AMA: Cisco Meraki Head of Product Marketing, Grant Shirk on Influencing the Product Roadmap

Okay, this is a fun one, so I'm going to start here. As a former UI designer (at Pixo and Tellme Networks**), this is probably the most fun you'll have in product marketing. You're bringing together three functions that thrive on different kinds of creativity. Words, emotion, and structural design all coming together. Other than "strap in and see what happens," there are a few things you can do to escalate the fun and the output of this dynamic mix: 1. Don't start cold. For a group to really gel, you need equal parts trust, common ground, and some practical familiarity. I would *not* recommend doing this as an icebreaker or new team get together. But, because product marketing can be the neutral ground between these teams, you can build those relationships over time. Small projects and product reviews; brand and product messaging exercises, product launches, even critical comms situations. 2. Do set a goal or focus. A lack of limits limits creativity. Start the team with a clear objective for the conversation, and define some constraints (together). This will keep the team focused without having to resort to judging or blocking ideas along the way. Constraints naturally create good editing. For example: "We're here to define the emotional impact we want our product to have on customers." Or, "we want to introduce our product to a completely new vertical. How could we introduce ourselves uniquely?" 3. Write everything down. Don't lose ideas that are before their time just because you've moved on. 4. Do it regularly. This shouldn't be a once-a-quarter-summit-of-ideas. Treat these teams like an extended writers room. Encourage everyone to bring problems, concerns, small ideas. One of the best things we ever implemented at Tellme was our weekly Design meeting. It wasn't a comms meeting or status, but "bring something to the table you want to workshop." We dramatically improved the product, the service, and the company every time we met. It was infectious. ** https://sharebird.com/h/product-marketing/q/how-open-would-your-company-be-to-hire-someone-with-category-management-experience-for-a-pmm-role-lets-say-the-person-has-worked-on-product-development-gtm-sales-enablement-and-campaigns-for-their-category?answer=NVJzUv85VK&utm_source=questionanswer&utm_medium=share 

If I understand your question correctly, constantly. No matter if you're the lead product marketer for an enterprise product, SMB, or consumer; whether you have a product-led go-to-market or a traditional enterprise sale; product marketing and design are inextricable partners in a product's success. Just like pricing is marketing, product design is also marketing. It's how you (your product) explain your value, function, and potential use cases to the end user. If you need to show how your product can be more efficient than a competitor, work out a better flow with UX. If you need to understand exactly why a competitor is perceived as more usable or scalable, ask UX to break the task flows down for you. Practically, you want your website to reflect the absolute best of your product in action. If your product team and your brand/web/design team aren't in sync, you're going to be setting the wrong expectations. Beyond that, at least half of a product design's team purpose is to deeply understand your end users. Their challenges, priorities, mental models, hopes, and dreams. That's persona gold, whether your end user is a buyer, an influencer, or both. And it's a win-win relationship; you can learn more about your end user in 30 minutes than a month of research, and your design team gets equal insights into the buying process, where friction exists, what other use cases exist in the market that might be competing for attention, or adding friction to the process. 

The great thing about roadmaps is they're like the Pirates' Code. "It's more of a guideline." First, never lose sight of the fact that if you have a concrete roadmap from your product team (like really concrete, more than 6 months laid out), that's heaven for PMM. A vision for where you're going, commitment from engineering, and a view a few quarters out of what stories you get to tell? Sign me up. Anecdotally, that's why I love the world of hardware so much. In networking, IoT, and even compute, you get a 12-18 month view of what's coming, and when. Getting that much runway to develop a POV, build a story over time, and test messages and positoning with customers? Doesn't get better than that. But, just like a good sales cycle and customer priorities, there's room to flex. Features can be delayed or acclerated. Any good engineering team reserves 10-20% of their capacity for critical customer requirements. New capabilities can be tested and build to MVP to fit a market niche. Learn your roadmap inside and out. Align and commit to it, and build the best story you can to fit the vector the product team is taking you on. And gather all the data you can on what's working and what's not. Through that, you'll earn the product team's trust, and then you can bring the data you need to argue for an adjustment. 

