AMA: Gainsight Director, Product Management, Sailaja Kalle on Influencing the C-Suite

* Aligning to Organisation strategy and working on building great products is a key way to stay close to C-Suite. * Bring innovation to the organisation. * Take mentorship offered in the organisation and become part of efficient teams in the organisation. * Work on creating products using efficient UX * Solve problems efficiently

Provide Customer Insights - One of the key services a Product Manager can do is service to customers. Positioning as the voice of the user, my CEO appreciates the customer insights I can provide. Deliver Walk the talk. Be concrete, show prototypes, traction and excited users. This is one of the key interactions to the C-Suite. Care about strategy Working with C-Suite to work on company challenges by working on planning. Working and Leading the process is one of the key interactions with the C-Suite team.

Being a subject matter expert and having empathy for customers helped me become a strong voice of customers. This allowed me to stay close to C-Suite. I learned how to understand the strategy, and what goes into building strategy. Also working with pre-sales teams helped me understand the needs of customers and how the product aligns and provides solutions to those problems. This helped me understand the strategies and challenges of the customer-facing teams.

Product managers who can become great product leaders have a keen vision of how to drive business outcomes to the next level. They can help drive revenue, accelerate throughput, and drive product conversation. Understanding the below business values of the product and building to the product KPI is a great contribution PMs can bring to C-Suite. Below points add to Product KPI * #Number of customers drives a product’s acquisition strategy. * #Number of transactions per customer drives a product’s engagement strategy. * Revenue per transaction drives a product’s monetization strategy. This is the support they can provide to C-Suite team.