Strategic cross-product owner

  • Slack channel: #cp-strategic
  • Owner: Ryan Phillips
  • Owner split with other roles: 50-50 (this-other roles)

Overview

Mission and ownership

The strategic cross-product owner focuses on all strategic product and engineering work necessary to make strategic customers successful.

This ownership includes:

  • Being the product contact for strategic sales and customer engineering teammates, and our strategic customers
  • Working with sales and customer engineering to proactively surface engineering needs and obstacles and deliver solutions
  • Partnering with strategic customers to shape aspects of our product roadmap together
  • Shepherding deployment and feature rollouts at Strategic customers, from pre-mortem to post-mortem
  • Prioritizing features across multiple engineering teams, alongside other product manager stakeholders, based on the TAM of all customers served
  • Ensuring engineering and go-to-market teammates have the right information, resources, playbooks, and roadmaps to make our strategic customers successful

Success metric

The north star success metric for these efforts is iARR closed from strategic customers.

Principles

Customer-facing work

To work best with strategic customers, I:

  1. Move fast and build momentum within large organizations
  2. Create and maintain a reputation of dependable partnership and delivery
  3. Approach issues with recommendations and best practices, rather than a greenfield exploration point of view

Operating within the engineering org

To work best with the teams and product stakeholders also involved in this work, I:

  1. Partner closely with the product stakholders on prioritizing team roadmaps – I will not “go around” a product manager stakeholder and make direct requests of another team’s engineers
  2. Focus on surfacing tactical information that empowers our engineering teams, like timelines, specific customer details, and customer sentiment

Process

  1. Weekly product engineering sync meeting for product stakeholders. We use this to stay closely aligned in priorities and roadmaps.
  2. #cp-strategic for updates
  3. Ad-hoc meetings with sales and customer engineering stakeholders

Strategy

  1. ✅ By July 30 2022, build a deep understanding of the strategic customer space current state and future needs.
  2. 🔄 By Sept 28 2022, prioritize and solve the most pressing future needs – currently:
    1. 🔄 Document product opportunities for select strategic customers and prospects By September 20th
    2. 🔄 Each triad puts together a roadmap for their team for the next 6 months (now until mid-March marketing moment) By September 27th
    3. Sqs and Ryan Phillips will review teams roadmaps in EM/PM weekly syncs During the week of Sept 26th
  3. Teams begin iteratively executing on their roadmaps. PM are focused 25% on strategic readiness and 75% on Code Intelligence Platform
  4. On Jan 1, most teams shift to focusing on the Code Intelligence Platform while continuing to prioritize alongside
  5. In March CY2023, Sourcegraph will host the spring Starship event focused on speed, scale, and reliability. More to come on this as the date approaches.

Resources

  1. Strategic Ideas list for work-to-be-done
  2. Strategic accounts list
  3. Strategic account size tiers for support, planning, and scale testing