In this episode of Next Gen Builders, host Francois welcomes Ashley Kramer, the Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer of GitLab Inc., the DevSecOps Platform. Ashley offers insights from her rich background in both product and marketing, sharing practical advice on how to foster successful collaboration between these two critical business functions.
In this episode of Next Gen Builders, host Francois welcomes Ashley Kramer, the Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer of GitLab Inc., the DevSecOps Platform.
Ashley offers insights from her rich background in both product and marketing, sharing practical advice on how to foster successful collaboration between these two critical business functions.
Throughout her conversation with Francois, Ashley emphasizes the vital importance of customer-centric thinking, advising leaders to focus on solving genuine customer problems rather than falling in love with their own solutions. Additionally, she underscores the necessity of constant learning and cross-functional communication, suggesting that leaders must be well-versed in demonstrating their product's value across varied contexts and to different stakeholders.
Furthermore, Ashley touches on the importance of building a must-have product from day one. In her words, “When the CFO comes to whatever executive you sell to and says, ‘Hey, we need you to cut 2 million in budget.’ [Your product] has to be something that everyone's like, ‘You cannot take this from me. Efficiency will be down, we'll be unhappy, we'll leave the company.’”
Ashley also shares practical advice on balancing visionary storytelling with concrete product development milestones. By weaving customer validation into every step, Ashley illustrates how product leaders can avoid pitfalls and drive sustained innovation.
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Guest Bio
Ashley Kramer is the Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer of GitLab Inc., the DevSecOps Platform. GitLab’s single application helps organizations deliver software faster and more efficiently while strengthening their security and compliance. As CMO and CSO, Ashley leverages her leadership from roles in marketing, product and technology to message and position GitLab as the leading DevSecOps platform through the next stage of growth. She is responsible for GitLab’s product marketing, brand awareness, communications, analyst relations, community, competitive positioning, marketing ops and revenue pipeline generation including all digital and sales development efforts. Ashley also leads the strategy for product-led growth and code contribution to the GitLab platform.
Prior to joining GitLab, Ashley was CPO and CMO of Sisense and has held several post-IPO leadership roles including SVP of Product at Alteryx (NYSE) AYX) where she led the messaging, positioning and roadmap for the Alteryx Analytics Platform and Head of Cloud at Tableau where she led the effort to transform Tableau (now a Salesforce company) to a cloud-first company and ran Tableau Online, their fastest growing product. She also has held various marketing, product and engineering leadership roles at Amazon (NASDAQ) AMZN), Oracle (NYSE) ORCL) and NASA. As a former engineer, Ashley understands and can capitalize on the value of GitLab’s unique ability to solve a deep developer pain point - streamlining the development process and bringing innovative ideas to customers in a quicker and more efficient way. She approaches everything with a customer-first mindset and has a passion for solving the challenge of positioning and messaging software platforms to technical audiences.
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Guest Quote
“I love storytelling. My team is great at it. But customers need to be able to tell the same story, believe it, buy into it. So then we can go bring more prospects along.” – Ashley Kramer
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Time Stamps
*(00:00) Episode Start
*(03:44) Ashley's career journey
*(06:04) Marketing vs. Product: How to be a better leader
*(10:23) How to break new ground and innovate against the norm
*(16:21) Ashely's Oh Sh*t Moment
*(18:29) How to become a must-have product
*(21:10) Strategies for standing out
*(23:26) Company vision vs. reality
*(25:40) Ashley's advice to aspiring product leaders
*(31:01) What Ashley would tell her younger self
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Links
0:00:05.0 Ashley Kramer: My big moment was whatever you're building from a product perspective has to be a must-have product. Who knows what's gonna happen in the next 10 years. We'll go through another boom where money is flying from VCs and everybody's building fun things. And then we'll hit these times again. Be ready for that.
0:00:23.9 Francois Ajenstat: This is NextGen Builders, the show for the growth and product leaders of tomorrow. Today, we're gonna talk about the unholy union, product and marketing. Are these teams frenemies at the drawing board or the secret recipe behind your favorite products? We'll discuss what's changed in the last few years and what makes a successful relationship and what pitfalls to avoid in the age of the NextGen Builders. And who better to take us behind the scenes than someone who's done both. Please join me today in welcoming Ashley Kramer, the Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer of GitLab. Ashley's led marketing and product leadership teams at companies like Amazon, Alteryx, and Tableau. And she'll tell us about the often ignored synergy between the storytellers and the builders and how the clashes and collaborations could be the key to your next breakthrough. So welcome, Ashley.