I strongly recommend against providing ANY incentive for alpha and beta users to provide feedback or engagement. I find it creates bias and influences the kind of feedback you receive. You want real users with real problems running into your software; otherwise you get nice-to-haves or less thoughtful comments. It's hard to set expectations for the kind of feedback you receive. Early on, you don't know what customers will react to, or even where the real bumps will be. I'd recommend starting super open ended, and then narrowing in after some of those early patterns emerge. The best time for this is when you start addressing the first round of feedback. The most important thing is to create the space for feedback, and make it an active process. Don't sit back. Set the expectation for feedback with beta users early, and then make it part of a process to capture it. So I'd say that: 1. Initial phase: Open-ended discovery with users. Watch, ask questions like "Tell me about your experience." "What were you trying to accomplish?" "What was challenging?" 2. Second phase: Regular (weekly/bi-weekly) checkins. "How's it going?" "Have you tried X yet?" 3. Third phase (fixing things). Take specific improvements back to customers. "We heard your feedback (and others') and made some updates. Can we look at this again together?" 4. Fourth phase. THANK THEM. Not just with physical rewards and words. Show them exactly how their feedback shaped the product. Show the impact, what new ideas it created, and how it helped others. 

Currently, we do not. I don't believe it's the product marketing team's role to quantify the technical costs of a product or solution investment. That's stepping too far into the role and expertise of product and engineering, and frankly it's just an inefficient use of resources. That's not to say you should wave a magic wand and wish for the impossible. Product marketers must have the technical depth to understand the limitations, constraints, and possibilities of a technology. Without it, they lose credibliity quickly. And so you ought to have a rough sense of the difficulty or feasibility of a request. But quantifying it is cheeky, bordering on insulting. If you don't trust your R&D teams to properly scope a request, something else is rotten, and you should look there first. (Yes, that means you might be the problem.) If there is a team dedicated to scoping roadmap items, that's a good indication you have a pretty mature product management process. Work in the process - understand how it works, where the right places to insert suggestions are, and plan accordingly. Be open about your goals, and what you do and don't know. You'll be surprised how often thoughtful ideas are welcomed and incorporated. 

There are two big categories here. 1. Speaking with a customer after specific feature feedback 2. Re-introducing a product to a prospect/customer who said "no" I'll address the first one in the question about capturing beta feedback. Quick summary: Show the customer how you listened and incorporated their feedback, and how it impacted the product and other customers. The second is truly difficult. Once a customer has told you "no," or "this doesn't work for me," they have made a decision, and either chosen to stick with the status quo or select a competitor. So, approach carefully at all. (As an aside, this is a very material reason why companies shouldn't "go big" with demand creation / capture marketing until you really know you've got great fit and understanding. You risk burning a ton of prospects if you're truly not ready. You have to keep a very close eye on this... maybe a topic for another session). Perhaps the best thing to do here is to approach the conversation with full honesty. "I know you weren't satisfied with our solution to your problem the last time we spoke... I wanted to check in and see how you were managing today. Is it still a problem?" * If so, learn more - why is it a problem? Can you honestly address that problem? * Lead with empathy in that conversation, and see if there's a solutoin. But know that if you present something that still doesn't meet their needs, you're going to get final no. This is that situation where you have to do what's best for the customer/prospect, not what's best for your sales team or number. I can't tell you how many times I've told customers, "you're right - solution X does fit your needs better. I'm glad you found it." Or, "You know, I think based on what you've told me, you might be better off with a solution based on Y." There's no such thing as a perfect product for every customer. But that shouldn't stop you from helping someone with a hairy problem to solve. 

