AMA: Codecademy Group Product Marketing Manager, Marissa Hastings on Influencing the Product Roadmap

There are a few aspects to this. The first involves being proactive and enabling your team with insights ahead of time. The second involves bringing in other data/business rationale to round out your case as to why these user needs should be prioritized. Enabling your team ahead of time Think about ongoing customer feedback mechanisms you can set up. For example, weekly customer churn surveys, customer calls, sales feedback loops, VOC programs in conjunction with customer success, design and sal ...Read More

Two things I wish I knew: The importance of building trust and establishing good relationships My unique capabilities/value as a PMM and how to communicate that to my partners In the beginning of my career, I think I over-indexed on producing a good work product and tried to influence through having the best ideas or strongest case. In hindsight, I realized that the first thing you should do as a PMM is establish trust and invest in building good relationships with your partners because if you d ...Read More

I would first try to understand where the product manager is coming from, i.e. what knowledge or perceptions are they starting with about Marketing? What context might they need? What pain points might they have experienced in the past with other marketers? Starting from a place of empathy can help you determine what information would be most helpful to share with them to bring them along as a partner and gain their support. Once you have that baseline, I'd then craft a deck or document that pro ...Read More

I think PMM is the perfect function to initiate this because you sit at the intersection of both teams. What my team usually does is work with Product to inform the product roadmap, then once that is settled (or in parallel) we develop a product marketing roadmap for the quarter which includes all of the product releases we will support, timing, and priority level.  As part of this we consider: - Priority level (not every release needs to get marketing support) - What level of marketing support ...Read More

The biggest mistakes to avoid when influencing the product roadmap: Being too prescriptive with the idea/solution, rather than presenting the problem space and enlisting your product, design, and eng partners to help you arrive at the best solution Pushing too far with an opinion (failing to "disagree and commit") Overstepping boundaries and trying to do the PM's job When influencing, it can be helpful to think about what unique value you bring as a PMM to your product squad.  For example, PMMs ...Read More

I would first make sure that any assumptions you've made when crafting your proposed idea are clearly documented so that everyone is aligned on the risks. When thinking about assumptions, ask yourself "what must be true in order for this idea to succeed?"  Then try and anticipate questions they'll have about risks and ways you can mitigate them. For example, can you propose experiments to validate hypotheses or identify other ways to derisk a project? Showing that you put thought into thinking a ...Read More