0:01:28.2 Ashley Kramer: Hello. Thank you for having me today.
0:01:28.3 Francois Ajenstat: Well, it's so great to have you here. Now, Ashley, before we kind of go into it, you love dogs and you love running.
0:01:36.1 Ashley Kramer: I love both.
0:01:37.6 Francois Ajenstat: You love both. Now tell me, you go running. I think you've been doing this every day forever. How do you get ready every day to get in the right mindset?
0:01:46.8 Ashley Kramer: I mean, for me, there are certain types of people that relax and unwind by doing things like meditation and yoga. And I highly respect those people. But all I think about the whole time I'm doing those is what's happening at work, what I'm gonna wear tomorrow, what are we gonna do this weekend? When I run, it's hard. Particularly where I live now, I live at 7,000 feet. So there's altitude pressures, there's hills everywhere. So when I run, no matter how much I do it, all I can think about is when is this going to be finished? And why am I breathing so hard? And that is my meditation, quite honestly.
0:02:26.4 Francois Ajenstat: That's awesome. And does that clear your minds or does that get like everything else, all the daily pressures just out of the way?
0:02:34.9 Ashley Kramer: Completely clears it and makes me I feel very unaccomplished at the end of the day, which happens sometimes if I can't get my run in. Come on my next run with me? Is that you volunteering?
0:02:48.9 Francois Ajenstat: I'm all in. I started running as well and I hate it.
0:02:54.5 Ashley Kramer: Exactly [laughter]
0:02:55.5 Francois Ajenstat: But halfway through it, I put on this mantra. I say, what got me here isn't what's gonna get me there or we haven't gotten this far to only get this far. You can go, you can push, you can push.
0:03:10.4 Ashley Kramer: Gone.
0:03:10.5 Francois Ajenstat: And that is actually my work mantra.
0:03:11.4 Ashley Kramer: All right. I'm signing you up for the next marathon. We're in.
0:03:14.6 Francois Ajenstat: All right. Let's do it. So talking about getting this far, let's go all the way back. How did you start in your career? 'cause you're actually... Are you a computer scientist, you're a NASA engineer. Where did it all start?
0:03:29.0 Ashley Kramer: I was. Let's get that very clear. I was. Yeah, I took what we would probably consider the most unconventional path to become a CMO. I was, yes, a computer science major in undergrad, later got an MBA. But being a software engineer was hard. And it was really, really hard for me. And because of that, I didn't like it. And quite honestly, I probably wasn't that great at it. We can call some former managers and bosses. And so I left software engineering and went to Amazon at NASA, where I had this interesting program management role, which is a little bit of a mix, at least at the time at Amazon. It's a little bit of understanding business, doing a little bit of development, doing a little bit of product management. And that's where I really got to stretch all of those muscles and found out I love product. Enter Tableau, where we had a really awesome product that we were working on doing really great things. After I was done with my time there, I went to a company called Alteryx and was running products.
0:04:35.1 Ashley Kramer: However, I always wanted to lean into the messaging and the positioning and kind of what's coming next, which, as we all know, is often marketing. So over my time there, we had a CMO changeover, and I actually got part of marketing. And so now I'm doing product part marketing. Maybe we'll talk about this later. I go to my next job at Sisense. I am CPO and CMO. Teaser for if we talk about this later. I don't recommend it. It was really hard. It was really hard, and I don't think I gave either teams enough attention. And then fast forward, I'm now at GitLab.
0:05:02.0 Ashley Kramer: And what's interesting at GitLab is I'm chief marketing officer and chief strategy officer. Chief marketing officer is really relevant to my background because I sell and market to what I used to be and I thought was really hard. I sell to the career. I abandon the developer. And then the strategy side, interesting enough, at Alteryx, I was the buyer of GitLab to solve issues I had. So I was an executive buyer of the product. And so strategically, I can go talk to our customers about the pain points I had, hear what they have coming as future needs, and sort of pull that all together in messaging and positioning.
0:05:43.6 Francois Ajenstat: That's fascinating. So having been on both sides, tell me from the marketer's point of view, how can you be a better product leader and vice versa from the product point of view? How does marketing help you be a better leader there too?
