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

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 opinions—make it a discussion, not a lecture. * Get aligned on a shared vision of what success looks like. When that relationship and alignment exists, it's time to formalize your process, or productize it! Process creates clarity and predictability. Think about all of the times you've worried about "stepping on toes" or been annoyed by somebody stepping on yours. Clearly-defined process can all but eliminate those situations. For example, at Appcues we've baked a couple of product marketing-sourced questions into the formal product discovery process (ie PMs must answer X, Y, Z questions before we move on from the discovery phase). They don't do it because "product marketing makes us," they do it because our PMMs and PMs have a mutual understanding of why it's important to answer those questions that early on. Phrased another way, they know that answering those questions up front will give us the best chance of a successful product launch.

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/medium-term. Active customers and prospects: build on the above by sharing specific features coming to the product in the next quarter. This should help retain some customers who may have otherwise churned or close a new customer who would've otherwise went with a competitor. If a customer or prospect has a specific need/concern that is expected to be addressed in the next 6-12 months, share it. Just do so with the caveat that while planned, things can change. In short, don't overpromise.

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 any single question about our market or customers, what would it be?" As you start to identify patterns (ie the same question comes up repeatedly, across PMs), look for opportunities to streamline and bake steps into the formal product development process. When you take this approach, you'll not only learn a ton, you'll also establish yourself as a trusted, valuable resource to your product managers. They may even start getting you involved proactively! :)

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 place to point them to that includes all relevant info. Otherwise, there's too much noise. * Include the information product needs to assess the size and urgency of each opportunity. I recommend you start by including the customer request along with specific details for clarity, a few supporting anecdotes for each (eg. quotes from CS, sales, customers), count of customers requested, total revenue of customers requested, count and total revenue of customers impacted (if applicable, ie other customers who you can confirm are impacted but have not proactively requested), and other revenue impacts (eg. "20% of new business deals lost due to this gap"). Revenue timing (ie $ at risk by month, quarter if no action taken) can be helpful to include as well, if applicable. * Communicate! Communicate a lot. Instead of just relying on what I have to say, ask your product leaders what they need to see from you. If you deliver and they still don't take action, ask them why not. If you don't already know, ask them what their top priorities are. Perhaps they're laser focused on driving expansion revenue and net revenue retention this quarter—now you can frame your pitch to highlight the biggest revenue expansion opportunities on your list and provide the data to support your case.

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 great inputs, along with customer feedback, behavioral data (ie product usage), and of course, user testing. If you need to, build an ROI case for a simple user testing or session recording tool and send it their way.

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 things: Invest in your PM relationships. I mentioned this in another post, but meet very regularly, always bring something of value to share, ask for their input on what you're doing, etc. Establish trust. Get aligned on what you two think is most important; what you think success looks like (set aside leadership's directives for a moment). Once aligned, work together to create your case for more formally aligned OKRs. Given the lack of alignment you mentioned, I'm assuming PM and PMM report into different functional leaders (ie VP Product, VP Marketing). Invite both of them to a meeting and make your case together. If your case aligns to high-level company objectives and your VPs are at all reasonable, they'll be psyched to see such strong collaboration and ownership, and I bet you get a heck of a lot closer to that shared OKR.

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 with that first. :) * Scheduled bi-weekly design reviews between product designers and brand designers. Both teams share designs in progress, ask questions, provide feedback, etc. This helps ensure design consistency and excellence. It also often inspires new ideas. * Speaking of new ideas, these reviews highlighted a need for shared component libraries. The product design team still has its own design system for in-app, but the teams recently co-developed a shared library of iconography, for example, so now the icons we use are consistent across every prospect and customer touchpoint.

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 make your case through the lens of company goals (or even better, specific product team goals), you're on the right track. For example, let's say we know that users who regularly rely on feature X retain longer and expand more, but today only 30% use feature X. If you believe the team can increase that number to 50% by making changes the new user journey, go make that case. If it's a strong case, and everybody's working toward the same goal (in this case, improving retention), the product team will have to listen and respond.

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 six months, the company has spent $400,000 in this particular feature, $20,000 in this other feature, and so on." And it was real interesting because the people who had worked on those features had an immediate visceral reaction. They talked to themselves, "Oh, $400,000 on this feature that had no impact on the business? $20,000 in this feature that had a big impact on the business?"