AMA: Appcues VP Marketing, Eric Keating on Influencing the Product Roadmap

I'm not the best person to answer this question, but my team interviewed somebody who is. I highly recommend you check out this take from Conor O'Mahony, who served as Klaviyo's Chief Product Officer at the time of recording: https://www.productled.org/blog/interview-connor-omahony-klaviyo He shares a great story about how he changed the way an organization measures R&D costs and ROI. Here's an excerpt: And then I got up in front of the company and I said, "Hey, you know what? For the last s ...Read More

I love this one! I love it because I'm so proud of the work our teams have done to improve product design <> brand design collaboration at Appcues over the last couple of years. Here's what we did: Establish a #design Slack (insert new chat tool here) channel and ensure all designers are invited. Start sharing all finished designs, from sales PDFs to UI updates, there as a habit. If you're feeling really wild, make it visible to the whole company. Just make sure all designers are on board ...Read More

In short, relationships and process. Great product marketing can make a product manager look like a hero. But great product marketing requires getting involved early. It's your job to help your PMs understand what you need and why, and more importantly, what's in it for them. Meet with the PMs you support at least every other week (weekly is better). Bring something (anything!) of value to every one of those meetings (ie market feedback, relevant competitor updates). Ask your PM for their opinio ...Read More

Ask them. 99% of PMM<>PM challenges can be resolved by better communication, whether at the individual level or further up the chain of command. "What kinds of insights are relevant and actually useful to you? Why?" "How could I better package/present insights like these?" "What else would you need to know in order to feel confident acting on these insights?" More generally, "What's keeping you up at night?" "What gaps or blind spots exist today?" "If you could wave a magic wand and answer ...Read More

If your designer isn't using any kind of data as an input into their design choices, then I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable just "trusting their word" for it. Start by asking your product designer how they make design choices. Ask about what data they use, if any. Maybe they are using adequate data as input but they haven't done a great job making their process known internally. If they aren't, I'd absolutely campaign to change that. Product marketing learnings (quantitative or qualitative) are ...Read More

If I understand the question correctly, this is about allocating time for journey/experience improvements when PMs are focused on feature/capability development. In short, it starts by getting aligned on goals. At the highest level, start with your company's current strategic priorities. What's most important right now? Perhaps you've placed an emphasis on retention/NRR over new customer acquisition. Ok, so how does this proposed journey/experience improvement tie back to retention? When you mak ...Read More

There's no right or wrong answer here. Really depends on your organization's current priorities. For example, if you're going hard in a new product direction, it may make sense to share a lot more about what they should expect over the next 6-12 months than you typically would. That being said, here's my general guidance under normal circumstances. Market overall: signal where you're going by talking about problems you're focused on solving (not specific features you're building) in the short/me ...Read More

I can't really recommend a specific template as I've seen/used a variety of templates over the years and still don't have a strong preference. Here's what I think is most important: Establish a dedicated source of truth for this (ongoing) conversation. Every company I've worked at has customer feedback and requests coming at them through multiple channels. I wont get into recommendations for how to streamline that problem, but when it comes to pitching priorities to product, you need a single pl ...Read More

This is about strategic alignment. It starts at the top. I've used a number of goal-setting frameworks including OKRs and my POV is that the framework itself is irrelevant. Success is most often the result of focus and alignment. When done right, product marketers and product managers should be tasked with working toward the same goal oriented around product/feature delivery and adoption. That being said, I understand not everybody is set up for success that way. Here are some tips for improving ...Read More