AMA: Google Head of Marketing, Google Maps Platform, Madeline Ng on Influencing the Product Roadmap

When I look at an external product roadmap, I see it as a coordinated effort where the product marketing team is accountable for delivering the roadmap, but the product team is responsible for providing the key building blocks of information that build it. Product marketing is responsible for * Crafting the narrative: Your roadmap should thematically address how you are recognizing and serving your customers' top problems in a meaningful way * Building the template focused on customer centricity: Ensure that the launches you have planned are oriented towards customer value, not speeds and feeds * "Externalizing" the story: Scrubbing any information on products to ensure they are external friendly which might mean changing the language * Managing the reality of your product launch timing: In rare situations, you'll have a product team that is extremely good at hitting their projected launch timing. Otherwise, it might behoove you to offer a bit of buffer on the launch timing in public roadmaps to make sure that you're able to hit your delivery goals. * Creative polish: Make sure your roadmap looks good and reflects your brand Product management is responsible for * Setting realistic launch timing: Identifying rational delivery dates based on conversations with technical teams, and then holding the team accountable to it. * Articulating value: Framing the launch in terms of the customer value. How does improving capabilities, or reliability, or delivering a new feature make a customer achieve their goals? * Technical details: Clarifying exactly what the launch is. * Visual assets: Depending on your team, this might be a shared responsibility from PM to PMM to even UXR or another organization. If your roadmap includes visuals, they should come through a product team to ensure they accurately showcase what is coming. The ideal scenario is a series of ownership handoffs that pass the roadmap between PMM and PM until delivery: * PMM will kickoff the roadmap process * PM will input the necessary information * PMM will refine the story and externalize information as needed * PM will validate any reframes * PMM will finalize the creative * PM/PMM will collaborate to do any trainings needed for the roadmap

First off, I feel your pain and I understand your frustration. While not articulated, it sounds like you feel the product direction is a little bit off course and could be improved with brand/sales/product marketing in the room. I'm biased, but I agree! There is so much value in bringing the outside world's perspective - market dynamics, competitive insights, sales objections - into a product direction discussion. The very first thing I would do is understand why the product direction omits the teams you mentioned. Is there a particular leader within the product organization that is actively opposed to input from brand/sales/PMM? Is there just a culture where it hasn't been considered but there might be receptivity? Have attempts been made in the past to try and change the dynamics and, if so, what happened? A little bit of digging will help you figure out your course and the level of resistance you might face in trying to get a seat at the table. Once you know what you are facing, I would approach with the following framework: * Understand your value: What insights and recommendations do you have, and how do they ladder in to support the product organization's goals? Be thoughtful and choose your best data and story to have your first foray into being a part of the product roadmap direction. Don't underestimate the value of a good customer story! * Find an advocate and stress test: Who is your most receptive PM? Work with them to help them understand your value and see if they would be an advocate in bringing you into the conversation, and backing up your perspective while in the discussions. Like so many organizations, a PM may be able to sell your value to their peers better than you could. * Figure out an insertion point: How often does product direction in your organization change? For instance, we do annual planning but also have forums for product direction changes. See if there's a space for you to insert your insights into the flow so that it feels natural and reduces friction for inclusion. This might manifest in having your insights show up in a Product Requirements Document or a section in a review meeting. * Show success: If you can sway the product direction, even in a small way, document it and then follow through on how the launch goes! This is the hardest but most crucial point because it will help solidify why you/your team deserves to be at the table and will create a pull from the PMs to include you instead of you having to push your way in. You are doing the right thing by bringing in customer insights and perspective and I encourage you to have grit and patience as you drive this change in your organization!

When I'm communicating with product teams, I always want to start by making sure that I'm heard, then that what I'm saying is understood and considered useful, and then finally that what I've shared inspires action. To break it down, here's how I would approach. 1. Be heard Always start by considering what your product team cares about. What KPI are they assessed upon? How does what you are sharing help to influence their success? If you start here, you'll be much more likely to get the attention of your product team. For example, when I was working on launching a public product roadmap for the first time (a daunting task) I started by thinking about how the PMs I was working with cared about adoption. The roadmap would be a way to inspire enthusiasm from customers as well as prospects and could create higher adoption at launch. 2. Be understood This is the fun part! As a product marketer, you have the dual skills of storytelling and also data-backed insights. When you blend the two together, you'll have insights that both hit the emotional high notes to cause your product team to care, and the data to attract the rational side of the brain. For instance, when I was working on presenting win/loss analysis insights to a team, I started by pulling a few quotes from the win/loss interviews to help emotionally explain what customers loved and didn't love about the product, and then backed it up with the data around how prevalent these sentiments were among the cohort we assessed. 3. Inspire action Insights are nice, but action is better! Since you've already started thinking about the KPIs of your product team, you can connect the dots from your learnings to what direction you want them to take. In one situation, my team presenting marketing insights around the lack of product-market fit for a product that was launched. This wasn't an easy storyline, but we ultimately wanted to help product understand what they needed to improve in the product to drive more adoption. You can do it!

I love this question because it reflects the reality of working between a sales organization and a technical team of product managers and engineers! This is a situation where you have to start with the success metrics for the launch, try to find alignment in the goals between sales and dev, and then find some creativity in the execution. Here's a rough framework I use: * What does success look like for the feature updates? * There are infinite flavors of this answer but if the feature success is connected to revenue attainment, there could be an opportunity to help dev understand that a delay to train could ultimately lead to more success. * Is the feature update release urgency driven by customer need or by developer preference? * There are many dev teams that are incentivized to ship quickly to achieve team or individual goals. This isn't a very good reason to rush. If, however, the launch timing is accelerated because it unlocks a major, urgent, customer pain point it may make sense to figure out how to execute sales awareness with a fast follow of more in depth sales training after launch. * Would a customer be able to discover and implement the feature update intuitively without deep education or training? * While sales should be aware of everything shipping, they may not be crucial to achieving the success of the launch itself. I have far fewer concerns about launching minor feature updates without in depth sales training because the relative importance of that information for sales is nominal and the success of the product can be achieved without the training. * Are the features tied to any other major marketing launch moments? * This wasn't mentioned but this would be a major priority for me to complete a comprehensive launch training if we were executing marketing campaigns and motions around it. As you can see, this is a classic case where you need to work with a philosophy (customer first, success metrics first) and then adapt it to the realities of the organization. Be committed to your philosophy, flexible in your execution, and overly transparent in your communications.