What does an average day look like for a Director of Product Management?

I’ve come to realize that there is no such thing as an “average” day, as it really depends on where I am in the world currently. If I am home (Jacksonville, Florida), I will typically start very early – around 6 AM – to ensure I have enough overlap time with my Amsterdam-based team. I tend to start the day with a quick scan of email (anything urgent?) followed by a quick catch up on backlogs and obviously any burning topic that might be active – a sales process, a critical deliverable, or a career question from my team.

Lately I’ve been finding that figuring which timezone I’m at is also part of an average day, as well as making sure my slides are ready for my next customer/community/partner/sales/prospect meeting.

So, I guess my average day is anything but.

What is the one thing you are most passionate about when it comes to end user experience?

I think the expectations from an end-user of software has changed immensely over the past 5 years. Just think about how much easier it has become to connect your gadgets at home, how “regular people” (ie, non IT geeks) control their lights from their phone, how much simpler it is to launch a Machine Learning Hadoop Cluster in the cloud. This is the world we created, and it still fascinates me whenever we remove one click from a complex operation that our customers do, or when we simplify anything. Simplification of complex tasks is really what I love the most about today’s user experiences.

What are you working on right now?

Among many other things – did I mention my days are not average? – my main focus today is to ensure we all row in the same direction when it comes to improving our customers’ experience with our software. While UX teams do an excellent job at mapping personas to tasks, and how to improve that work stream, I feel that we often forget about the first experience our customers and partners have with our software which is the installation. Coming – as we do – from a world where IT was complex and expected to take time to deploy, to today’s cloud enabled, containerized, commoditized infrastructure-as-a-service world is a huge step that is taking longer for us to achieve than I thought it would. So we’ve been putting a lot of focus on adopting cloud practices and tools that will make everyone’s life easier – and reduce the frustration from our customers and our support team.

What is your Product Team focused on for the next 3-6 months?

We’re on so many fronts that this may take a while to explain… We are working with our fantastic community on merging the two implementation platforms we have today (DD4T which is community owned and DXA which is owned by SDL) into a single one, under SDL’s stewardship, but open to the community to continue contributing, following a true open source collaboration model. We are improving our deployment models – especially in cloud – and working hard with our friends in Knowledge Center to create the next-gen delivery platform that SDL products and customers deserve.

Tell us about your interaction with customers and end users? How does this impact what you build?

Coming from nearly 20 years of professional services, contact with the customer base is extremely important to me. I do make it a rule to visit a minimum of 20 different customers every year, and I try to attend every SDL Web related conference, anywhere in the world. From the TDS (Tridion Developer Summit) in Amsterdam, to TDS India, to SDL Connect, to the SDL Web MVP Retreat, any chance I have to meet customers, partners and prospects, I will take.

It is at times a frustrating experience to discuss challenges with customers, as often they will be struggling with features and challenges that we have already solved in the past, and they are still running on an old version of SDL Web. Or perhaps their implementation partner wasn’t knowledgeable enough to understand they were doing it wrong. This really drives me to reinforce the message that we need to make our software easier to deploy, make it more standardized and “out-of-the-box”, while embracing best practices.

How can customers reach out and share their feedback around the product?

We are “blessed” (it is a double edged sword at times) to have a very active community around SDL Web, and there are more and more ways to talk with us. I have also made sure to build a team around me that is community focused, and we see that having community focused people like Bart Koopman (who manages the DXA) and Alvin Reyes (who manages the SDL Web Extensions team and has a special focus on content editor usability) really opened the door for partners to communicate directly with us. The easiest way to get community support is to ask a question on http://tridion.stackexchange.com, or contact us on the SDL Tridion Facebook group, Twitter (@sdltridionworld), community.sdl.com, and – all else failing – pm.web@sdl.com. Yes, we love communication.

Often, we have 1-on-1 meetings with customers to discuss challenges, opportunities, etc.

Which 1 person would you love to invite to a dinner party?

Michele Obama. I would just love to learn some of her class when dealing with, let’s say, stubborn people.

