AMA: Gem Head of Product Marketing, Content, and Website, Ani Sapru on Influencing the Product Roadmap

The short answer: constantly, with formal check-ins quarterly or semi-quarterly. Product marketing's job is to be a continuous feedback loop between the market and product. You're hearing things in sales calls, customer conversations, competitive intel, and win/loss data all the time. The insights you uncover don't wait for quarterly planning cycles, so neither should you. That said, here's how I think about the rhythm: Real-time sharing (ongoing): This is where you're dropping quick insights in ...Read More

The honest answer: I don't formally track it, and I don't think you should either. When PMM and PM are working well together, influence doesn't feel like something you need to prove on a spreadsheet. You're both looking at the market together and making decisions as a team. If I'm keeping a running tally of "my ideas that made the roadmap," I'm optimizing for the wrong thing. Your goal isn't to mandate what gets built. You're contributing signals – what customers are asking for, where competitor ...Read More

It depends on the scope. Small stuff gets handled in Slack or email. Bigger themes need more structure. Quick feedback: Drop it in Slack. "Just heard from three customers asking about X—seems like it's coming up more." Patterns from multiple conversations: Pull together a short doc with the theme, who's asking, and why it matters. Include quotes when you can—"this is the only reason we're still using [competitor]" hits harder than a summary. Big strategic feedback: Present it live. Walk through ...Read More

The main channels I use are: sales calls, customer conversations, competitive intel, market research, and industry trend reports. These are all places where you're hearing directly from the market, and your job is to bring that signal back to product. Sales calls and deal reviews: Join calls where prospects are asking questions or raising objections. Look for patterns in win/loss data. You'll see what features keep coming up or what's pushing people to competitors. Customer conversations: Talk t ...Read More

For quick wins: prioritize the most impactful customer requests. What's going to make their lives way easier, prevent churn, or really impress them? But you can't operate like this forever. A product vision is a must. Without one, you're just reacting to whatever customers are yelling about loudest. A clear vision is what lets you move from doing everything a customer wants to actually dictating a strategy to the market. It's how you get customers excited about where you're going, not just what ...Read More

I pull from all your usual sources—sales calls, customer feedback, competitive intel, market research—but the key is synthesizing it into a clear story, not just dumping data. Win/loss data: What features are making us win or lose deals? Are there patterns in what prospects keep asking for? Customer conversations: What are your best customers struggling with? What workarounds are they building because the product doesn't do something? Competitive intel: What are competitors launching? Where are ...Read More

Keep a running doc of insights, then use it as your starting point for planning sessions. Here's what works for me: Track insights as you go: I keep a Notion doc (or deck, whatever works) where I dump anything that feels like it could influence product. Customer quotes, competitive moves, patterns from sales calls, whatever. I don't overthink it: if it feels important in the moment, it goes in the doc. Use it for quarterly and annual planning: When it's time for roadmap planning, I don't start f ...Read More

It's not higher or lower value than customer input — it's just that not all analyst feedback is created equal. Analysts see patterns across the market that you might miss from your own customer base. But there are tiers based on your industry, their focus area, and how senior they are. The best way I've found to prioritize analyst feedback is by getting to know them. Once you have a relationship, you understand which customers they work with, what verticals they focus on, and where their experti ...Read More

This is the holy grail question, and honestly it's more art than science. It's a cross-functional conversation where you weigh the pros and cons together. The tricky part is that customer priorities don't always align with your product strategy. Sometimes you have to make a call on what you're willing to give up because you think the opportunity is bigger elsewhere. It depends on the complexity and how many people need to be involved, but you've got to loop in all the core departments—sales, suc ...Read More

You need to lean harder on partnership with your technical PM and engineers. PMM focuses on the "why" not the "how." You bring the signal from customers and the market to understand customer problems & potential business value. The technical team can help you figure out if it's actually feasible and what the trade-offs are. The fundamentals are the same, though. Customer pain points matter. Competitive gaps matter. Market trends matter. You just need technical partners to help you assess wha ...Read More

Hot take: requiring ROI for everything is not a winning strategy. Sometimes the best moves are strategic bets without hard data. It's art and science. If you're only building things with clear, quantifiable ROI, you're playing it too safe. Sometimes you're entering a greenfield market that doesn't have robust data yet. Still, you've gotten other signals—analyst reports, early customer conversations, competitive moves—that tell you it's worth the bet. That's the whole point of a strategic bet: Yo ...Read More

At least 6 months out is a good rule of thumb, but it depends on how involved leadership is and how much exploration you need to do. For us, leadership is pretty hands-on with major product launches and investment areas, so the research phase usually starts about 6 months ahead, while simultaneously starting an MVP build. As we dig into what we actually need to build in-depth, we get clearer on when we can feasibly launch. Here's roughly how it breaks down for us: 3 months for research and MVP b ...Read More