0:06:02.1 Ashley Kramer: Yeah, from the product perspective, so what I see as best product leaders, and this was an Amazon principle when I was there, is you start with the customer and you work backwards. However, that doesn't mean that the customer always knows the solution. They think they do. They know their problems, and they try to give you the solution. So the best product managers, product leaders I've ever worked with know how to get the mass customer feedback and distill it into the solutions that they can build that will achieve the goals of many customers. And so that's what I see from a marketing perspective as the best product leaders.
0:06:41.0 Ashley Kramer: On the product leader side, for marketing leaders, and I take this very seriously as CMO at GitLab, is I think the very best CMOs must know the product and the space. And you can argue in MarTech, it's probably pretty easy for a CMO, they're probably the best salesperson at that company. CMO at a DevSecOps company, it takes work to understand, and it takes even today, even as a buyer and a former developer, words get thrown around all the time that I don't understand that I have to go talk to our CPO and understand. And then if my team sees that, of course, that makes them rise to the challenge as well. So we know we're not just releasing marketing material, we're releasing things that resonate with the audience we're trying to reach.
0:07:26.5 Francois Ajenstat: So any advice for leaders of how do you get that learning? How do you lean in and get into that uncomfortable space to develop yourself and develop the skills?
0:07:38.6 Ashley Kramer: To me, this is where the partnership comes into play. I am not afraid, and I made very clear to our CPO, David, who is fantastic. When I first started, I said I used to be a product leader, but I don't want your job here at all. And he actually likes the messaging side. He's actually named some of our capabilities. He was the one that chose the name, and we loved it. But he doesn't wanna be a CMO. That's not his desire. And so it's having that close partnership. He's not afraid to call me and say, Hey, I was talking to a customer who's thinking of this. What do you think about this for a campaign? And I'm not afraid to call him and say, I keep hearing this product come up or this word come up, and I cannot figure out what it does. And we have that so we're teaching each other every day. And again, my desire is never to go be a CPO again. I would argue his desire probably is never to be a CMO. But that partnership is really powerful because we're making each other in our teams better by being okay asking those questions and educating each other.
0:08:39.6 Francois Ajenstat: Now, have you seen when that relationship is broken? What happens?
0:08:46.1 Speaker 1: [chuckle] finger pointing. We'll talk outside of this company. Of course, other companies, let's say product, build something, releases it. There's no pipeline around it. Sales can't really sell it. It's very easy to say, well, you're not taking it to market. You're not talking about it. It's also very easy for marketing to say, feature doesn't work. It's not good. That's gonna achieve nothing. You win or lose together as a company, as a leadership team, as an entire organization. And so, of course, in any role, you can ask me that about any role. It's very easy to say, oh, finance didn't give me enough budget. That's why my team's delivering slow. But it's more about are you taking the team approach? And sure, if we can't build pipeline, let's work out together why we think that is the case around whatever feature product capability that you delivered.
0:09:39.1 Francois Ajenstat: So let's transition a little bit to building new things and going against maybe what is the norm to move forward on something you have strong conviction on. And I bring it in this context because you're building something new. You may not have the pipeline. You may be creating the category. You may be maybe earlier in the space. How would you approach it? And I've known you for a while. And that's kind of how I always see the Ashley that I know, which is creating new opportunities, seeing problems and breaking new ground. Like, how do you get started in going against the norm?
0:10:20.5 Ashley Kramer: Yeah, I think often, unfortunately, when people get started in going against the norm at mature companies, it's different for probably startups and founders. They start their company 'cause they see a problem. They go after it. When you are at a company that starts getting known for something, guess what? Everybody's gonna try to build that. At Tableau, everybody was gonna build visualization. At Alteryx, everybody was gonna build prep and blend. So it becomes commoditized. And so what I think the best leaders do is they continue to look ahead. They don't get complacent that, great, they're selling this like crazy. Everybody needs it. Always know something is gonna happen, some other solution is gonna come out. And how do you think about how you're going to further your total addressable market? How you're going to further solve the needs of customers? Bonus points if you can keep the same customers and keep delivering them more. And there's different ways to approach it.
