AMA: Google Product Marketing Lead, Vishal Naik on Influencing the Product Roadmap

To bring the voice of the customer (and all of the external market concerns top of mind to a customer) to help the PM team build the best product possible.  Feedback in review cycles or direct questions in 1:1s between leads helps. But its also valuable to read the room when you sit in on meetings with your team. Are the PMs engaged? Is there a buzz in the air or does it feel flat? While a PMM is talking/presenting, are others multi-tasking or are they participating? If your PMM team is bringing ...Read More

The best full-stack marketers can go broad and deep. From a hard skills POV, you'd need to know enough to build a plan across any marketing dimension (product, social, email, web, growth, strategy, etc.) but IMO its more about the soft skills to build relationships, know when to do a task vs bring in others, brand yourself as someone who gets the job done and delivers results and the mental model to always think big picture about customer impact and usage--that will bring more opportunities whic ...Read More

I'd reframe the question a bit from proving value to adding value. Proving value is a little defensive, vs adding value puts the onus on PMM to show up every day with a task to be done. I think about adding value to PMs in two parts:  Trust: If I had to simplify it to a few key things, its a strong understanding of the customer and their problems and then a strong understanding of the competitive space and market. I think its also important to have a point of view. If you bring those insights to ...Read More

My advice on this one is that there's no real overstepping of your role--as long as you're respectful of others (both people and functions) and act in the interest of the company. If you're doing both of those things, then act like an owner and do what you think is necessary to help the business move forward. PMMs tend to have a vantage point not always offorded to other teams, given the nature of our role is to be so higly cross functional. So if youre seeing silo'd work and its negatively impa ...Read More

Impact. If you dont do the training, will the feature be used? Will it create more bugs? I think of this as a cost benefit equation--What is the cost of holding a launch to do a training vs what is the cost of launching without the training? Being able to articulate that potential downside to doing the launch "wrong" will help your XFNs understand why youre making a specific recommendation.  For example, if you can quantify that launching a feature without a sales training will equate to a X% co ...Read More

You'll definitely want to chat with a research agency or your internal researchers to build a game plan, but I think it starts with a list of questions you want answered. Nothing too formal, just conversationally, what insights do you need to know that will help build product strategies? For me, that starts from talking with PMs and Sales people and understanding current context and then looking for where they may be a gap.  One of our products is localized only for US-EN, but we have a large vo ...Read More

The way I think about this is that PM owns the roadmap. What I mean by that is that, none of my PMs--past or present--have sat down and brainstormed about roadmap with PMM. So in the moments where I've felt that we have an area that is unadressed within our roadmap or that by not adding an item to our roadmap at a certain time puts us at risk of a market moment, the onus has been on PMM to drive the steps necessary to win over PM as a stakeholder around what the future product strategy should be ...Read More

I think the most important part of influencing product roadmap is that its an outcome created by a strong understanding of the user, strong understanding of the product and a strong relationship with product management. If you have those items already landed, then you can better understand if theres a gap that truly needs to be filled in the roadmap. If you lack one or more of those areas, then it may be hard to achieve the XFN buy-in required to influence roadmap.  To play back a sports analogy ...Read More

I'd say this is a volume game where you have to look for patterns while also thinking about your growth model and ideal customer profile. Given these data points you might find that out of the list of feature requests, a handful are commonly requested and and even smaller subset are commonly requested by your most valuable customers. Focusing on these will not only help your current customers but help you win future deals as well.  Another valuable thing to consider here is buidling a developer ...Read More

I tend to think that teams like to hear their work is appreciated and their processes are modeled. So if another team is required for estimating roadmap costs, I'd ask them questions about how they do this level of modeling? What's their process and what are their inputs? Then I'd take a stab at doing something similar and then set up time with them to review.  At my current company, things tend to be measured based on resource allocation (X full time-employees required to work on the project fo ...Read More

Its about doing the work. I view influencing the roadmap as a byproduct of a great process rather than a task itself. So as you build up your understanding of the product and your user needs and you map that to the market and competitive landscape, formulate your own point of view on where your product needs to go and become a thought partner to your PM. Influencing the roadmap is a long game, but if you can brand yourself as a trusted mind with your product manager that has an eye for where the ...Read More

IMO, your roadmap needs to be representative of your company vision. And practically, your company's growth opportunities would come from customer expansion and new deals. So I'd advise that you leverage your advisory board to really understand your current install base well. As you think through segmentation for future opportunities, your current install base may be an analog to your highest potential addressable market, or it may not. Thus, how much your advisory board plays into your roadmap ...Read More

I think this one is a bit tricky, because I wouldnt recommend creating a user list without appropriate PII governance. Rather than creating a user list, I'd suggest building an outreach stratgey that can deliver content to customers in a scaled manner. Some suggestions are in-app notifications that can serve easy consumption content at the right moment, or building a webinar series where your customers can sign up via your O&O channels. This way you can still enable users to get the informat ...Read More

For your sake, I'd hope that if your research shows that MVP doesnt equate to a value add for your customers, that causes your product team to make a full stop and push. That said, at this point I think you need to put your PM hat on and think about what features might make users see value in your product and opportunity size those features for what could be the easiest to deliver in a meaningful way. Have that conversation with your PM team and also reiterate the cost to launching a non valuabl ...Read More

As a PMM, I tend to view the RACI as PMM being responsible/accountable and CS being considered and PM being informed/potentially considered.  But it depends on your org and how you're structured. The reason I say PMM is because I think the value of an advisory board is to help understand new trends, forecast the future, and help guide the product. So its about the intersection of the product and the market.  CS teams could also lead and advisory board as well. I think the best solution on who sh ...Read More

