Employee Spotlight: J.D. Peterson, Product Marketing Manager

For this issue of Making Mail Work, we interviewed J.D. Peterson, Lyris’ new Product Marketing Manager and asked him about his role in the company.

Tell me about what your job entails.

In a nutshell, I help Lyris figure out what we need to add to the product or change about it to help move it forward. Essentially, I own the roadmap for the product. This involves coming up with the ideas or determining what we need to develop, gathering the requirements for how these things need to be implemented, managing the development process, and seeing the new features through from conception to completion.

In my job, I’m like a clearinghouse for customer feedback: I listen to the customers, analyze their needs and how they fit our strategic plans, articulate them to the engineering team, and ultimately help turn our customers’ needs into an actual product or feature for Lyris.

My role benefits our product’s development in that it enables us to truly focus on the needs and demands of our customers and know what’s truly important to them, helping us to build the features and functionalities that make their lives easier in terms of meeting their own business goals.

What have you found in your competitive research are the strengths of our product?

• Robust functionality
• Stable and solid
• Depth of reports and analytic capabilities
• Great reputation with years of experience in our product’s development

At the end of the day, our product just works: we give our customers the tools they need to send extremely high volumes of targeted email with high deliverability. It’s just a very solid, stable system. In addition to the user interface, we’ve developed our own back-end and our own mail engine that are both world-class, top of market solutions.  Our feature set overall is very robust too. Basically, we have all the features that a small to large customer would need, whether in a hosted or installed software environment.

In terms of the product roadmap, what’s coming in ListManager that our customers can look forward to?

Well, in a general sense we’re always trying to develop things that continue to improve deliverability, ease of use, and the ability to analyze and understand your email marketing program. In terms of the features we’re developing to meet those goals in the near future, you’ll soon see a new template and content creation wizard with a Web 2.0-style interface, including image drag-and-drop and image manipulation tools.  We’ve also redone and improved some of our most popular reports by adding additional layers of filtering so our customers can more easily get to the specific, targeted information they’re looking for. We’ve got a new and improved HTML editor and are adding web analytics integration. With each new release, we will also continue to enhance our navigation and overall usability. We also remain dedicated to improving our back-end and adding a lot of features to strengthen our MTA (mail transfer agent).

What is your background?

I have experience in numerous parts of high tech companies, including customer service, marketing, and quality assurance. I’ve been a product manager for over five years and have worked at great companies such as Hotmail, Microsoft, ViewCentral, and Instill Corporation.

And on a more personal level?

I live in San Francisco with my lovely wife and beautiful 14-month-old daughter. When not dreaming about the next big marketing application, I enjoy live music, following my favorite sports teams, and exploring the wonderful city where I reside.  I also play golf at every opportunity, though I’m rarely mistaken for Tiger Woods. 

To contact JD with product ideas or suggestions, please email him at: productguy@lyris.com

Contact us at editor@lyris.com to share your ideas. We may include it in the next issue of Making Mail Work!