AMA: AppFolio Vice President Product Marketing, Daniel Waas on Influencing without Authority

You will need to win their respect and trust. To do that you need to...  know your stuff be humble give ample positive feedback understand their agenda and help them advance it take personal responsibility for everything that goes wrong, and emphasize the team contribution over your own for everything that went right criticize in private, while using "I" instead of "You" statements but be unmistakably clear in your feedback. Don't leave room for ambiguity and always criticize the work, not the p ...Read More

I'd say lead the way. Use a traditional PMM responsibility like refreshing your buyer personas as a reason to kick off a joint research project and pull in your partners from the product and design team. Set up customer interviews. Get outdoors and do a workshop. Have some fun with it. Bribe them with candy and fizzy drinks :o) If you can't get buy-in for that, go talk to customers yourself and present a read-out of what you learned.  Get with the sales and client services team and use them as a ...Read More

Set boundaries and clear expectations with the various stakeholders you work with. Don't commit to crazy timelines. If a crazy timeline is unavoidable, communicate what you will have to trade off.  Create a culture of trust with your team by being your authentic self, being a good listener, and always having your team's back. Build frameworks and processes and communicate them across the org. Follow your process. Build systems for yourself so you don't reinvent the wheel too often. Understand ea ...Read More

Influence comes from repeatedly bringing fresh insights and a distinct point of view to the table. To influence product strategy and the roadmap you need to take a broader view of your market and the customers than your friends on the product management team. Invest in a deep understanding of your customers, your competitors, and the market at large. Map out mid- to long-term threats and opportunities. Validate those threats and opportunities with customers, industry experts, and your internal e ...Read More

There are many answers to this question depending on how large your team is, how much budget you have, etc.  Some pointers: Get clear on your goals for your product marketing team (even if it's just you) and how they ladder to the business goals.  Build an annual plan. It's surprising how much you can get done in a year. It's also surprising how little you sometimes achieve in a week. By having an annual plan you can chip away at your long-term goals whenever time allows. Take an honest look at ...Read More

I have led product marketing teams that reported into marketing and others that reported into product. I've been reorganized from one to the other twice. I don't find it makes all that much of a difference. You'll need to work harder to build strong relationships with the "other" team. Your responsibilities should be the same. Regardless of where you sit in the organization, you need to build deep rapport with both the product and the marketing leader. Building a string relationship with the pro ...Read More

My biggest accomplishment was in a prior role at a different company for a SaaS product. I was able to persuade the product and executive leadership team to invest in a redesign of the user experience of a product that had become stale compared to new entrants in the space. Redesigns can be a hard sell as they do not produce immediate revenue and at best have a neutral impact on customer satisfaction. The key to getting buy-in was making a compelling case for the change based on customer and com ...Read More

See my answer to a similar question on this page. You'll need to build trust and rapport with them and you do this by knowing your stuff, bringing unique insights, and having a well thought out perspective on key industry challenges. You keep overdelivering until your PM counterparts understand the value you bring to the table. If after a long period of serious investment on your part they still don't see the light, crumple your self-doubt into a tiny ball, toss it away, and find a new employer ...Read More

Regardless of the size of the organization, there will always be a marketing and a product leader. They are your critical partners. Even in very large organizations with a matrix structure, you will still typically have these leadership roles for each business segment. As the organization grows the founder or CEO will be further removed from day-to-day operations and you're less likely to work with them. At AppFolio we are ca. 1600 people at the moment and key stakeholders I connect frequently w ...Read More

To be an effective product marketer my view is that you need to be a deep expert on your product. You don't need the same technical expertise as your product management counterpart but you need to deeply understand the customer, their pain points, and how your product solves these pain points. AppFolio is a B2B SaaS platform that property management companies run their entire business on - accounting, maintenance, marketing, leasing, rent payments, everything is done through our platform. It is ...Read More

That's a great question and actually my answer to some of the other questions asked today. The way to influence without authority is to build credibility and trust. My thoights on how to do that overlap with many of my other answers but here they are in summary: Get to know your colleagues and their priorities. Help them achieve those priorities regardless of whether they ask for help.  Be transparent about your objectives, motivations, weaknesses, etc. Be yourself. Have your work persona be as ...Read More

We're actually in the middle of a project like that. For major launches with large cross-functional teams, there is a point of transition when you, as you say "pivot towards a stance of execution". Some thoughts on how to prepare for that point and then make the transition. I'm putting this is sequence mentally on the fly, you be the judge of how robust or not that is ;-) Get clear on the objective of the project and how it ties into the overall strategy. The why and the what. I like "Good strat ...Read More