The heavy marketing focus of Workfront - are traditional PMOs concerned about Workfront's product direction?

I echo your observations and have the same concerns.

Yes, it's interesting you bring this up because I've been having the exact same concerns as you. Our marketing doesn't use it at all, and we use it for I/T development projects (actually consulting with clients). It DOES make me nervous that marketing is such a huge focus for Workfront now.

Hi: I used to work for a company that was focused on selling a project management, project finances, and campaign management toolset to Marketing. In the last year, I think WorkFront has had a singular focus on pushing into that market. I had the chance to speak to the then-CEO of WorkFront in May of 2015 and he confirmed that singular vision. At LEAP, all of the WorkFront-sponsored events focused on marketing. I applaud WorkFront’s effort to expand their market. They are, however, doing it to the exclusion of the other markets that already use WorkFront. We’re going to put WorkFront in a position to defend themselves with this thread. Let’s speculate on what they might say: 1) The Community Blog site has special interest areas for non-Marketing groups; 2) The Birds-of-a-Feather groups met at LEAP; 3) The new community site does not focus on marketers - it focuses on discussions of general and technical interest and on reporting; 4) (I used to write stuff like this) The leadership and management team at WorkFront remains committed to providing the best work management system available on the market. We believe, marketers tell us, and Gartner tells us that the marketing world does not have a workforce management tool that addresses their unique needs, and WorkFront is endeavoring to be the toolset of choice for marketers. In doing so, however, we are committed to balancing the needs of all of our customers in forging our corporate and product direction. Our product roadmap, in fact, has more features of general interest than features targeted to marketing. We are committed to well-reasoned, steady growth by creating a workforce management tool that addresses the needs of a diverse set of markets. Thank you for your questions, I have no further comments. I think, however, if you look at where WorkFront is putting their money - and that is really the measure that counts - it is all in marketing. I share your concern. Eric ________________________________

David, Thank you for bringing this up. I would agree. I did not go to the conference this year. However, a co-worker did. She mentioned that the focus at the conference was on Marketing. I selected Workfront (AtTask) three years ago, because it was unique in that is was marketed and appeared to be designed as a wholistic work management system. Our marketing team uses this on a limited bases for corporate level projects, not necessarily in the way that Workfront is currently promoting it and I am not sure that we have that need. The current might be great for marketing teams of large organizations or even Marketing agencies.

We use Workfront for IT and General Management projects, but no new developments are being made in this direction. I'm not sure if we need to consider other options.

HI All, I take a special interest in this thread and your concerns expressed here are important ones and I think they need to be addressed. Yes, Workfront is focusing on developing our product to become a premier tool for marketing workflows but this does not detract from the traditional IT and PMO use cases where our product had originally planted it's roots, in fact it enhances and strengthens them. One of the key things this evolution toward creative workflows has done for Workfront is expand the versatility and full enablement of a wider variety of practical use cases that can be part of many corporate and enterprise departments, not only marketing but web and software development (note our significant recent improvements to our Agile tools) videography, event management, HR and legal processes, better corporate/IT document management and enhanced proofing tools for better work group synergies and improved collaboration across the board. Marketing team interactions can be very complex and deliverables are many and very granular. We learn from this every day and apply these lessons toward making the tool work better on all fronts and for all groups that comprise the total work management scenario. Keep submitting your feature requests and ideas to us and be confident that we are listening to all great ideas, not just marketing-focused ones and we continue to find new ways to improve the tool for core PMO and IT-centric users so it can be applied to more complex and granular use cases in all organizational domains. Thanks for bringing up this issue and fostering a healthy conversation. Cheers, Steve

<> Hi - Please introduce yourself. You write with authority. May I presume you work for WorKFront? What is your role there? Thanks! Eric ________________________________

I like the Marketing department push because that is an underserved group (IMHO) that could greatly benefit from the work management capabilities Workfront provides. I'm not seeing a lack of enterprise features as a result of the increased focus on agencies / marketing departments. I think it is more of an AND than an OR. My $0.02

We have exactly the same concern and during the last several months, we have expressed our obeservation and opinions to WF product team and their management team. As you have oberserved also, in the last year also, most of the new feature priority were given to marketing needs, hence it took away the priority and developer resources from working on other impartant features that PMO, IT and engineering work management really needs. Marketing is a very small % of user base compared with product development engineering teams, PMO and IT teams. So we would like to see the feature priorities to be shifted back to serve the majority of users propotionally, this is especially critical for large enterprise customer case. I believe the right product vision and feature prioritization are exremly critical for WF as a successful enterprise level tool, for long term usage. If people who bought this tool for PMO don't get the same vision and the features that they need to perform their work (especially if this is the larger user base), it is a very serious concern.

As the CMO of Workfront, let me start by saying I'm glad David raised his concern. The Community site is the exact right place for this kind of discussion. So let me share our perspective. The short answer to David's question is we are committed to the enterprise work management space. Along with making sure we properly serve our large base of existing customers, here's why we're committed to the enterprise...For our business to achieve our goals, we need to sell our products to multiple departments. We have a 16 year legacy in the IT PMO space. In 2013, we looked at how we could build from there and succeed in other groups/departments. We chose marketing and have seen great growth there. But for marketers, we started with very little for them, so some of what you see as a "marketing emphasis" is adding functionality that will allow us to successfully compete there -- essentially adding marketing-centric functionality that would put us on-par with what we already offer to our IT customers. That said, we went through an exercise in the last month looking at the product roadmap to see what is applicable to marketing teams/agencies and what is applicable to IT and other teams. There is a 75% overlap in the functionality, where what we are building is applicable to both segments. Agile is a great example. Agile Marketing is a hot topic. The Agile functionality we are adding to the product is something marketers are very excited about. But so are the IT customers. As we briefed the Gartner analysts on our Agile additions, both the MRM analyst and the PPM analyst loved it. Another example that was previewed at Leap is work we are doing on an executive calendar -- where the exec can see in a calendar view the high-level scope of projects, statuses, etc. This is going to be a great product addition for the CIO, CTO and CMO. Those are two examples, but there are many others. The person who responded to this post saying that this is an "and" not an "or" is right. We are working hard to solve work/project problems across the enterprise. Where does Workfront go from here? I think you'll continue to see us add functionality for specific teams beyond IT and beyond marketing. For us, doing so increases the scope of our opportunities, and for our customers we think it creates a product that is more universally adoptable throughout their business. Our base is made up primarily of IT-centric PMO deployments. Those customers are important and valuable to us. So while we need to expand into other segments, we know we need to care for the base. And the only way to do that is to keep delivering product enhancements that are meaningful to them. A concluding thought...The Community site is read by our product team members. If there is specific IT-centric product functionality that you think we aren't addressing (perhaps because we're using resources to expand into other work-management departments), please share those here. Again, I like the conversation. I hope what I've written is helpful to you to better understand our strategy.