AMA: Atlassian Head of Product Marketing, Compass, John Withers on Influencing the Product Roadmap

How far out your company or team should plan your roadmap, and the frequency with which you revise it, will depend on the maturity of your market and of your product. The more mature your market and/or product is, you ought to be able to make plans with a higher degree of certainty. In contrast, if you’re in an emerging space (as I am currently), you'll have more uncertainty as to the correct product strategy, especially the further you project into the future. This is because you’ll need to be rapidly experimenting, gathering feedback, and changing direction (eg, quarterly, monthly, or even semi-monthly) as your understanding of market and customer needs evolve. But even if you’re in a mature market, you still need to analyze your roadmap on a regular basis. Occasionally, disruptive technologies completely change the game (eg, LLMs disrupting mature industries). Regardless of which roadmap planning time horizon makes sense in your particular case, you should be considering the following inputs: * Direct customer feedback: Customer calls you’re on or Gong recordings * AE and SE input * Win/loss reports * Feature requests * Analyst reports * Your research team * Competitor feature set comparisons * Customer complaints on social media * Relevant industry news * And more... While you may go through a more formal roadmap process prior to beginning a new fiscal year, your should engage with your PM regularly to analyze your product strengths, gaps, and areas of investment (eg, multiple times per month). Not only will this demonstrate that you are an expert and deserve a seat at the table, but it also ensure that you and your PM stay aligned. Prioritizing which capabilities to build can be tricky. The obvious answer is that you should build whatever is going to drive the most revenue (eg, by increasing win rates, reducing churn, and/or increasing other revenue streams). But knowing what will actually deliver on those outcomes isn’t always obvious. Sometimes, teams may decide to prioritize what their loudest customer wants at the expense of delivering what most customers actually need–try to avoid this trap. That said, it can be hugely beneficial to develop design partnerships with engaged customers that you truly believe will grow with you as you meet more of their needs–all the better when meeting their needs also meets the needs of the masses.

As outlined in another question, there are multiple ways to analyze i) your product-market fit, and ii) your position in the market relative to your competitors. All of these inputs need to be analyzed systematically to determine your product strategy, and thus, your roadmap that will fulfill that strategy. To be explicit, PMMs need to gather more than just customer input to build out their point of view. Ideally, both PMMs and PMs will analyze many/most of the same inputs. While this may seem redundant, the reality is that determining the right product strategy (and roadmap) is difficult, ambiguous work that requires ongoing and healthy debate amongst multiple stakeholders to give yourself the best chance of getting it right-ish (it’ll never be perfect). If a PMM is only investing in direct customer feedback, and the PM is only reviewing, say, a backlog of FRs (feature requests), then you’re reducing the likelihood of making the right long term strategic decisions. Finally, by maximizing the diversity of your feedback channels, you reduce the risk of over-rotating to any one channel of feedback, giving you a more holistic understanding of your place in the market and what decisions you should make to improve your position.

PMMs should be the conduit to collect insights and feedback from AEs, SEs, SDRs, and all the other channels discussed in this question's prompt. In many cases, PMs may also directly interact with customers and the field. But even in these cases, you (as a PMM) are hopefully gathering additional feedback from separate customer calls or account team meetings. You can’t both be everywhere, so in many cases, it's prudent to divide and conquer. Beyond individual customer meetings and internal account team syncs, there are plenty of other feedback mechanisms, including: * Dedicated Slack channels for the field to provide their insights * Q&A during Sales enablement sessions * You joining a Sales leader’s weekly team sync (with the goal to pitch a new idea or gather specific feedback), which you'll share with your PM * Field surveys * And more…

In a perfect world, your goals will complement the goals of other teams across your organization, including your Product counterparts. Think about it this way: As a PMM, you are (hopefully) acting as your product’s CMO. As such, you should be focused on: * Driving high quality pipeline (TOF assets; paid and organic search, events, etc) * Helping move leads through the funnel (MOF assets) * Enabling the field to qualify and win (discovery questions, pitch decks, demos, etc) that leads to revenue * Driving post-sales product engagement and expansion that further increases revenue All of the above motions and their associated outcomes should be complementary to the Product org’s goals. In the event that your goals are misaligned with Product’s goals, you’ll need to work with your manager to understand how far off they are, and in what ways. Goal misalignment is an organizational issue that needs to be identified and reconciled at the leadership level. Sometimes, you’ll have no ability to work around this, which complicates or impedes achieving your own goals. In these cases, the right course(s) of action may be non-obvious, but minimally, you need to flag this to your manager to see how your own goals may need to be modified, if at all. Bringing it back to the initial question: The roadmap ought to be rooted in driving revenue by solving new use cases and/or existing use cases in a better way, leading to: * Increased win rates against competitors * Reduced churn for existing customers (increased “stickiness”) * Increased engagement that drives incremental revenue * Expansion to new personas (or entire teams) within your existing customer base * Serving new customer segments * Serving new industries Hopefully, the aforementioned should complement and be consistent with your Product org's goals.

Implicit in this question is that long-tenured PMs are more difficult to influence, because they may think they know it all. This certainly isn’t always the case, but to the extent that it is true, I find it a fairly reasonable and understandable position. Fundamentally, I don’t think the answer in this scenario is any different than if you're working with a less-experienced PM: To influence someone, you need to establish your credibility. Depending on your own tenure, doing so may require that you consistently demonstrate your ability to bring unique insights (or confirm his/her own insights) until your PM trusts that you have established an understanding of your market.

Sure, why not? Whether you’re selling a physical product, a service, or an idea, you’re in the business of influencing your “customers” to “buy” into your “products.” Admittedly, public education campaigns lie outside my own expertise, but the concepts of understanding customer needs, dealing with competing “solutions” (perhaps ideas, in this case), and gathering feedback about what messaging and solutions are compelling are translatable. In the public domain, you can use surveys and focus groups to gather feedback, along with other quantitative and qualitative efforts. These should inform not only the right “solutions,” but also the messaging that will resonate to drive action or behavioral changes.

Anything has the potential to influence the roadmap, but I’ll answer a slightly different question: What typically doesn’t work when it comes to influencing the roadmap. Any PM or Product leader who’s worth their salt will use a mix of quantitative and qualitative inputs to understand what they should build next, and so should you. Developing a roadmap, and keeping it updated, is both an art and a science. So here's what typically doesn’t work: Expressing opinions that aren’t informed by the data or a deep understanding of the market, customer needs, or your competitors. Trying to influence the roadmap in any other way demonstrates a lack of sophistication and erodes a PMM’s credibility. Once eroded, it’s difficult to rebuild that credibility and regain a seat at the table or your PM's respect. That's why it's so important to invest heavily in understanding your market, your customers' needs, and your competitors before having strong opinions about what Product should build next. (See my other response for recommended approaches on how to influence the roadmap)

Analysts are a great source for understanding your market, your position in the market, your competitors, what your customers’ needs are, and emerging technologies, etc. Analysts speak to hundreds of customers, and they’re able to see patterns that you might miss. Oftentimes, customers will share unfiltered feedback with analysts that’s different than if they were speaking with you (although not always). But analysts are humans, and they come with their own biases and knowledge gaps, so you should treat their input as another source of imperfect feedback. Moreover, not all analysts are created equal. Experienced analysts may have invaluable knowledge in a mature market, but they might also hold on to outdated thinking and biases as those markets evolve. Conversely, a less experienced analyst might lack the same level of domain expertise, but they might be more motivated to keep abreast of the latest trends. Ultimately, customers buy your product(s) and/or services, not analysts, so it may be prudent to give higher weight to customer feedback. But both have their merits and should be used alongside other channels of feedback.