AMA: Atlassian Director of Product Marketing, Jira, Marina Ben-Zvi on Influencing the Product Roadmap

You can’t shape what you’re not part of. Influencing the roadmap starts with being plugged into the right product cadences — quarterly planning, QBRs, product reviews, and monthly syncs. Those are the rooms where roadmap trade-offs happen and priorities shift. That access requires building trusted relationships early. You can’t just show up at planning and expect to have influence. Spend time developing trust with PMs, designers, and engineers by showing curiosity about their goals and constrain ...Read More

There isn’t a single “gold standard” framework — every organization and product team prefers to consume information differently and has different preferred frameworks and formats. What matters most is that you structure your case in a way that’s familiar to your audience, speaks their language, and makes it easy for them to act on. The simplest and most effective way to do that is to answer three questions clearly: Why this? Why now? What’s the upside? How? Start with the problem and “Why this?” ...Read More

First, don’t just come with data — come with a point of view built on that data. Product teams don’t need a report; they need perspective. Show up ready to answer “What’s changing in the market, what does it mean for us, and where should we focus next?” The most relevant data will vary by business model and what you have access to, but the goal is always the same: to help Product make more confident prioritization and trade-off decisions. Below are the most valuable categories of insight for PMM ...Read More

PMMs often produce great research that never makes it past the readout. To actually influence product strategy and roadmapping, your research needs to be decision-ready, well-timed, and effectively socialized. 1. Make it relevant, actionable, and decision-ready For research to shape the roadmap, it has to answer questions the product team actually faces — not just be interesting. The most valuable work clearly builds a business case for why to invest (or not) in a particular area, supported by c ...Read More

There will always be a backlog of customer requests, internal asks, and technical debt. Don’t let that deter you. Roadmaps aren’t fixed — they’re living plans, re-evaluated regularly as customer needs, market dynamics, and company priorities evolve. Your goal isn’t to “add” to the roadmap — it’s to re-prioritize based on impact. Product teams are constantly under pressure from sales, customer success, execs, and customers — all advocating for their needs. When everyone’s shouting, it’s hard to s ...Read More

Both are valuable inputs— they just serve different purposes and inform roadmapping on different horizons. Customer input Ultimately, business success hinges on customer growth and retention. Roadmap effectiveness — and ultimately business performance — depends on delivering for your core customer segments, and co-creating with customers is often the fastest path to success. Customer feedback guides you to the biggest pains that need solving today — usability gaps, blockers to close/adopt/renew, ...Read More