Influence Product Strategy as a PMM and Boosting Product Adoption

I kicked off a structured investigation and partnered closely with the PM so we could both hear customer feedback firsthand. We defined our target as Confluent Cloud customers, then sampled accounts across geographies and sizes (with help from data science to pull the list) for good coverage. We drafted a consistent set of discovery questions covering the data systems in each customer’s tech stack, what they currently used and why, alternatives (including building their own open-source connectors), current pain points, and openness to adopting cloud connectors. Technical blockers were explored live with the PM in the room.

Three clear themes emerged. First, customers needed greater breadth in our connector portfolio to match their tech stacks—something already on the roadmap and being addressed rapidly. Second, configuration and setup created unexpected friction, so we added usability features. Third—and the insight that forced us to re-examine the roadmap end-to-end—customers understood the benefits and wanted to use cloud connectors, but could not because their most sensitive data lived in Oracle databases and company InfoSec policies prohibited sending it over the internet. Private networking was a hard technical blocker we had not realized was so central to evaluation.

We packaged the qualitative insights into a readout complete with customer quotes and soundbites, then built a business case with a financial model based on reasonable assumptions to size the upside of unlocking these customers. Because private networking was owned by a separate networking team (not the Connect product team) and would require shifting resources for roughly two years, we presented directly to C-suite executives to secure cross-organizational alignment. Once approved, the networking features rolled out over many quarters by cloud and region; we circled back to activate the field, notified the original interview customers, and communicated to newly acquired Confluent Cloud customers so the business case would translate into real adoption rather than remaining an Excel model.

Due to the product changes and our coordinated go-to-market efforts, we have grown our product adoption metrics for connectors significantly since then. Circling back to the customers who gave the feedback also strengthened those relationships and reinforced that their input directly shaped the roadmap.