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:

Move fast and build momentum within large organizations
Create and maintain a reputation of dependable partnership and delivery
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:

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
Focus on surfacing tactical information that empowers our engineering teams, like timelines, specific customer details, and customer sentiment

Process

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

CE Customer Issue Routing

Customer Engineers often receive issues from strategic customers and the introduction of this cross-functional project makes it unclear where to post these issues. Please follow the below process when you receive an issue…

File a product gap in Salesforce
Notify the respective slack channel
1. If the issue is within a single team with clear ownership, post within that team’s channel and cross-post in #cp-strategic for FYI
2. If the issue is within multiple teams or ownership is unclear, post in #cp-strategic

Strategy

✅ By July 30 2022, build a deep understanding of the strategic customer space current state and future needs.
✅ By Sept 28 2022, prioritize and solve the most pressing future needs – currently:
1. ✅ (See document here) Document product opportunities for select strategic customers and prospects By September 20th
2. ✅ (Find roadmaps here) Each triad puts together a roadmap for their team for the next 6 months (now until mid-March marketing moment) By September 27th
3. ✅ Steve and Ryan Phillips will review teams roadmaps in EM/PM weekly syncs During the week of Sept 26th
🔄 Teams begin iteratively executing on their roadmaps. Each team provides an weekly update on Friday via Geekbot, results are posted in #cp-strategic
On Jan 1, most teams shift to focusing on the Code Intelligence Platform while continuing to prioritize alongside
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.