AMA: Gusto Former Product Marketing Lead, Angela Zhang on Stakeholder Management

I’ve led pre-mortems at various stages of product - from early product concept, to alpha/beta stage, to immediately pre-launch. Pre-mortems are valuable exercises (and I think they’re fun!). They help teams examine their assumptions, surface concerns without being painted as downers, and come to a response plan as a group. For a pre-mortem, I bias on the side of including more folks than not. It’ll also depend on the nature of the product and launch. At a minimum, I always include PM, research, ...Read More

These four things have helped me influence the roadmap: Quantify the impact of feedback and even better, have an understanding of PM/eng lift required to implement. If you have a strong case for the impact (doing this will generate $$$ in revenue or resolve pain points for XX% of customers… which will generate $$$ in revenue) and a sense of how much eng work it’ll take, it becomes easier for PM allocate additional points for the work.  Tie feedback to company or product vision. Sales is focused ...Read More

That’s always a challenge in a resource-constrained world! My goal is to spend 80% of time on 1-2 big strategic projects, routine launches, process improvements, and leave 10%-20% of time for ad-hoc requests which I’ll prioritize based on some combination of interest in problem, development opportunity, and relationship-building.  During planning, I'll involve my key stakeholders (PM, design, and sales) into the process and walk them through how much PMM support they can expect. Things will inva ...Read More

I think a strong PM-PMM relationship, on an team-level or individual-level, is based on three things: 1. focus on the customer - but we'll go beyond that!, 2. respect for what each other brings to the table, and 3. goal alignment within the org.  Here are the areas I focus on to build on #2 and #3 Build PMM expertise on inbound research, around market opportunity and that overlaps with product vision and capability. This is a place where PMMs can really shine when we ask where is the market toda ...Read More