AMA: ActiveCampaign VP Product Marketing, Jackie Palmer on Influencing the Product Roadmap

There are a lot of ways to gather customer feedback and a lot of types of customer feedback you should gather! Feedback can take the form of enhancement requests, product issues, customer satisfaction surveys, NPS and other sentiment, product reviews, company reviews, surveys, win/loss analysis, comments on marketing channels and about marketing messaging, feedback on interactions with company employees, and so much more! You can use a variety of tools but many of them come from the following ca ...Read More

If you are already tracking KPIs and metrics for your product marketing team, you are well on your way to demonstrating how product marketing has influenced the roadmap! It's important to be able to tie each feature or product requested to the direct data you have provided to support the request. You can track and measure things like: Win/loss data: which deals have cited the particular feature/product in their closed/lost reasons. Look at new business losses but also and maybe more importantly, ...Read More

For annual and strategic planning, it's important to focus on long term things that will drive growth and expansion rather than individual features requested by customers. Often, this shows up in bigger investments like brand new products or new areas like geographies or industries. This is where product marketing can really shine. Begin by doing research: Interview customers Conduct win/loss interviews Have inquiries with industry analysts Gather market insights like predictions, trends, and fo ...Read More

I've found the best way to work with product management and influence the product roadmap is to build that tight relationship early on. Make sure you are meeting one on one with your product management partners at least weekly. Make sure you are not just "taking" during those conversation but you are also "giving" - in the form of insights and data from customers, prospects, competitors, the market etc. Don't wait for a formal roadmap review meeting to make your requests! Many times it will be t ...Read More

When meeting with the product team to plan out the roadmap, it's important to come prepared with data to back up your requests. Often times, customer feedback data is well-received but if you are working on more blue sky features where you want to lead from the front then you'll also need to look beyond your existing customers. In my experience some of the best insights come from the following sources: Customer feedback like enhancement requests, product issues, customer satisfaction surveys, NP ...Read More

With product marketing you can't say it enough - your best friend has to be your product management partner. Make sure you are setting up consistent one on ones and bring value to your PM, don't just ask for things from your PM. In addition to your one on ones, make the effort to attend all the roadmap planning sessions and all the team meetings. Again, contribute in these by bringing research, data, anything that can help you to be seen as a partner vs a consumer of information. The more you ca ...Read More

There are several keys to how product marketing can influence the product roadmap and they all start with a strong PM/PMM relationship. If product managers are planning far in advance, though that seems to be less of the norm nowadays, you need to be working with them early and often. Start by bringing things each week to your one on ones with them. Make sure they understand why you are asking for a particular feature/product and what the data is behind it. When your company is one that plans fa ...Read More

Aligning releases to a key theme is a great thing to do for multiple reasons. First, and probably most important, it makes the marketing launch for a particular release easier because you can tie a bunch of content together in a common story and have that story thread through all the different launch mechanisms and channels you use. Second, you may also gain some abilities to work in parallel. For example if one engineering team is working on themed features for your release, another team can ge ...Read More

Early on in my career as a product marketer, I had the opportunity to present an enhancement request that was a huge change to our business model. This feature opened up our previously mostly closed system to be able to include more data from other applications in real-time, not just via a one off upload. This was a request I had noticed was coming up in more and more customer conversations as newer competitors had been built using this approach. It wasn't yet losing us deals but it was getting ...Read More