0:11:16.1 Ashley Kramer: What did we do at Tableau? We built brand new way to deliver use, and we deployed the software for you, a SaaS product. And it was going to have its unique fit. At Alteryx, what did we do? We looked at the chessboard. We started doing some M&A. And we started figuring out either company, you could argue, did close partnerships. And then you start to see what's working and what's not. Partner is probably the cheapest, easiest way to see what's happening. And then you go after that. You're solving problems that maybe don't exist yet, but you know will happen the day that everybody starts using free visualization software or everybody starts building prep and blend just as part of their product. Always looking two to three steps ahead, but also understanding you're not gonna always get it right. And I can argue, I've gotten it wrong several times.
0:12:16.9 Francois Ajenstat: We'll talk about some of those soon. But how do you break through with the biases or the beliefs that people have? For instance, in the early days of the cloud, oh, the cloud analytics will never work. The early days of any category, everybody believes that'll never work. How do you break through and make progress in that world?
0:12:37.3 Ashley Kramer: Yeah, we have enough examples over time now to know that there's always going to be cloud's not gonna work. AI is only gonna be scary and never gonna work. I think we're going to see that, that's probably not going to be totally true. And so from my perspective, trying to really understand why they're saying that I think a lot for cloud, it was because of performance, security, blah, blah, blah. So start leaning into why, and that was a big part of my job there, why cloud could actually be more efficient and more secure. It took a lot of people a long time to figure out that the cloud could actually be more secure. In other roles I've been in, like at Alteryx, we decided we were gonna go after the data scientist market. And data scientists wanted nothing to do with it, because they've gotten years and years of education to build these models to do this on their own. But what we saw was that was the exact problem.
0:13:38.2 Ashley Kramer: There was only at the time when I was there two million of them. And there were needs for probably tens of millions of them. And so what we were trying to solve is, how do we make data science more accessible? But we realized over those conversations, maybe we weren't selling to the data scientists. Maybe we were selling to those executives and to those people that could almost get there needed it, but couldn't dip into that two million talent pool that they had. And so it's all about that creativity and figuring out how to break through what you're correctly stating is people that don't ever work, that's never gonna work. And in most of the times down the road, it does, you just got to convince them in different ways.
0:14:21.8 Francois Ajenstat: Are there signals that you look for in the kind of the early days of that transformation that's giving you the the positive signs? 'cause not all ideas are good ideas. But how do you know that it's actually working?
0:14:32.8 Ashley Kramer: For me, it's actually customers. So I'll use an example from GitLab. Now we are going all in on AI, like a lot of companies out there. And we have lots of capabilities. And when I get most excited, our product leader, our chief revenue officer get most excited is when we have customers coming back to us, telling us the value of the beta features that they were testing, or now they have it in production. And what I saw as a shift this year that I got super excited about is it wasn't us going in and just explaining to them the what this is what we're gonna do, this is what we're gonna do, this is why you're gonna love it. Instead, they're coming back to us, and they're saying, this is how we're going to measure the impact of your AI capabilities throughout our SDLC.
0:15:24.8 Ashley Kramer: And to me, that's my validation. That's what I need to know. We can go convince the analysts and we can go convince the early prospects, but the customers coming to us and repeating that. And as you can imagine, the CMO in me wants to get every single one of those stories and show them to the world. People don't want you selling your product to them. They want other customers talking about value.
0:15:48.8 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah, and that comes back down to grounding everything in the customer and the customer value and the customer problem, really.
0:15:56.0 Ashley Kramer: That's right.
0:15:57.3 Francois Ajenstat: At the end of the day. Now, when you lean in to build, when you lean into the unknown, it doesn't always go right. Sometimes I call it the oh shit moment. What did I do? Or this is never gonna work. Can you kind of give an example of one of those and how you overcome it or keep the team focused?
0:16:21.5 Ashley Kramer: So from my perspective, and I learned this, so we had two big moments over the past let's say since 2020 on, we had a pandemic hit, which arguably for tech was fine. But at the beginning, it was scary 'cause we were like, everybody's going home. We don't know if companies will keep moving, keep building. And then there's whatever time we're in now, inflation rising all of the things. And so for me, my big moment, and it was not at GitLab, it was not at Tableau either, was whatever you're building from a product perspective, has to be a must-have product. It must be something that when the CFO comes to whatever executive you sell to and says, hey, we need you to cut two million in budget. I think consolidating tools is going to be the best thing to do. Your product has to be that thing. And it can't just be one or two people that are like, I love this, don't because they probably don't care what those two people think.
