We’re excited to introduce Cansu Berkem, a Group Product Manager based in New York City, for this month’s Datadog Spotlight. As a Group Product Manager, Cansu leads a team of Product Managers (PMs) and covers multiple product areas, such as Incident Management, Cloudcraft, Mobile Applications, and collaboration integrations. We spoke with Cansu to discuss her journey with Datadog, some of the exciting things she’s worked on this year, and the culture of the Product Management team. Here’s what she had to say.
Cansu Berkem, Group Product Manager, New York
Tell us about your journey at Datadog over the last year.
My experience so far has been extremely rewarding! This year, I presented in the Keynote speaking session at DASH, Datadog’s annual conference. I also traveled to AWS re:Invent to introduce Datadog to hundreds of attendees and visited our Paris office to meet with Engineers and other Product Managers. One great thing about being a PM at Datadog is that our engineering teams are users of our own products, so I can get direct feedback from whoever I talk with. And all of my travel and meetings have helped me understand how we can better improve our products.
Recently, a big priority of mine has been with the acquisition and integration of Cloudcraft, which I now head up as a designated Product Manager. For Cloudcraft, we are working to seamlessly integrate the Datadog and Cloudcraft products together to help our customers with the best architectural visualization of their infrastructure. Ultimately, throughout this past year, I have been working closely with other PMs to find ways to collaborate, integrate, and build great products together.
What does a day in your life look like?
Of course, no day looks the same. As a Group Product Manager I need to wear many different hats and switch between many different products I manage. For some of my products that are still in the ideation phase, my main focus is around customer research, discovery, and design. We are looking into defining the market and figuring out how we can address our customers’ pain points with these products. So, I join multiple customer meetings and brainstorm with my engineering and design teams to define the user journeys. For more mature products, such as Incident Management, Mobile Applications, and collaboration integrations, I work closely with my team to deliver best-in-class products. The PMs on my team do a great job to add new functionalities, drive the roadmap, and deliver new product launches in these areas. My main day-to-day goal here is to help remove any roadblocks and guide the vision of these products together.
What impact do Product Managers have at Datadog?
Product Managers at Datadog build and drive the roadmaps of products, which has a huge impact on our company’s growth by acquiring new customers and keeping existing customers happy. As a Datadog PM, you need to make sure your product is healthy and reaching its goals. Also, you need to bring new ideas to the table to always stay competitive and be ahead of the market. All of these factors help our company grow and scale while making sure engineering teams have all the tools and support they need to build a high quality platform. Datadog has proven itself to be an amazing company to be a PM at, and while there are a lot of responsibilities, the impact that you can make on both the product and customers is immense.
Describe the Product Management community at Datadog
Datadog PMs are always willing to share their thoughts, failures, and learnings, which helps us support each other and scale together as a company. During my first week, there was a “Women in Product Management at Datadog” event where we all got together to share our thoughts on how to improve our careers and how to support and increase diversity within the department. I was impressed with everyone’s amazing ideas, and by the end of that three-hour meeting, we had dozens of initiatives that we could activate on. Overall, everyone on the team is humble, open, and willing to help each other, and I have felt fully supported since the first day I joined.
Why is now a great time to join the Product Management team at Datadog?
There are many unique challenges that our team is trying to solve, and we have the opportunity to have a direct influence on the whole Datadog product. Datadog is at a point where we have a fantastic product-market fit and amazing growth. We have exceptional talent, and we’re constantly looking for new individuals to join the team. In addition to all these things, Datadog has a great culture that values growth, innovation, and diversity.
