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

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 ...Read More

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-m ...Read More

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 dis ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 li ...Read More