AMA: Lattice Head of Product Marketing, Julian Clarke on Influencing the Product Roadmap

Most of the tools we use in product marketing are focused on collecting and analyzing the insights (customer feedback or otherwise) we need to use to define our strategy and inform our cross-functional teams, but not actually relaying it to Product Management. So this part of the process for us ends up being a lot of slideware, emails, Slack messages or one-on-one meetings (shameless plug here for my company, Lattice, which helps me manage and track all of my one-on-one conversation agendas with my peers in product management and across the organization – it rocks for building these relationships).

It’s a useful exercise to determine first what the company’s most important objectives are rather than any one team’s. PMM, being as cross-functional as it is, acts as sort of a layer of utility business athletes within the organization, pushing for whatever the most important outcomes are that the business needs to achieve in that specific period of time. Once you clearly understand what the company’s goals are, you can push for alignment between these three groups and prioritize which voice needs to be heard the most at that moment. You can also usually find common ground between these team – more often than not there is a solution that satisfies each team’s needs while addressing the company’s goals at the same time. So ultimately, it comes back to setting a strategy, defining objectives, and aligning your stakeholder teams around those.

When we’re assisting Product in determining the roadmap, we’re doing all sorts of research to inform the recommendations we make – from both an outside-in and an inside-out perspective. Some useful examples for us have been… Outside-in: competitive research (recent product launches, press, content, where they’re hiring, what their leadership is talking about publicly), analyst relations (inquiries, formal reports, reading research), customer research ( first-party interviews, surveys answering specific questions, or listening continuously to real sales and customer success conversations, h/t to Gong), market research (what other companies are our customers/prospects engaging with and buying from? How might we tap into that?) Inside-out: what do our sales reps think about how they can win more? What do our customer success managers feel is the toughest part of renewing a customer? What does our support team get the most inquiries or issues about? How much do these things cost the business? Synthesizing these inputs can give you a good idea about what opportunities are out there for the business to tackle, at which point you can determine the most advantageous output approach. Generally speaking, Build is a good default with an effective and fast R&D organization and is usually the right choice when seamlessness of the experience matters to users or when taking a differentiated approach to a product space. Buy makes sense when speed to market is the top priority and building would get you to market too slowly or when the product is far enough separated from your core offering that the experience doesn’t need to be perfectly seamless. Partner makes sense when your customer gets the majority of the value from a combined offering and owning the full experience is not strategically important to your company or product.

In my experience this usually breaks down due to underinvested relationship-building or lack of alignment of objectives across teams. If you try to convince a PM or any cross-functional stakeholder of a point with research you conducted – as quality or strategic or correct as it may be – without first establishing a foundation of credibility and trust, or understanding what that person and their team is trying to accomplish and positioning it around how this research helps them achieve those goals, then it will likely fall flat. So I guess the tip here is to use your PMM skills to understand your audience’s motivations and identify the action you want them to take. Work backwards from where you want them to be and determine what needs to be true for them to arrive at that conclusion. Position your research around their interests or selfish benefit, and your work can drive broad impact across the business.

This can totally vary team to team, company to company, product to product. Like you said, you want to do all of this early, the question just becomes how early and what kind of value PMM can drive the most for that particular product or roadmap. Sometimes product marketing should be the first team to touch a new product bet. When there’s an adjacent space or market that you’re eager to break into but don’t have clarity or conviction about the problem space or product needed to succeed, product marketing can do the upstream research about the market, competitive dynamics, buyer criteria, decision process, and more to pick the right wedge for your investment, giving the product team a clear idea of what’s different or uniquely valuable enough to win over buyers. Other times, when there’s a stronger foundation of knowledge in the space or when the product is a known entity, product marketing’s role becomes more important in the downstream phase of that product launch or roadmapping process – crafting the position you want to occupy, the differentiated narrative you can amplify to the world, and equipping your customer-facing teams to win. Either way, getting involved early means being proactive around establishing credibility and competence in GTM strategy, being the expert on the market, your customers, your product, and your competition.