Roadmaps are a living, breathing plan. This should be a continual conversation with product (and sales, and cs, and...) to make sure you always know what is happening and changing. And, I've never seen a roadmap that's truly "final." It's technology. "Stuff happens." But, there are multipltae stages when you should have both input and visibility into the plan: 1. Early/vison setting. What's the long-term target we're trying to hit, and what are the key investments/stages on the way? Here you're getting input into the order of operations as well as the stories you'll want to tell along the way 2. Concrete, mid-term. This is the 6-12 month view (depending on product timelines). Now you're engaging around launch planning and customer comms. What are the big themes you want to build around? What content marketing investments do you want to make to define the market, key differentiators, etc. Big point of input: What can you package/land together to tell a better story? 3. Delivery time, short term. This isn't so much input as awareness. What's new, what's changing, get into the gory details.

Repeatability. Customers are asking for a feature because they believe the need it. Nobody has time to invent frivolous features for companies they don't work for. As a result, there's always an element of truth to every request. The trick to determine whether you should add a capability to your roadmap most frequently comes down to, "how many other companies would benefit from this feature?" If it's a one-off, you still have to value that one-off. But if it's something that's broadly applicable to a segment or industry, it's definitely worth it.

I find that there are two times when it makes sense to truly invest in deep market research like what you mention: * When you're considering starting a company or building a completely new product * When you're a very mature company (public, large revenue, growth slowing) and you need to evaluate options for a next growth trajectory In those situations, you're trying to learn something completely new, identify risks, and plot a course forward. You don't have product yet, you don't have customers, and you might not have expertise. The rest of the time, particularly in high-growth markets, doing all these things is just spinning wheels. The one thing that will drive successful adjustments to your roadmap is customer knowledge and interaction. It's a continual process - captured through sales calls and customer success engagements on a daily basis. These converations are also great times to vet ideas early. Questions like, "What if we..." or "What if you..." can rapidly validate or invalidate ideas. Finally, the best format is a concise format. Pages and pages of details, data, and quotes will not make your argument, in the same way that 20-page "messaging brief" is a waste of everyone's time. They won't read it. Treat it like a messaging exercise. What are the 3-4 pillars of your argument? What are the best proof points to substantiate your point of view? What invites the best discussion. Your goal in shaping the roadmap is not to win an argument or dictate feature priorities. It's to invite a deeper discussion of customer needs and arrive at a better solution for the market, together. 

This is an inteesting one. My first question is, "Why are you pitching to Product leadership?" A pitch is a judgemental situation. Instead, I'd urge you to discuss your ideas with them. Invite their feedback, instead of seeking approval. Try it - it will change the conversation instantly. There's no single template for this. Your PM team probably has an existing rubric they use to vet and prioritize roadmap items. Lean into that as much as you can. If you're using their language, it's easier for them to understand your ideas. Some common elements, though: * Who the roadmap item is for (customer segment, user, use case) * What kind of opportunity is it (point of parity, market differentiation, delighter) * Size the opportunity (customers, pipeline, bookings, cost savings, etc.) * Message/strategy alignment ("our mission is to deliver the most secure content platform in the cloud...")

Offer to help write product copy. One, it's really fun, and a nice break from the usual. Two, it forces you to put your money where your mouth is. How would *you* guide a customer to complete a specific task? It's also a great way to learn your product inside and out. Potentially higher ROI than signing up for a bug bash on a regular basis. 

I'm currently the Head of Product Marketing at Cisco Meraki. I also have responsibility for the Cisco Wireless product portfolio. In the Meraki business, Product Marketing is a core pillar of our Market Strategy team. Market Strategy encompasses: * Audience Marketing * Customer Marketing * Solutions Marketing * Product Marketing Together, we're ultimately accountable for Meraki's go-to-market strategy. From whom we target (Audience) and their unique priorities, to the unique value propostiion of our products and platform (Product and Solutions), through the customer lifecycle (Customer Marketing), we define the priorities, stories, and key themes for the department. I like to think of Product Marketing as the alpha and omega of marketing. We sit at the very beginning of the conversation, connecting with our customers interests and needs, and help educate their overall consideration. Later, we pick up these customers with our partners in sales and help straddle the final stages of the purchase process.