0:17:19.9 Ashley Kramer: They'll figure it out. It has to be something that everyone's like, you cannot take this from me. Efficiency will be down, we'll be unhappy, we'll leave the company. It must be something that you can't go and have your customers just build on their own and get 75% of the way there. So I saw firsthand, if you don't have a must-have product, that it can be really, really detrimental. And that must have need, needs to start all the way in the beginning of the product ideation, be looking around all of those angles because who knows what's gonna happen in the next 10 years. We'll go through another boom where money is flying from VCs and everybody's building fun things. And then we'll hit these times again, be ready for that.
0:18:05.4 Francois Ajenstat: So actually, can you drill in a little bit? Nice-to-have versus must-have. When you're building something new, you're kind of a little bit ahead of it where you might say, well, maybe I could live with the old way of doing it. How do you actually become a must-have product?
0:18:27.0 Ashley Kramer: You have to be able to show distinct value in whatever you're doing, whether it is making teams more efficient, and that's measurable, whether... It is actually saving money. That's a big thing I like to focus on, is can you help measure the ROI? And it's not super simple. It's not usually just a dollar for dollar, but can you help demonstrate to the organization the value of this? And this is where I think sometimes, companies executives go wrong. They focus on the buyer. Like sometimes C-level, other companies, maybe not ahead of C-level and trying to prove to them the value. You gotta make sure you're focusing on the users too. Are they sitting there complaining this isn't working for them about the bug, but they're using it 'cause you brought it in? Or are they your biggest evangelist that will say, no, no, no, my day is totally different. I cannot go back to that way of doing things. Tableau example, I cannot go back to using spreadsheets. GitLab example, I cannot go back to using all these point solutions. And so I think if you can figure that out within organizations, then it becomes a lot less of intuition. No, my team likes it. No, CFO, we can't take that and more of like, this is the value that it's bringing.
0:19:43.5 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah. Creating champions is so critical, especially when you're creating new.
0:19:50.6 Ashley Kramer: Yeah. And be able to speak to the value. We have a bunch of MarTech solutions that I brought in to modernize our system and I would be totally comfortable if my CFO came to me and said, I need you to cut some of these tools to say that this is what we're able to do because of it. This is how much more efficient sales is in prospecting. This is how more efficient this is because of it. But you need to help them get there. You don't... You need to push them to be there to be ready for that moment. Otherwise that's not gonna be there. The CTO of customers that we sell GitLab to is not sitting every day being like, I wonder what value it's bringing. We have to make sure to have those touchpoints and be like, we wanna make sure if you have any questions, let us know. But here's the value, here's what more we can help you do. You have to be proactive.
0:20:34.6 Francois Ajenstat: Now, Let's talk about that and think about the breakthrough on marketing. When you're successful or if you look at a variety of tools, they end up all kind of looking the same. They all have some sense of either copycat messaging, look and feel, value statements that maybe are elaborate or imaginary. How do you break through when everything looks the same?
0:21:08.1 Ashley Kramer: Yeah, it's a super hard challenge because you're right, the minute you finally get messaging right, everybody else starts using it. And so I always tell my team, to me, that's flattering to me. Imitation, best form of flattery. But also that means we have to keep going and we have to keep building upon that. And we have to, again, keep seeing around the corners of what will provide that value. But I'm gonna bring it back again to I can, I like that you called it imaginary. Hopefully, I don't do much of that. But I can create, I love storytelling. My team is great at it. We can create best messaging, new ways of talking about it, but you gotta have other validation. And so obviously, customers we just talked about need to be able to tell that same story, believe it, buy into it.
0:21:58.1 Ashley Kramer: In fact, when we were doing a messaging exercise, when I first started at the company, we were iterating on our messaging and one of our board members came to me and said, I just don't buy this messaging at the time. I said, why? And he's like, go talk to 10 customers and tell me if they repeat that to you. He was right. None of them were saying what we were saying. So that's one way of doing it. The second you know this as well as I do, you've gotta convince the influencers in the market. So influencer means different things for us. It's probably same for you. It's analysts out there saying it, believing it, believing you are ahead in it. And so it's sort of marketing has that role of being very concrete for the field so they can go talk about and sell what we have and what's coming, but also influencing other people in the market and making sure customers have that resonating with them so then we can go bring more prospects along.
