Working in product management at a start-up offers exciting challenges, especially when the market that product serves changes quickly.
The product team will need to advocate for and obtain headcount proactively; they’ll need to constantly review the market landscape to identify new competitors and shifting demands on time; and they’ll need to continuously tweak the product roadmap to ensure their product stays a cut above the rest.
For the product team at Randori, the leader in attack surface management, this situation is all too familiar. Just 18 months ago, the attack surface management space didn’t exist, and now it’s seeing explosive growth.
Kristen Yerardi, the CPO at Randori, shared how her team is managing to excel in this environment during our recent Confessions of a CPO webinar. You can read on to see what she shared.
Want to learn even more?
You can watch the webinar’s full recording to catch everything that Yerardi and Gautham Viswanathan—our very own Co-Founder and CPO—said.
Leveraging a product-prioritization framework that accounts for each customer-facing team
Every month, Yerardi and her team meet with various customer-facing colleagues to better understand the challenges they’re facing and what they’re hearing from customers and prospects. She went on to specify the information they gather from different departments:
- Marketing: understanding the messaging that’s resonating with leads and converting them effectively
- Sales: uncovering what prospects say about Randori and competitors
- Customer success: identifying the problems their platform solves for effectively, the issues they should tackle in the near future, and the challenges they might need to address further down the road
Based on the conversations, her team adds potential features to their list. On a quarterly basis, her team then presents this list to these customer-facing teams, where they’d assess each feature using the product prioritization framework “Weighted Shortest Job First.”
The results show the features that different teams see as most critical, which, in turn, helps the product team decide on the ones they put at the top of their roadmap.
Adopting 4 categories for measuring product success
Yerardi went on to highlight 4 areas that help her team assess the overall health of their product.
1. Product onboarding: For Yerardi’s team, successful product onboarding doesn’t just mean that the client understands how to use the product; it also means that the client uses the platform’s data as part of their security operations processes.
2. Product operationalization: Distributing Randori’s insights across the rest of security ops’ tech stack is critical in terms of driving product adoption and value. To help facilitate this need, Randori has always offered clients a bidirectional API.
Unfortunately, adopting this solution hasn’t always been feasible for clients. Yerrardi went on to explain that “not all customers have the resources and staff to actually implement that API.”
Her team responded by providing an integrations marketplace that allows clients to easily connect Randori with the rest of their tech stack. And given that Randori is a startup with finite resources, they decided early on to build this marketplace with the help of a partner (Workato):
3. Feature usage: Yerrardi’s team looks at metrics like the pages users visit, how often they login, and feature adoption—placing a particularly close eye on high-value features.
4. Customer health score: While this score is heavily weighted towards the qualitative feedback customer success managers receive, the product team also accounts for the number of tickets that’ve been filed on behalf of a customer and the extent to which the product team has addressed the client’s feature requests or feedback.
Related: The benefits of using an embedded iPaaS
Fostering a “symbiotic relationship” between product and customer success
Since Randori’s customer success managers engage with clients throughout their journey with the company, they’re the only function—with sales perhaps being an exception—capable of providing “the voice of the customer” to product managers.
Randori’s product team has managed to fully harness their CSMs’ “voice of the customer” by having the customer success function live within the product department. This allows the two to have (in Yerardi’s words) a “symbiotic relationship”—which enables product to truly understand how the platform performs both holistically and at the feature-level over time.
Yerardi further explained why this close partnership is so crucial by exploring an alternative scenario where product holds daily conversations with customers: “If product talked to customers every single day, we’d never get our jobs done. Because we can’t talk to customers every single day, customer success must be the voice of the customer and deliver us that information.”
