AMA: Glassdoor Lead Product Marketing Manager, Sophia (Fox) Le on Influencing the Product Roadmap

* Build relationships. Show up to add value; ask, remind, repeat. * Bring the voice of the customer to the table. Leverage customer interviews, NPS verbatims, third-party research findings, competitive intel. Bring data to validate and strengthen your recommendations with the customer wants, needs/unmet, and motivations at the center of said suggestions. * Bring your marketing calendar with you. Create shared aspirations to get as much exposure and adoption of products set to release while opening discussions on what else can be invaluable product additions to the overarching brand story your marketing team will be pushing out. Time and again, we are finding at Glassdoor that when we are able to anchor or couple product releases with marketing campaigns, it is stronger in every sense. * Bring your GTM launch proposals to get feedback. Involve your product counterparts in the sausage-making. How might your team help move these products off the shelf? How might your team help arm product with data to help with prioritization, especially in high growth orgs where ruthlessly prioritizing is the name of the game?

In organizations where you have a product machine that pushes new features or feature enhancements every two weeks or so, I highly recommend creating a GTM launch engine that can optimize to get the biggest bang for your buck! Having done this in several organizations, I start with partnering with our product and marketing teams (plus, GTM like Sales or CS if a B2B product) to identify the criteria for stack ranking product releases. The ranking would sort and “tier” or size release by things like business impact, differentiation, new vs enhancement, and price/packaging as relevant. You can also start with a 2x2 framework on business impact and differentiation to start guiding your GTM launch tiers–we do this successfully at Glassdoor today! Ideally, if you have a marketing calendar and overarching stories you hope to tell over the course of the quarter or year, you can work with your product counterparts to devise a GTM launch plan for one or more than one feature or product set to anchor your narrative.

Data, data, data! Once you are able to identify your customer’s unmet needs, motivations, and attitudes, you can put your customer at the center of your business cases to influence product priorities. And couple that with market insights on your competition, your product counterparts will have to listen. Are you able to identify any gaps that your current feature set does not address? Is there an opportunity for your product to be first to market by fulfilling an unmet need that they cannot get anywhere else as part of their journey to find a solution? For SaaS products, is there any point in the funnel that there is significant drop off that you can test your way into optimizing conversion? Do you have any NPS data or verbatims that you can share areas for enhancements or net new solutions?

* Quantitative and qualitative market research. Working with expert market research partners will help you get to solid customer segmentation, customer journey mapping, competitive landscape analysis, market trends, and market sizing, TAM. This can be costly, but always worth it! * Qualitative customer interviews. This is probably the easiest and most powerful thing you can do yourself in partnership with product or product design counterparts. You can do 1:1 interviews or even leverage tools like usertesting.com to get qualitative customer insights. * Most analysis is shared in a very clear slide deck that outlines research goals, key learnings, and implications. * I highly recommend checking out my former colleague and friend, Sonia Moaiery’s Sharebird AMA on Market Research (https://sharebird.com/h/product-marketing/ama/intercom-product-marketing-lead-platform-sonia-moaiery-on-market-research) as another great resource!

If you have relationships built with your product counterparts, and product leadership, you can influence through this relationship. This is especially the case if your product marketing org is accepted as a strategic partner instead of just a tactical partner. Ideally this partnership if founded on your PMs leaning on you to contribute as voice of the customer, data-driven insights on the market landscape, the competition, trends. As the voice of the customer and market insights SME (subject-matter-expert), you can develop business cases and present them to your product counterparts at any stage, and more often than not, your product counterparts will listen and consider your recommendations. Even if the roadmap cannot be changed at that moment, that does not mean it cannot be influenced for the next set of iterations! And, product organizations are strategic in that most will build in wiggle room to address or adapt to changes in the market or customer wants/needs/motivations influenced by factors outside of their control–think Covid as the most recent example. For organizations where product marketing is still being establish, continue to build relationships as well as your PMM muscles on bringing market and customer insights to the table, every single time. Become invalueable as a strategic partner and not just a tactical superstar!