0:22:55.9 Francois Ajenstat: That's great. I wanna go back to the word imaginary 'cause it's so fun to dream, but as builders, you're dreaming a lot.
0:23:07.5 Ashley Kramer: All the time.
0:23:08.1 Francois Ajenstat: You're just thinking about the art of the possible and what you could create, not necessarily being stuck in the present, but vision versus reality. How do you actually sell the vision knowing where you are today?
0:23:24.0 Ashley Kramer: To me, setting the vision is great and necessary. And anything time I'm buying something from a vendor, I do wanna know where they're gonna be in three years. Because if it's somewhere totally different than where I see that I wanna take my team, I'm not gonna go with it. So for me, it's about setting that vision and validating, but that having steps to get there. If I set a vision today about something coming in three years and customers, prospects, the world don't see anything stepped into that direction for the next year, that's exactly what it was. It was a story, it was imaginary. And that can be what your company becomes known for. So there's a fine balance from being the black and white company that always says exactly what's coming and when it's gonna be there, and sticks to that and the company that tells those large stories about what's coming. But then nobody sees any steps toward that direction.
0:24:22.6 Francois Ajenstat: Totally makes sense. At a certain point, the story can only go so far. You need to have validation points and proof that you're actually going in the right direction. 'cause you'll probably zigzag along the way to get to that destination, but it evolves. You learn along the way. And I think as you said, everything starts with the customer and you want to get that customer voice in as early as possible to validate.
0:24:47.6 Ashley Kramer: Totally agree. And they're the best product marketers, storytellers can take that vision and even take the tiniest little feature that the product team might not even have built for that vision and tie it into why it was an important step toward that vision. So again, it's not imaginary, but it is putting the narrative around where you are trying to go down the road.
0:25:15.6 Francois Ajenstat: All right, awesome. Let's flip back to your career. And you're working with product leaders, marketing leaders, all the various leaders in the company. From your current standpoint as a CMO, if you were to give advice to an aspiring product leader or an aspiring builder, what would you tell them to be more effective?
0:25:40.1 Ashley Kramer: Yeah, I think I already said one of them, which was, listen to the customer problem, not their proposed solution. But the second one, I think makes the best product leaders and product teams, think about how you structure your team. Whether you're building on a platform or you have a bunch of different capabilities as part of your product. Too often, I see product managers that know one slice really, really well. So then what happens is, is what they're building gonna tie in with that slice next to them? And even worse, when they're talking to a customer oh, I have a customer that wants to talk about X. So product manager that owns X goes in and then the customer's like, well, I have you. I wanted to talk a little bit about Y. Then what happens if your team doesn't have a basic understanding of the entire product or platform is they start shipping the org chart. Let me bring Susie in to do that and talk about making customers upset is when you do that, when you cannot expect a particularly PMs that are just starting out to know everything. But you can certainly have a baseline level understanding. If you think about it, We require our sellers to do that. We require them to pivot and say, oh, I was gonna talk to you about this, but it sounds like you want this, so let's get product managers and product marketers there as well.
0:27:02.9 Francois Ajenstat: Is there, do you have a technique on how to get people to kind of get out of their lane and think about the whole?
0:27:08.4 Ashley Kramer: I think it depends on the product you're working on or selling, but demos. That was the very first thing Tableau actually made me do is they made me, and the person actually I think ended up working for me down the road. They made me go to, I forget what we called it at the time, but one of the first touch sellers and do a demo. We had a demo and it was interesting. I had never had to do that at a company before. But that gets you to the point, go make them get certified on the demo because you're gonna get a question or two where you're like, oh, I just memorized a script. I don't actually know it. Like do a certification around it. And then again, then they find interest and they understand, oh, when this product manager's working on this, now I understand where it fits in and probably why.
0:27:54.2 Ashley Kramer: So I actually, it's very tactical. It's not the most strategic plan in the world, but make them learn how to demo, make them learn the elevator pitch. Will five people at your company right now, when you say what does your product do? Will they all say the same thing? I can tell you my answer is probably still no at GitLab. So that's on me to fix that [laughter] But that's the other piece. So now you understand product and you understand how we're gonna go If a customer asks you at a random event, what do you do? Boom. That's what I do. Not this like long drawn out, very different message than they're probably gonna get from the next person at the company.