Having engaged with customers a lot, where do you see customers having the most challenges when using SDL Web? Why do you think this is?

The main challenge I see – and this is common across all Enterprise WCM products – is the usability expectation set by products like WordPress, Wix and Squarespace. Editors with experience in these tools rarely understand that our product is designed for a holistic, omni-channel content delivery model, and that you need to be able to abstract yourself from what the content looks like and focus on how it will be consumed. As an editor, you’re perhaps working on an article for a web page, but did you consider that the same content could be showing in your mobile app and the experience for the consumer is completely different? And also, that classifying this content correctly is what will allow us to suggest it to site visitors as a recommendation?

The second part that most people struggle with is our “Component-based model”, where we store content as pieces that can be assembled (manually or dynamically) on a page. Especially as we move towards a connected world where “web pages” only make sense on a desktop experience (which we all know is rapidly decreasing as the preferred channel) they need to embrace the component models that both SDL Web and Knowledge Center offer for content management practices. It seems counter-intuitive for new editors, but experienced Tridion/SDL Web editors love it.

If you had a magic wand what one thing would you add as an enhancement to the product suite?

One-click install!

How do you decide what to build?

This is probably the hardest part of the Product Manager’s job – the filtering between all the inputs (market, company direction, customer and partner requirements), balancing that with team capacity and deciding what to build. As we move forward with our implementation of SAFe this process is becoming clearer, as we apply principles like value-driven decisions, making the final decision process a much clearer and rationalized data-driven exercise rather than based on past experiences and gut feeling.  This ensures our product backlogs and roadmaps are much more aligned to the features that create value for our customers.

If you were about crash onto a desert island with plenty of water, food and shelter what 3 things would you save and take with you?

A satellite phone.

Can you share 1 quick tip you have learned that makes your use of SDL Web so much easier?

Use the DXA. Save yourself the trouble of reinventing the wheel, and follow the patterns the community built over years.

What 1 question do you always like to ask Customers when speaking with them?

I guess it changes by vertical, as different things are important to, say, Financial Services or Retail. What I really like to find out from customers is how their content lifecycle process has changed over time. I often hear from content specialists that the content lifetime has changed so much over the years, that only 10% of the time is actually spent on creation and the remaining 90% is spent on repurposing, reuse and updating. This is something that very few content management tools take into account, by focusing on the creation process. With SDL Web and BluePrinting™, this content lifecycle change is really visible, as content gets created once and then translated, transcreated, adapted, and reused in surprising ways, even to the original content creators.

How do you see technology in this area progressing in the next 5 years?

I’ve written a series of blog posts back in 2013 about what I feel is the future of content. You can read it here:

• Schemas will disappear
• Content Ownership will be flexible
• Context engines will be mainstream
• Data is the future of content
• Any tool can create content

The emergence of content standards – of which DITA is perhaps the technical “grandfather” – for marketing is something that is already happening. When you look at standards like Schema.org and the Open Data Protocol, which are truly open and forward thinking, I believe the choice of tool will matter less and less, and customers will be looking at the real differentiators between platforms – like our BluePrinting™ - and how to optimize their content process. It is a very exciting moment to be active in this space.

What do you think have been the milestones in the development of this product over the last 5-10 years?

There are two moments in my career since I joined product management that make me really proud:

• The launch of the DXA in August 2014 – this is something I worked really hard at making a reality, and it is almost emotional to see its positive reception by partners, customers and colleagues
• The change from long release cycles (about 2 years) to quarterly releases in SDL Web. We are now preparing SDL Web 8.5, which will be our 4^th release in 2016. When we set this as a goal back in 2014 it seemed like we would never make it – yet, here it is.

With faster movement in our product we can expect to see a much faster reaction to the market changes and shifts, and also a stronger maturity in shipping the product. It does come currently out of the dedicated hard work of our teams, but as time goes by and our release process matures through automation, it will benefit SDL, our partners, and most importantly, our customers.

For more content like this, please 'like' this page.