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Irshad Raihan is Director of Product Marketing at Red Hat and is responsible for strategy, thought leadership and go-to-market execution. Previously, he held senior product marketing and product management positions at HPE and IBM for big data and data management products. Irshad holds an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University and a Master’s in Computer Science from Clemson University. He is based in Northern California and can be reached on Twitter @irshadraihan.
Interviewed by Shwetha Mahesh
/ / How has the product marketing function evolved in your company over the past few years?
The biggest difference is changing from an inside-out to an outside-in model. We focus on customer pain points and work our way backwards into the solutions we present to them to solve those problems. Given the complex and varied nature of product lines at Red Hat, it is important to put customers first.
/ / How many product launches do you conduct in a year? What are the challenges that you face while designing a product marketing plan?
We have up to eight different product/service lines, each with their own schedule of major and minor launches through the year. Given the pace of growth at the company, the biggest challenges are around coordinating launches to optimize share of voice and demand-generation efforts.
/ / What tools and technologies do you use to run a successful product marketing campaign?
We use a mixture of third-party and in-house tools to manage various aspects of a campaign. From lead generation to event execution to product planning, we rely on cloud-based tools for greater access and availability for our internal stakeholders.
/ / What are the different metrics you track for evaluation of product marketing program performance?
/ / Which digital content assets have you found to be most effective in your product marketing program?
It varies by type of program but we usually find a mixture of thought leadership or analyst-driven content rated very highly from early funnel audience. For late funnel acceleration, any online tools that demonstrate the tangible value of our products, including product demos and ROI tools, are effective.
/ / Which online channels have you found to be most effective in meeting your product marketing goals? Which are your top three social media platforms for a product launch?
It varies by product line but we usually target the key decision-maker audience for each product line, followed by the key influencer audience. In many cases, those two could be quite varied in the type and frequency of marketing collateral consumed.
The top three social media platforms to drive awareness and demand generation are LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
/ / Can you give an example of the most exciting product marketing campaign run by your company?
It has got to be Red Hat Summit 2019.
/ / What are the three product marketing tips you would want to share with our readers?
/ / What are the trends/technologies that you think will drive product marketing in the future? How should businesses gear up for this?