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 ...Read More

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 dat ...Read 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 Drivin ...Read More

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 r ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 shou ...Read More

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 group ...Read More