Episode #25: The GTM Systems Product Manager - Josh Hill
Resolving the prioritization paradox for systems teams
If I had to name the single biggest challenge for ops teams, it would have to be prioritization. We all have limited resources, and we all have way more requests than we can ever fulfill.
How do you solve this problem?
If you say “yes” to everything, you pretty quickly become a service department, you have no strategic input, and life gets kind of miserable.
At the same time, if you just set your own priorities without enough input from the business, you can find yourself irrelevant and potentially out of a job.
The best model I've seen for tackling this problem is the product management approach, where you effectively treat your stack as an internal product and ops takes the role of a product management team delivering features for internal customers.
I’ve seen many people arrive at this notion independently, but it first occurred to me about 10 years ago.
I was managing GTM systems for a startup at the time, and I observed a virtuous cycle between receiving feedback from my sales users, implementing new features, delivering customer satisfaction and business impact, and receiving new feedback.
It was just like being the product manager of my own internal product—except that all my “customers” sat on the sales floor 10 feet away and could tell me directly what they wanted.
I even got a seat in Aha! (the roadmapping software my product team used) so I could keep track of my roadmap and take feature requests.
Now, this was small company of 30 people. Today’s guest has practiced a similar methodology at truly enterprise scale. Josh was most recently VP of Marketing Technology and Operations at RingCentral, where he managed a team of over thirty marketing ops professionals.
Josh also happens to be a legend in the marketing ops world—one of the first people who saw the opportunity in establishing a serious professional identity around being a marketing automation professional.
He was an early mentor and teacher to so many of us.
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About Today's Guest
Josh Hill is a GTM operations and systems executive who builds revenue accelerating GTM platforms, global teams, and processes in partnership with Product, Sales, and Marketing. He has a strong track record of turning business strategies into live enterprise capabilities and impactful customer experiences.
Key Topics
[00:00] - Introduction
[01:37] - Josh’s professional journey
[04:19] - Development of automation pro as a professional identity
[06:48] - Scope and scale of the teams Josh led
[08:54] - Definition of a product management approach to martech
[15:45] - Should marketing ops be oriented around business impact?
[21:03] - Reasons why ops teams need to say “no” sometimes
[27:38] - Solving for the internal vs. external customer
[30:39] - Asking tough questions about adoption and ROI
[33:53] - Building your roadmap
[35:53] - Communicating your roadmap internally
[40:10] - Cultivating resolve around prioritization and triaging requests
[42:43] - How to transition to a product management approach
Resources
The 5 Pillars to Ending the IT Stakeholder Tug of War - This is a presentation I gave at Workato’s Biz Systems Magic conference in 2021. It’s my own effort to create a framework for using product management techniques to run business systems.