AMA: HubSpot Senior Director of Product Marketing, Nisha Goklaney on Influencing the Product Roadmap

What works here in my experience is having regular touchpoints for alignment + strategic reviews to influence direction. Here's a framework: * Weekly or bi-weekly syncs - for ongoing collaboration and alignment. This is where you discuss progress on current roadmap items, any changes to product launch timeframes, updates on GTM plans, customer feedback and market trends. Why it's important: Maintains a constant feedback loop and prevents surprises as features move through development * Quarterly roadmap planning - PMM's present a 'GTM recommendations report' summarizing top customer problems, market opportunities. Bring snippet Gong calls, rep calls here to help frame the customer first mindset. PM's share upcoming plans and trade-offs for the next quarter. Why it's important: Provides a formal opp for PMM's to influence the roadmap and for PM's to be aligned with the GTM strategy * Ad hoc as needed - This is to address any urgent issues or opportunities (could be a critical customer or sales feedback, competitive threats, market shifts requiring immediate adjustment

If your goal is to influence the product roadmap there are a few pitfalls you should avoid. 1. Don't treat the roadmap as something fixed/set in stone - Having a roadmap is super crucial to helping focus product teams + also giving the market a clear sign on where you are going. However, there needs to be a fine balance here, so that you don't miss opportunities to meet the moment. A better approach - is to recognize that roadmaps are dynamic, frame your input as a way to enhance priorities or respond to emerging trends. 2. Don't focus only on features, ignoring the problem - Suggesting features without tying them to customer pain points or business outcomes can make you seem out of touch with the broader goals. Instead, present insights framed as 'problems to solve' e.g. the customer needs a better way to track ROI, letting PM's design the solution 3. Don't forget to make trade-off's - Suggesting changes and additions without tradeoffs can make your input seem unrealistic or unhelpful. Instead acknowledge tradeoffs and frame as opportunities for discussion (e.g. if we say yes to this, we may need to delays Y. Here's the impact of both options) 4. Don't overpromise to customers - Making commitments about future features without product team's buy-in can lead to misaligned expectations. Instead communicate roadmap priorities but be clear when things are in consideration, or timeline hasn't been finalized. 5. Don't dismiss the product's teams expertise - this sounds like a no-brainer but PM's are experts in their product - acknowledge their expertise, ensure you are clear in framing your recommendations from your expertise in bringing market and customer insights 6. Don't forget to follow up and have shared documentation - follow up and shared documentation is super crucial to finishing the swing

This is a great question. An important thing to remember is Products should be built with a market in mind - and that's where a PMM comes in. They should be experts in the 'market' (customer, competitor, market sizing) and use this as their grounding. Here's what worked from my experience: 1. Coming to the table with data and insights - Product teams value concrete, actionable insights so bringing data that they can't ignore helps. Use customer feedback, rep feedback, competitive analysis and adoption data to make your case. Data shifts the conversation from 'opinion' to 'fact' 2. Becoming known as the person that brings the voice of the customer to life - This takes some work, but create space for yourself and set aside time on a recurring basis to speak with customers. Understand how they are using your product, what's working and what's not. Capture their exact sentiments, and share this with PM's on a regular basis. Have a call scheduled with a customer - bring your PM along so together you can understand customer pain points and sentiment directly. 3. Have product expertise and strong knowledge on the competitive landscape - These 2 skills are crucial to establish credibility. Share interesting and impactful competitive intel with PM's. Become a partner that your PM looks at as someone that will help them grow and learn as well. 4. Embed yourself into product planning early - Find ways to inject PMM influence into the roadmap early. One thing we have been doing at HubSpot is helping our GM's take their product vision (a technical doc) and frame it in the lens of a customer narrative and a company growth narrative. This has helped us showcase our value as a trusted partner, and enabled us to provide recommendations on the roadmap 5. Build relationships -Invest in trust-building with product leaders. Have regular 1-1's with PM's to understand their challenges and find ways to support them.

Product marketing plays a key role in sharing the roadmap externally to ultimately help buyers buy and sellers sell. Here's some key ways to on how to do this: 1. Public roadmap pages or tools - Share high level public facing roadmap that helps give customers insights into the areas the product is investing in and the use cases, themes and problem areas where the product is doubling down to support. 2. Customer advisory boards - share the roadmap selectively with top-tier customers (in certain upmarket deals customers want to see this before they make product investments.) 3. Ongoing release moments - the key here is to have a regular cadence for your ongoing releases, so customers know when to expect this (e.g. HubSpot uses a 2X/ year Spring and Fall Spotlight cadence to launch our big product innovations for the year). We combine our biggest innovations in these 2 marquee moments and present them in a customer first narrative (vs. feature launches) to help customers understand how we're helping them solve their problems. 4. Customer facing events - Use events to unveil exciting roadmap themes and demo the product 5. Social media and content marketing - Build buzz for new features or releases for example by posting a teaser video on Linkedin hinting at an upcoming big release 6. Tailor roadmaps for specific audiences - this could be specific segments of your customer base (E.g. enterprise user, or specific geographical markets or industries) the goal here is to tailor the enhancements to what is most important to this sub-segment of users based on their needs.