Winning over stakeholders is a key part of being a PMM, and it might be your approach that needs an iterative update. IMO, influencing roadmap comes down to influencing PMs--and some are going to be easy to work with and easily malleable and some arent. So if your product management team isnt open to customer or prospect feedback on your product, what are they interested in? How are they making their decisions about what to include into roadmap? How are you packaging the insights you hear from c ...Read More

Time and resource allocation helps me think about this. If I know I have 40 hours of work already lined up and a new project pops up, it helps me to talk to product about when we'll be able to support a new workstream if I can detail whats currently open. That helps us jointly prioritize so that we can spend time on P0s, hopefully get to P1s, and keep P2s alive until there is time. Having a running document (deck with project plans or spreadsheet/gantt chart) helps to visualize this. Though the ...Read More

Tracking impact of launches and defining the costs associated with roadmap slipping. Sales deals lost because a feature was promised but didnt ship. Customer trust lost because they dont have confidence in what you say is coming. The opportunity cost of internal teams working on items that didnt ship and what they couldnt do because of it. I tend to view a lot of things as a cost/benefit equation, so really get sharp at defining the costs to the organization that product is creating by not deliv ...Read More

I dont really have a strong "pro" for why to do this, so I personally wouldnt put too much time and effort into it. But it may make sense for your business challenges. I think something to be aware of is that when you document your roadmap publicly, it puts more pressure to ensure dates dont slip. If you're trying to brand yourself as an innovator by having all these new ideas, it may help, but you run the risk of causing customer to delay their purchase until a later date until a feature they w ...Read More

I think I mentioned this in another answer, but I think a good framework is the Five Dysfunctions of a Team model. Build trust with your PM and other stakeholders--that's delivering results when called upon and being a key thought partner with your stakeholders. That will allow you to have productive conflict--which is about being comfortable enough to challenge an opinion because you already have mutual trust with your stakeholder. That will allow you to have buy-in on plans because youve both ...Read More

If you dont have data or customer anecdotes, I'm not sure you should be driving roadmap. Influencing roadmap is an earned outcome and not something to just "do" for the sake of checking a box. Think of the roadmap as a business mechanism, and do you have enough to convince stakeholders that the direction of your company should be steered in another direction? For most cases, that is going to be user data, market research, competitive positioning, customer feedback, etc. Without that, I'm not sur ...Read More

As it relates to influencing roadmap, breadth is important. If youre spread too thin (I don't mean PM:PMM ratio, I mean commonality in what you cover--more on this later) then you wont be able to go upstream and influence roadmap because you'll be playing defense all day.  I personally think being tagged to a vertical or a persona will make it harder to influence roadmap because you'll be seen as a person that executes a launch to a segment; rather than being a person that understands both the p ...Read More

I personally think the biggest value of an MBA is in getting into product marketing. Most companies dont have APMM roles and so there isnt a ton of opportunities for true entry level roles. PMM roles tend to require mapping customers to narratives to products to marketing strategies, while being able to project manage your time and build relationships internally--thats a pretty nebulous charter, which is where the MBA comes in. For candidates who havent had luck moving internally from another ro ...Read More

Ultimately I view roadmap as a path to your company's vision to get more customers to use your service. Thus, I definitely dont think that meet-comp features by themselves are justfiable evidence to get something into roadmap--because the market already has that and is it really going to differentiate your product. In certain cases it will help you not lose deals because of a gap, but its not really making you a visionary, so a healthy balance of when to add competitive features is nice.   I'd s ...Read More

At my last company we made a launch tiering playbook. It was a series of 6 steps: 1) First, we's look at product's roadmap to see what was on the horizon 2) From there, we'd review PRDs. Mainly, we'd use the PRD to know what was behind the scenes so that we could forecast impact so that we had an idea for meaty vs light features coming.  3) We'd use that to think about bundling and timing. Some features with like components could work well as a bundle, of which the bundle could carry more weight ...Read More

How I've understood customer journeys in the past have never actually leveraged a software tool to do so. We've started by mapping out the customer journey into normal stages: awareness, interest, consideration, preference, loyalty. Then across those stages, look to see what is the customer thinking, doing, experiencing and feeling across each.  Fill all of that out into a matrix and from there you'll have a good grasp for what your customer is going through across the journey and that should he ...Read More

I dont actually think my approach changes. I tend to believe that the process will yield results and my process to influencing roadmap focuses on acting (in my head) like I'm the owner of my product: what users use my product? what are they thinking/feeling as they go through the journey to understand and ultimately use my product? is there a known gap in terms of what would make them use more of the product?  is there a common denominator that is driving either upside or downside for the produc ...Read More

I like to anchor messaging to a foundational message house/messaging framework document that all other deliverables stem from.  List out details about your core persona:what their challenges/pain points are.  List out your market context.  Think about your product differentiation  What are your supporting product proof points. Distill those down into a 50/100 word messaging statement.  Be presecriptive about alignment and buy-on on that message house, make sure your brand team is on board, your ...Read More

It starts with buy-in. If you can work with your XFN teams before the research is commissioned to chat about what questions the business wants solved and then once you have a vendor share the vendor proposal and then once you have qual/quant outlines share those with your XFNs to get their opinions on the questions being asked and research strategies being leveraged--then your partner teams will feel like they had a part in the research origination, and then they might be more interested in its ...Read More

A great business resource on developing XFN relationships is the book "Five Dysnfunctions of a Team" by Patrick Lencioni. Its an easy read and its scalable to all relationship building in your organization. If you can establish trust, you can have conversations and meetings with productive conflict that will make it easier to achieve buy-in of various ideas which will help keep people accountable and ultimately drive results. But the book is a much better blueprint than that 30 word sentence abo ...Read More