0:28:31.7 Francois Ajenstat: Let me take out t the messaging pitch and share with you.
0:28:35.0 Ashley Kramer: Yeah exactly [laughter] et me read the... Hold on. Let me open up my email for a second. Now, it's really critical, I think.
0:28:41.1 Francois Ajenstat: I actually 120% agree. I think demos is one of those special skills where not only does it give you a broad sense of your entire product but it makes you a better communicator. It makes you have a better understanding of the customer pain point. And for me, I built my career starting with building demos. And it's really given me that kind of perspective of product and marketing. 'cause you kind of have to do both when you're delivering a demo.
0:29:10.1 Ashley Kramer: Yeah, and I don't wanna make your head bigger or anything or flatter you too much with this, but.
0:29:16.3 Francois Ajenstat: I know. Please, please, go ahead.
0:29:21.3 Ashley Kramer: You were a product leader at Tableau that I can say knew the product inside and out, was not afraid to just pull out a demo, talking to an analyst, talking to a customer, pull out a demo, had it ready all the time, used it every day to find insights about the business about. Aand to me, that is the most effective way to do it. Because guess what? Who found the most bugs... Was my first year at Tableau, Who found the most bugs Francois, because he was using it every day and knew what he needed. And you were the person we were selling to at other companies. And so I think, again, that's the only compliment I'm committed to giving you today. But it's super, super critical for product leaders to think and act that way.
0:30:00.0 Francois Ajenstat: Well, I'll take it. Thank you for that compliment. The one, it's been recorded now forever.
0:30:03.6 Ashley Kramer: The one of the year actually we'll call.
0:30:05.7 Francois Ajenstat: Oh, okay. Yeah. Well that's nice. I will say though, that technique I still do today. Even though I'm in a new company, in a new role, I still will go do demos every time there's a new feature, I'll learn to demo it. I will showcase demos in meetings, but it also sets a tone, I think with others. 'cause if you're able to demo, the others should be able to do it too.
0:30:28.9 Ashley Kramer: Totally agree. I totally agree. And I do that when I require my teams to again, learn a demo, learn new messaging, I always go and do it first. It's leading by example is so critical. And I think particularly for product leaders when it comes to using your own product.
0:30:46.5 Francois Ajenstat: Right. So you've given us some good advice, good perspectives, go all the way back in time. Young Ashley starting out her career. What would you tell her to drive even more impact and more success?
0:31:00.1 Ashley Kramer: Yeah. I think on this sort of interpersonal side, I have one on product two is to not get so wrapped up in minute details on, you actually used to give me this advice, like it might seem like the biggest problem in the world to you right now. This tiny little feature not working or engineering not moving fast enough or whatever it is. But in the grand scheme of things, is that really gonna impact a whole lot or is that specific to Ashley's role? And and now that I have large teams, I see it really clear. So I think I would've been a more effective PM even engineer back in the day if I would've learned earlier on to see bigger, broader picture. I think that's the perspective I have from that side of it. What I would tell early and later, product leader Ashley, is it's okay to release fast and often, and MVP is a thing to people and isn't a thing to others.
0:32:04.3 Ashley Kramer: But for the really big product launches, you have one chance at a first impression. And so you better make sure it is gonna be useful. It is gonna be ready because it's gonna take a long time to bring back customers, prospects that looked at it had, there was all this buzz and they thought, Hmm, that's okay, but it's not what I need yet. And then the second part of that is convincing your field, your sellers to believe in it and go sell it. Okay, we know a year ago when we launched this, it wasn't that great, but try again. And so that's the other piece. So there's the external and the internal. If it's something big enough and impactful enough, make sure it's ready. Time to market is important, but trying to get people back to believing in whatever you built, if it wasn't quite ready can be much more detrimental.
0:32:53.4 Francois Ajenstat: And in that example, is it about going slower or about focusing on the core problem?
0:33:00.9 Ashley Kramer: Focusing on the core problem and making sure... I mean, I never wanna go, David, Our CPO will tell you, I'm the last person to wanna go slow. But I also understand it will slow things down if we are able to say something's NGA, something's in production now. But then people start using it and say, Hmm, this isn't quite ready. You're slowing, you've just slowed everything down. Maybe in product, you went fast. In engineering, you've just slowed down how you can make progress in the market. So you have to balance those things. There's always a give and take around it.
