By following the unconventional model of a combined team of product management and support, organizations can leverage more granular customer feedback into the product faster, ensure that customers are engaged in the design process, and close the loop with customers as new features are available to resolve longstanding issues.

At a startup like Splunk, which has a business model that involves massive free downloads and is already supporting a free user community of tens of thousands, this kind of tight connection between support issues and product direction is critical. The other benefit of this is that support teams perform a lot of the job of firstline product managers, which makes the job more interesting and helps attract and retain more senior and talented support personnel. This webinar will address formal and informal processes used at Splunk, and some specific examples of features that came out of this approach.