AMA: Grammarly Global Head of Product Marketing, Natala Menezes on Influencing the Product Roadmap

It’s a bummer situation when product and engineering teams don’t deliver on the timeline planned. My best practice is to make sure that there’s organization-wide agreement and alignment on delivery dates. I’ve seen inconsistent delivery happen most in cases where marketing operates separately from the engineering workstream. A single meeting where all of the deliverables – not just product – are reviewed helps the org have greater context and status. Second, identifying delivery milestones to track progress. For example, “we’ve moved out of development to testing,” and leveraging those milestones to trigger workstreams helps keep the teams in sync and adjust to delays. 

Keep a stack-ranked list of the top product/feature requests that you hear from customers. As the product marketer, you represent the voice of the customer within the organization. Bring that voice to life by knowing their needs, where the product has gaps, and which features or enhancements will have the most significant impact.

When I started at Grammarly, I did an audit of how PMM mapped to the product organization, our consumer acquisition and growth teams, and our B2B sales teams. The audit revealed that we were significantly understaffed (did I mention we are hiring?) And as a result, PMM was focused on launches more than product strategy and messaging. My first cut of the org chart focused on coverage – ensuring that our product partners had identified partners and that we aligned to the sales org. I also developed different PMM roles within our organization to deliver lateral growth. Our PMM team has 4 flavors of PMM: * Segment. Consumer PMMs focused acquisition, retention, and growth of a specific segment of users. * GTM. B2B PMMs focused on a segment (enterprise, mid-market, or self-serve/smb) and aligned to a sales org. * Core. PMMs focused on a specific product or set of features. For example, mobile or desktop experiences or our core writing experience. Features that are cross segment and cross line of business. * Specialists. Specialist PMMs are unique in that they provide expertise across the PMM org. For example, competitive intelligence or monetization/pricing&packaging. These specialist roles have helped me bring unique skills into the team as we grow and invest in our relationships with product and sales. I also reorganized my leadership team to map to product and built out an 18-month growth plan. It was straightforward to identify significant gaps in current coverage – but going through and understanding the roadmap and growth of partner organizations helped develop a long-term growth plan. It also allows us to be a bit opportunistic in hiring. We know which roles are critical today and which ones will be important soon. So, suppose we meet a fantastic candidate that meets the criteria for a position we might hire in the next quarter. In that case, we have some flexibility to pull that headcount forward. 

Ideally, PMMs are influential partners. :) As PMMs, we represent the voice of the customer in product decisions – because we know our customers and their needs best through the work we do. When you have influence, PM will bring you closer to decision-making. Sometimes this starts as bouncing ideas off you vs formal integration into planning. With trust, I think the ideal scenario is where PMM is integrated into the planning process, just as PM integrates into the launch/GTM process. 

Outside of the wonderful PMM work we do at Grammarly (we’re hiring btw), I think Salesforce and Google do an exceptional job with product marketing. Salesforce focuses on the story and the pain they are solving. They are flashy and visionary (particularly in the slow-moving enterprise space). Google differentiates by being product-driven in their narrative, often dialing into the individual product benefits over industry shifts. I think Salesforce stays ahead because of their keen focus on the customer, their 360 narratives, and they do a lot of testing with customers. Google doubles down on technology and speed as a differentiator. I’ve also been impressed with Microsoft; lately. They have brought more energy to their historically developer-centric narratives and elevated their presence as “The Workplace’s BFF.”

I have always loved this quote by Robert Johnson (notably a musician, not a product marketer!): “Leadership is the ability to influence people and motivate them to do what needs to be done to accomplish a goal, vision or mission.” Those last three parts: goal, vision, and mission, are the keys to influence. Know what you are trying to accomplish (the goal), the vision of where that accomplishment will take you, and the why (the mission). I always like to have a stack-ranked list of requested features/needs from customers for priorities. Stack-ranked by impact. For timeline, I find the best method is to give the team broad awareness of all the moving parts. This way, they see the upstream and downstream implications of missing delivering timelines. 

Show up! In my last role, I was on a team where it wasn’t usual for PMM to play a significant role in the PM planning or organization. I showed up, spent time with the leaders, shared what PMM could do (by doing it!), and was consistent and available. I ended up being BFF with the PM lead. Together, we had a massive impact on the product and customer adoption. It was also a lot of fun.