AMA: Ironclad Director of PMM, Stacey Wang on Influencing the Product Roadmap

(Hot take?) I, too, am wary when product marketers' stated/primary motive is to "influence the roadmap" b/c influencing the roadmap is just a means to an end; it's not the end itself. (This is perhaps a slim bone to pick, but in my experience, genuine collaborative intent makes all the difference b/w a trusting/productive partnership vs. a guarded/challenging one.) Once there is right intent, you can influence the roadmap by becoming the absolute authority in the world (yes, I said world) in your market, customer, and story. A few key things to get right: (1) Aligning on success metrics. Work with your PM to define the north star vision for the product as well as the metrics that will gauge whether you're on target. You can then tie roadmap arguments to measurable business outcomes and isolate for the product team the set of features that are critical to achieving your mutually agreed-upon result. (2) If the goal is to win net-new customers / increase market share, PMM needs to be an absolute authority on Voice of the Market. To influence the roadmap, you need to know, better than anyone in the world, where the market is commoditizing versus innovating, where your competitors are placing bets, implications on company/product strategy, why you win and why you lose, etc.. This will be key to enabling you/your PM to make strategic trade-offs. (3) If the goal is the make the product more successful amongst current customers (increasing activation or retention, decreasing churn, etc.), PMM needs to be an authority on Voice of the Customer. You need to understand whether or not the product or proposed feature is serving customer needs and prove (or disprove) value hypotheses through betas, data, feedback, and analysis. (4) Finally, you need to understand your positioning and story at a cellular level so that you can contribute to the longer-term vision/trajectory of your product. Some roadmap choices aren't really anchored in market or customer need, but in longer-term "vision," which is just another word for "story," which PMM (at least at Ironclad!) drives. If you intimately understand your company story and strategy, you'll be able to do more than just influence the roadmap; you'll be able to help set trajectory.

It's hard to answer this in the abstract (w/o knowing more about your current culture), but these two cultural components have been critical to the influence creds PMM has earned at Ironclad: (1) empathy and (2) (a derivative thereof) "win as one" mindset. Empathy means the ability to see things from your counterparty's point of view. "Win as one" culture is something we really care about at Ironclad, and it basically means committing to driving the best results for the company. It means always looking for the highest common ground instead of devolving to the lowest common denominator. It's the opposite of factionalism (e.g., my team's needs versus your team's needs). This "win as one" mindset is really important for product marketing because we are the connective tissue b/w so many teams. When the company is trying to "win as one," PMM can be a powerful company linchpin, greasing the GTM engine for all the teams we connect. Rather than making your goal "influencing the roadmap," you can focus on the higher order goal of making the product successful by your agreed-upon metric. (See above answer.) This makes us better partners to each other, which ultimately helps us achieve our goals. On the flip side, without "win as one," PMM can easily end up in a state of perpetual reactivity, serving this or that team, unable to be proactive/strategic. How do you change your culture to be more empathetic, to actually win as one? I believe product marketing has to exemplify both empathy and "win as one," earning trust and credibility the hard way, i.e. the right way. Set an intention is to drive the right result for the company, versus to merely influence the roadmap, and prove out that intention with excellent results. 

I like the idea and intent behind increasing transparency and visibility, as well as communications efficiency—but the answer to this question totally depends on your market and customers. There may be really valid strategic reasons (you may be in a hyper-competitive market, for example, where your competitors can gain an edge looking at your roadmap) for not wanting to publish a roadmap. 

- Anchor on the highest priority for the company, versus any one team. One of the hardest but also most liberating things about product marketing is that we are an inherently flexible function. Our skillsets are diverse, so we can quickly get into formation behind whatever is most important and strategic to the company at any given point in time. This is our greatest strength (and, if handled poorly, our greatest weakness; see below response), so don't let it go to waste! If the most important initiative at the company is revenue, make yourself indispensable to sales by holding your team to sales targets. If it is building a revolutionary product, prioritize product. Whatever you do, do not try to be everything to everyone. That just results in a lot of "RAM" (random acts of marketing) that don't make clear to anyone what you're actually good for. - When it comes to resolving tension between teams: Seek to find higher, common ground. Recognize that we're all trying to build a better business, so what are the highest order priorities we can all get behind? Resolve confict by bringing to the table with a point of view grounded in market or customer expertise.