AMA: LinkedIn Director of Product Marketing, Andrew Kaplan on Influencing the Product Roadmap

Convincing your PM partners to accept and fund your product or feature ideas is certainly never easy. The best approach will vary from one company to the next. That said, I've found that a combination of qual and quant works best -- plus some good old-fashioned persuasion techniques and relationship building. Qual: What are our customers telling us in our advisory boards, panels or focus groups? Are they reflecting a need/pain point that your product idea solves for? Are they directly asking for ...Read More

What our PM’s expect from PMM is to represent the voice of the customer. This might take the form of articulating customer sentiment about a new-product idea, feedback about an existing product, or overarching customer needs around a larger “job to be done” like building their brand or generating quality leads for their business. Our team delivers a “market insight report” to PM roughly once per half that is designed to shape major funding decisions on a 12-month horizon or longer; usually, this ...Read More

A good PM will look to PMM for their deep knowledge and expertise about the customer and the market. In my experience, the best way to improve relationships with PM is to show them that you possess unique insights that they don’t, which can help them build more successful products. Can you use industry or market research to show PM what they should be building 1, 2, 3 years from now? Where is the market headed? What are the mega-trends that will reshape the business and how should PM respond? Ca ...Read More

One of my single most important learnings is that as a PMM you need to know when and how PM makes funding decisions. For example, at LinkedIn, our Product team does semi-annual planning, and funding decisions for the half are made roughly 1 month prior to the start of the next half. As a PMM, this means I need to gather my data-driven customer learnings and product roadmap recommendations at least a couple months prior to funding decisions. I need to ensure our findings and recs are simply but t ...Read More

At LinkedIn, PMM leads regular Customer Advisory Boards of about 10-15 customers. Each meeting of the CAB is designed to gather feedback across our key segments. We usually do these in person once or twice a quarter. Every CAB has a theme that we know is highly relevant for our customers as well as our Product team's roadmap and our business strategy overall. We invite Product Mgrs to every one of these sessions so they can help drive the conversation with customers, ask our customers some top-o ...Read More

I love this question! Let me start with a mistake some Product and PMM teams make when it comes to betas of new products: They assume the beta is where customers tell you what you should build; where you learn what kind of product customers want. The truth is, before your R&D teams code a prototype for a beta, PM and PMM should have mostly figured out which essential capabilities should go into your new product to make it a win. You should have researched the customer need or pain point you' ...Read More