Let’s synthesize and figure it out what is it exactly you’re trying to get? What needle are you trying to move? What’s your hypothesis? Help them get to what that is, and agree on that. Typically, it’s good to have that on paper, digital paper or whatever, e-mail so you could always refer back to it and keep track on that. It’s kind of like a mini project, right, and let’s see how we’ve done. If there’s milestones, we go back and we measure, and we show the data, and we say, “Okay, where are we now?”
That’s great. Well, we’ve heard from Oren about how to break out of the product death cycle and take a metrics-driven approach to big customer requirement, big customer needs. Thanks so much, Oren for joining us.
Thank you.
If you want to learn more about how to do some of these things, and how to engage with customers, check out our agile specialization at bit.ly/highagile, and thank you so much for joining us. This is the Interdisciplinarian.
The Interdisciplinarian is a production of Darden Media, in cooperation with the Batten Institute at UVA’s Darden School of Business.
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Sr. Product Line Manager, VMWare
linkedin: /orenroot
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