AMA: Adobe Director of Product Marketing, Stephen Baloglu on Influencing the Product Roadmap

As we all recognize, the voice of the customer is one of the most powerful influences on shaping strategy and, ultimately, the product roadmap. Over time, methods for gathering meaningful, representative feedback have evolved, but nothing replaces direct, human connections with customers. Here are what I consider the top five customer feedback loops today: Customer Interviews: Nothing beats direct conversations with customers. These provide rich, nuanced insights that often reveal underlying mot ...Read More

Who doesn't love low hanging fruit...but sometimes it can feel like we're not delivering on the bigger picture and innovating to take a bite of a big, juicy opportunity. My favorite framework to overcome this is an investment portfolio approach where a mix of resourcing is spread across different risk/return investments. From core, incremental improvements to low risk experiments and ultimately higher risk big bets. For an established product, that might look something like 70/20/10.To put more ...Read More

To create a winning product, you can’t just build a roadmap based on feature requests in customer feedback. As a product marketer, you need to understand motivations, job to be done, pain points worth solving and unmet needs In my opinion, there’s no difference in the types of roadmap items you can prioritize based on customer feedback and it doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. Innovation is fundamentally informed by customer feedback. It’s a matter of how deeply you listen to customers, how clo ...Read More

Never go into roadmap planning empty handed! Great product development takes time and these planning cycles set teams off to work. Whether it’s a 2-week sprint or a 2 quarter cycle, you want to make sure that work is directed in the most valuable direction for the business and your customers. And that it gives you what you need to deliver a compelling story to customers. Product teams may use different frameworks such as RICE scoring, Kano modeling, there are many others. So, be ready with relev ...Read More

I’ve worked at multiple companies that have had long-tenured product teams as well as startups where we’re all fresh to the team. So, i’ve seen both sides here. In the case of long tenured teams, you have the opportunity to reignite fresh, day-1 thinking across the team. But, one of the biggest challenges to joining a team that has been working on a product for a long time is having an equal seat at the table to partner on product strategy. They’ve “seen it all” and “already tried that and it di ...Read More