AMA: Iterable Director of Product Marketing, Jeffrey Vocell on Influencing the Product Roadmap

This can be a huge challenge, and I certainly feel for you. Overall, I think it comes down to open and transparent communication between Product and Product Marketing, and the organization at large. Overall, I think there are a few things you can do to get ahead of this: 1. Transparent Roadmap - This will depend on the culture of your organization and how transparent you can be, but ideally the more the better. If you can keep a roadmap that everyone has access to and contains key timelines it will naturally help with the communication across the company. 2. Separate launch date, from the marketing "go live" date - Clearly there are some things that need to happen in unison with the actual launch, like internal enablement. But if the shifting of launch dates causes down stream challenges with the broader marketing team (i.e. a webinar was planned, and now has to be moved) then you can separate these two events. This gives you as a PMM some flexibility and also builds in some buffer for Product if timelines are a challenge. 3. Cross-Functional Teams - Internally at Iterable we have "Tiger Teams" for key launches and major initiatives. These teams have representatives from each functional area (Customer Success, Sales, Marketing, Product, Etc) and PMM will drive the meeting and transparently share launch updates. As a result, the representative from each team can help cascade information down across teams when a launch date changes. More so than just a launch date changing though, this cross-functional team helps increase communication and collaboration in the lead-up to a launch.

There are varying opinions on this, but from my POV, it should be as early as possible. It's a journey to get to this though, and won't happen overnight. Also, our contributions will change as well. In early roadmap planning, it's about ideation (both blue sky thinking, and what's possible near-term). If you have data on what feautres customers have requested, it can be a quick win for short-term roadmap prioritization. For bigger themes ti's a broader conversation abotu where the market is headed, what your unique differentiation is, and how you can continue to carve out more of a blue ocean (from the book Blue Ocean Strategy) for your organization. When it comes to execution, it's more about communication with Product, but also the broader organization and ensuring that Sales/CS have the resources they need to effectively talk to the roadmap and why some things were prioritized.

It depends what the meeting is. More generally what PM expects from PMMs include: 1. Intelligence on Customers - Trends, NPS data, insights from conversations or a Customer Advisory Board. In other words, what are you hearing from customers or trends in data are you seeing that should or will impact product or the strategy. 2. Intelligence on Competitors - It's important to be aware of what competitors are doing, but not blindly follow them. With that said, what products are they releasing and how is your differentiation changing. 3. Intelligence on the Market - For example, Apple recently announced "Mail Privacy Protection" as a part of their upcoming iOS15 release, which impacts a wide range of marketing technology companies. Learning about this, and working hand-in-hand with your Product team to come up with a Point of View on these market changes is good for your organization, and great for Sales/CS as well. There's a whole lot more than these 3 as well such as pricing and packaging, GTM strategy, analyst relations, and more - but the broader point is that if you can collect and synthesize this information for product it's a huge value add.

Great question! A lot of collaboration can come from shared KPIs, so it's great to align where possible. I'll divide this into two groups, on-going and launches. On-going KPIs: * These should largely be goals you can both impact over time. Things like adoption, revenue (particularly if there's a freemium, or PLG motion at your company), retention, NPS. * For example, with adoption there are product changes that can likely be made as well as dedicated marketing done to drive success. At Iterable, we were working to drive adoption of one of our AI products and did just this. The product team made it more discoverable and added to the UI, and in product marketing (with the help of customer marketing too) we drove case studies, and a bunch of use case content around this product. In addition, through some segmentation we found a cohort of customers who tried it once but hadn't gone back since so we dedicated content, and 1:1 conversations with CSMs and Product for these customers. Launch KPIs: * Similar to the above you can also drive adoption, revenue, and some of the same metrics here - and I think you should measure some of those on-going KPIs to see impact, but also look more granularly at KPIs that will drive success for this launch. For a freemium product, it may be more around user generation and upgrade metrics, whereas for a paid product it's likely more around lead generation and close rates, or even revenue from teh launch. * Personally, I like to look at the launch through the entire flywheel - from the very begining to what PR mentions we garnered - to the bottom on customers closed from the launch and (over time) what they're saying about the product/company. Setting these KPIs is a huge step in the right direction, but don't forget about communicating them as well. If they just sit in a dashboard, or Excel spreadsheet somewhere it won't be really helpful so make sure you operationalize it and build a dashboard review into team meetings, or send out an email update on a regular cadence.

Great question. Building relationships with Product is paramount to our success. I think this comes down to a few things... 1. Establish a personal relationship with your product stakeholders. Get to know them and what drives them (beyond just work). I had one PM I used to work with who is a musician and plays guitar when he's not working, and we always talked about music and connected much deeper than just the latest project. Beyond that, make sure you have regular 1:1s with your product stakeholders and connect on the projects they're working on, but also that you take an active part in the conversation to share what you're learning and hearing in the market. 2. Be adaptable. There have been countless examples in my career when a release has shifted dates. Be adaptable with product, and ensure you are supporting them and planning on timelines that make sense for you both. 3. Provide strategic guidance and value. An important piece of building a productive relationship with your Product counterparts is proving the value you provide. This can mean collecting win/loss data and sharing insights on what product should take away, competitive intelligence, or virtually anything else. As a product marketer you should have unique insight into how your product works, customers, competitors, and the broader market and with that lens you have valuable perspective to provide to product (and virtually everyone else inside the organization).