The SaaS Product Power Breakfast with Dave Kellogg and Thomas Otter

TSPPB: Thomas and Dave interview Prof Dirk Riehle

This episode goes deep into open source, especially open source licensing models and how they are evolving. Prof Dirk Riehle is one of the leading researchers on open source. We dig into the recent MongoDB licence, amongst other things. We also discuss product management education. 

 

TSPPB: Dave Interviews Chris McLaughlin of Nuxeo and LumApps

We welcome a special friend Chris McLaughlin, currently CMO at France-based powerhouse LumApps, a collaboration and communications platform backed by top European investors including Idinvest and Goldman Sachs.

In this week’s episode we  ask Chris many questions, including:

• How to get product and marketing working together, especially when they aren’t under a common boss.
• How European startups should organize their go-to-market functions to enter and grow in the US market
• The role of both the product and marketing leaders in startups with either a technical founder or business founder
• When is the right time to hire your first CPO and/or CMO
• How to align product, marketing, and sales around a strategy — and dealing with the normal challenges in focusing that strategy

TSPPB: Dave and Thomas with Stephanie McReynolds on category creation

We have a discussion with former Alation CMO Stephanie McReynolds on the topic of category creation and her learnings as she helped drive the creation of the data catalog category and establish Alation as the leader in it [1].

In addition to her gig at Alation, Stephanie’s had a great career at many leading and/or category-defining vendors including E.piphany, Business Objects, PeopleSoft, Oracle, Aster Data, ClearStory, and Trifacta.

Questions we address include:

• Does a vendor create a category or do market forces?
• In creating a category do you lead with product or solution?
• How do you know if you should try to create a category?
• What role do industry analysts play in category creation?
• What happens once you’ve successfully created a category?  What next?

TSPPB: Thomas interviews Murali Mazhavanchery

Murali is VP PM at Utmost, and former SuccessFactors PM. We  delve into some HRTECH history, the differences between PM 10 years ago and today, scaling, technical debt, understanding users v buyers, managing constraints, platforms v apps, developing the next generation of PM, and the social contract between sales and product. We may mention cricket.

TSPPB: Dave interviews Brett Queener. The Product Superpowers That Few Flex: Intention and Conviction.

Dave and Thomas interview Brett Queener, partner at Bonfire Ventures, former President & COO at SmartRecruiters, product-line general manager at both Salesforce.com and Siebel...

What was it like running product for Marc Benioff?  (Or, for that matter, Tom Siebel?) and much more. 

TSPPB: Thomas Interviews David Clarke, former Workday CTO

The SaaS Product Power Breakfast with Dave Kellogg, Thomas Otter and guest David Clarke. We discuss the early days of Workday.  We explore acquisitions, the role of architects, what is a platform actually, and the challenge of being a small vendor with big customers, and how to say no when you need to. We also get awesome audience feedback likening us to a famous band gig, which we graciously accept.  transcript.

 

TSPPB: Dave interviews Scott Beechuk of Norwest Venture Partners.

Dave interviews special guest, entrepreneur, ex-Salesforce product leader turned venture capitalist, Scott Beechuk, of Norwest Venture Partners.  Scott and Dave worked together at Salesforce almost a decade ago and work together today with Bluecore. 

Recorded  with the consent of the live studio Clubhouse audience.