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

It depends what the meeting is. More generally what PM expects from PMMs include: 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.  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 ...Read More

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: 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 ...Read More

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 head ...Read More

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 ...Read More

Great question. Building relationships with Product is paramount to our success. I think this comes down to a few things... 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 stakehold ...Read More