0:33:32.8 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah, I agree. There's the expression of you gotta fall in love with the problem, not the solution. I think sometimes that happens when you fall in love with the solution and all the cool things that it does, but it actually doesn't solve a real customer problem. And that gets you in a bad spot.
0:33:46.8 Ashley Kramer: Happens all the time.
0:33:50.5 Francois Ajenstat: Happens all the time?
0:33:50.6 Ashley Kramer: Yep. I killed many, many features and capabilities because of that.
0:33:55.8 Francois Ajenstat: Do you have a test for that to validate it?
0:33:57.1 Ashley Kramer: It goes back to early validation and what the market needs, what's already out there. It goes to, are you solving it properly? It's very easy for somebody that's very familiar with their product, their capabilities, what it can do to say, oh, it's okay, you just have to change this and this and change the way the person works and do that. That's really hard. People needed to just work. They don't need a long implementation around it. They don't want to no longer click here. In analytics, I heard that all the time clicks matter. So like to a product manager, it's just five more clicks. It's no big deal. Non-starter for customers. Very easy to validate by the way, in beta testing with a solid beta program, very easy to validate if you're actually close to customers. And so from my test is great. We're in love with the solution. Do we have other people that actually believe it will solve things and believe it'll be impactful that aren't the people working on it?
0:35:00.9 Francois Ajenstat: That's great advice. So Ashley, we can't go through a whole conversation without talking about dogs.
0:35:04.5 Ashley Kramer: I love dogs.
0:35:05.7 Francois Ajenstat: I love dogs too.
0:35:06.0 Ashley Kramer: I know.
0:35:06.8 Francois Ajenstat: Tell me about your dogs. What's the difference in their personalities and.
0:35:12.2 Ashley Kramer: Well, you knew Bruce is a puppy. Bruce is now eight and a half. Sweetest, most gentle, loving dog since he was a puppy. My mom and I joke, he potty trained himself. And it's a long story, but it's true. Just the sweetest. During the pandemic, we decided to expand the family and we brought in Betty. Also a lab. And she will be my greatest challenge for the rest of time. It's not that she's not sweet, but everything is her way or the highway. She's the first dog I've ever had that she prefers her dad and not me, which just makes it even harder on me 'cause I try too hard. And so I have two dogs with very opposite personalities. They get along great, they mesh really well, but yes very, very different personalities.
0:36:06.6 Francois Ajenstat: It's kind of like managing people at work. Not everybody's The same.
0:36:10.6 Ashley Kramer: [laughter] actually, yes. And you have to treat them different and they care about different things. Like if I don't feed Bruce by 6:00 PM on the dot, it's done. It's over. He'll come find me. He did it last night. Betty doesn't really care. But if I miss playing ball with her, we're done. And so it's just, yes, it's just like managing a team. You have to understand different personalities, different needs and alter yourself a little bit when you're working with them [chuckle]
0:36:38.5 Francois Ajenstat: It's situational leadership.
0:36:41.1 Ashley Kramer: That's right. I do it every day at home [laughter]
0:36:45.0 Francois Ajenstat: [laughter] it doesn't matter who you're managing or what project you're on, understand the situation and build on that.
0:36:49.5 Ashley Kramer: So true. It's hard being us.
0:36:53.0 Francois Ajenstat: It totally is. But when there are puppies involved, it makes everything so much better.
0:37:00.0 Ashley Kramer: This work from home thing really resonates with me. 'cause I have two best coworkers ever, all day, every day.
0:37:08.3 Francois Ajenstat: I wish I could say that. I have mine who both mostly sleeps and.
0:37:11.1 Ashley Kramer: Snores.
0:37:12.7 Francois Ajenstat: Fills the air with some great smells.
0:37:14.0 Ashley Kramer: I remember that even that's always been a thing with him.
0:37:18.4 Francois Ajenstat: That's a thing. That's the breed.
0:37:22.8 Ashley Kramer: [laughter] that's the breed. That's the breed, you know And love.
0:37:23.5 Francois Ajenstat: [laughter] they're special creatures.
0:37:24.0 Francois Ajenstat: That's awesome.
0:37:27.0 Ashley Kramer: [chuckle] well Ashley, thank you for so much for joining us and thank you all for listening to Next Gen Builders. Look out for our next episode wherever you get your podcasts. And please don't forget to subscribe.