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 ...Read More

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 s ...Read More

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 ne ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 goa ...Read More