On Thursday, October 18 SaaS professionals joined at ATDC for the Simply SaaS University: Product Management 101 class with Josh Siegel, Director of Product Management at Salesforce (Pardot).
Josh comes from 20+ years of tech and joined us to help develop, motivate, and teach tactics to product builders, makers, and leaders.
Things we learned:
Check out the video recap and our photo story below.
They're focused on Agile, Market and User Research, Go-to-Market strategy, and Pitch Decks. They help juggle all parts of the business and act as:
As a Product Manager, you become the center of an ongoing conversation and that conversation evolves.
Josh shared his tips on Agile and what he considers his best practices:
Agile is the worst form of Software Development, except for all the others.
(A take on Winston Churchill's famous quote.)
At the end of the day, Agile is really about communication and commitment. It might seem trivial, but in the daily stand-ups you catch the little things that would go up in flames in 4 months, because they come up in casual conversation.
Josh gave insight on the importance of your customers and engaging them. Customers are overlooked the most, and it's the absolute most important part of the work. It’s almost never urgent. You as the Product Manager are an advocate for your customers. It’s about empathy. Ask, “Who are you? Why do you do what you do?” After that, then you get back insights. It's about market research and user research.
Josh’s best practices for user experience research:
Not knowing who your customer is.
Josh's storytelling best practices:
Create value in the incremental steps, and learn along the way.
The “old” four P's marketing mix:
The “new” four P’s:
Pricing and packaging are incredibly important for going to market. Details matter.
Pricing...
What are you going to ask them to pay and are they getting what they’d like for it?
Positioning...
What is this thing and what mental space should it entail?
Packaging...
How are you going to offer different editions to different segments in order to get them real value?
Pitching...
It's sales! Enable your sales team to be successful. You train the trainers. You give them scripts, then incentives, then support, and then documentation.
What are we going to build, and also why?
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