AMA: AppZen Former VP Product Marketing, Uri Kogan on Influencing the Product Roadmap

This can definitely be a challenge, depending on the relationship between PM and PMM. There are a number of approaches that can help. 1. If you have had a prior launch that didn't go as perfectly as everyone hoped, have a conversation with them about some of the challenges that, easy to see in retrospect, limited the success of the effort. Highlight points of disconnection between PM and PMM that led to feature or design choices that didn't hit the nail of the hed because PM lacked the understan ...Read More

A customer advisory board can be a great way to capture high level roadmap feedback from your most important customers. But to my mind, it's main value lies elsewhere: in giving your most important customers the feeling (and reality) that they are being heard not just by a CSM or a sales rep, but by the executive team; in giving your customers a chance to hear from each other, which validates their individual decision to be your customers and often also cross-pollinates ideas / use cases / produ ...Read More

I have seen it go both ways. It really depends on the relative strength of the product and product marketing teams. Product marketing, though, is probably the best positioned part of the business to be a voice for segments of the market and the future customers that don't already have a voice in your business. It's the customers who aren't prospects yet, the markets you haven't entered. In my experience there are plenty of voices speaking for bug fixes and feature enhancements for existing produ ...Read More

Based on the question, it sounds to me like your product management team isn't thinking very strategically. Perhaps they're not close enough to customers, or they're too close to a select few, who have taken over the roadmapping process for their own needs. I'd encourage you to try to translate the company's strategy and positioning into themes, and talk to product leadership about what the key areas of innovation are that will make the company successful over time. Product knows as well as any ...Read More

In B2B SaaS, the roadmap is an important sales tool. Buyers aren't just buying a tool, they're buying into your company's strategy for the future, and the roadmap you communicate to prospects and customers is the best way to articulate that. I like to work backwards from this, and ask myself, what do we want to communicate about our company through the roadmap? It might be about specific features that make your product better, or potentially new products you're working on. But the most important ...Read More

This is an interesting one. In my last company, I joined as the first PMM. In my first meeting with the product team, I spent a fair bit of time explaining the role of PMMs and what we do — how we connect the market to the goals of the organization, and the product back to the market. That helped PMs understand when and how to engage with PMM. In that instance, the company was also undertaking a shift from selling to developers -- an audience PMs knew well -- to business buyers. It was definitel ...Read More

This is such a great question. It's not easy. The best way, which is not always (rarely?) possible, is to have enough knowledge and market intelligence to identify the ways two segments are different that it becomes evident that serving both isn't practical. For example, let's say your product solves a problem that both medium and enterprise-scale companies could benefit from, but you believe that medium-size companies are the right segment to focus on for now. What makes enterprise not worth go ...Read More

From my experience, it's usually product that is doing much of this prioritization, rather than PMM. What I've seen that PMM can do to help is two-fold: 1. Themes. Product knows the product so well, it's very easy for them to get lost in the nuances and intricacies of how different features might or might not be easy to implement in a particular order. But this is a constraint, rather than the critical prioritization framework, which should be market-driven. So help product create a market-drive ...Read More