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

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're solving for and mapped those needs to product features and potential benefits. These are all discoverable through market research, customer interviews, UX research where you have customers click through wireframes, and competitive intel. And all of this can and should happen before build. Imagine not knowing these above things before you code your beta product, only to discover during the pilot that your R&D teams built the wrong thing entirely. What a costly waste of resources! What, then is the goal of a beta? In my experience, a beta can be useful for the following things: 1. Gather customer success stories, proof points, and case studies you can leverage in your global GTM moment or marketing launch (messaging, positioning, etc.) 2. Ensure your product performs as expected in the wild, according to customer-centric exit or success criteria. For example, in the case of LinkedIn Ads, where I work, for our betas we set goals for whether the beta product helps customers achieve certain targets for Cost per Marketing Qualified Lead, revenue or opportunity pipeline generated, attributable brand lift, etc. If we don't hit these targets, we might need to hold back the launch to improve the MVP. 3. Test different positioning statements with customers who've used your product and can vouch for its benefits or value props. This kind of goes with #1. 4. Learn more about who your target customer really is: their jobs to be done, their use cases for your product, their verticals or sales tiers, etc. Which ICP's demonstrate the highest CSAT? 5. Identify some follow-on features to build post-launch. Or, worst case scenario, you discover in the that your prototype is missing 1 must-have feature, and now your Eng team can hopefully fast-track its development before launch. 6. Uncover key questions your sales team will have for a global training. Sales reps whose accounts participate in the beta can clue you into what training needs they'll have and key info they'll need to sell effectively. Your beta reps can also become internal sales champions for your product! As for whether your should financially incentivize customers to join your beta, I'd say tread carefully. Sometimes it makes sense to give your customers a value-add for participating to help you collect more data in a compressed testing timeframe. But if you make your product entirely free to use during the beta because you fear it's not good enough to win customer budgets, you might be masking or compensating for inherent weaknesses that you won't even see till it's too late (i.e.: during the main product launch). Financial incentives, if too generous, can also obscure who your target customer really is or complicate your ability to price correctly in GA (general availability). So when it comes to incentives, ask yourself this before proceeding: Why I might I need to offer a financial incentive to my customers in the first place; what do I gain from this; what are the risks (and how do I mitigate them); and what is the minimum level of incentivize necessary to achieve my beta goals?

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? * Can you deliver compelling insights from, say, customer advisory boards, to shed new light on your customers’ pain points, needs, and “jobs to be done” when using your products? Can you develop recommendations for what PM should build or even de-prioritize (in the spirit of helping PM better focus their scarce time and resources) based on these customer insights? * Can you craft a detailed competitive analysis, showing where PM should invest to leap-frog the competition?

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 report incorporates insights collected during customer councils or major industry news and in-house market research. But week to week our PMM’s sit in with their product counterparts and deliver recommendations about specific feature ideas or product capabilities for something that’s being built and tested right now. The PMM in this case usually derives their insights from recent beta-customer feedback gathered via survey or calls, sales rep feedback about a new product we hear through our official sales tiger teams, etc

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-of-mind questions, and hear customers discuss their goals, needs, challenges and ideas in their own words. Another way to partner with PM on Market Research is to invite Product to review or help shape your research brief. Let's say you're doing a large focus group or survey to understand customer needs or purchase habits. Start with a brief that outlines the objectives and structure of the research initiative. Invite PM to contribute their feedback to the brief. Once you move from the brief to questionnaire, or from the brief to writing an interview guide, invite PM to contribute or give feedback on that asset as well. Finally, ensure PM decision-makers are an audience for your final research "readout" where you share your findings and, MOST IMPORTANTLY, your product roadmap recommendations. The readout is usually written but I find it's best to schedule a live Q&A or "jam" where PMM, Product, etc can all go over the doc together and discuss its findings and implications in person (or over Teams/Zoom).

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 thoroughly documented. I want to get these docs in PM's hands before they start drafting their funding proposals for the half, so my team's ideas are more likely to be used as sources of truth in funding decision-making. Lastly, I need my team to attend the live planning meetings where PM, Engineering, Design, and Strategy present their fundings plans and decide what's finally above or below the cutline.

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 or affirming their interest in buying/trialing a product idea you have? Do these customers represent a valuable segment we want to protect or expand into? (Pro tip: Whenever possible, get your PM's in front of customers directly so they're hearing their feedback firsthand; it's more persuasive that way.) * What is the competition doing in this space? How would your product idea or recommendation position us more competitively vs our peers? * What are your Product team's priorities, principles, or strategic pillars? Can you show how your idea directly maps to the things your PM team already cares about the most? * Do you have any partners in Strategy, Finance or Business Operations who can do a rough market sizing or TAM analysis of your top product ideas? This can add analytical heft to your recommendations. Quant: * Have you conducted market research or customer surveys that reflect high demand for your product or feature idea, or a profound customer need/pain point that your idea addresses? * Does your company already conduct regular customer "pulse" surveys (NPS, C-SAT, etc.)? If so, you might already have a lot of readymade customer verbatims that reflect a need or demand for your product/feature idea. * Do you ever survey your sales org? What are the top feature requests from reps? How do they feel about your idea's potential to unlock incremental budgets? Relationship angle: * Building personal trust and kinship with your PM partners makes them more likely to embrace PMM's ideas. Never underestimate spending face-to-face time with your PM counterparts for coffee, lunch, happy hour, etc! Experience angle: * Do you have unique industry or functional wisdom from a prior job/role that you can draw from when fashioning your argument? Draw from your anecdotal outside experiences to position yourself as a trusted domain expert to "fill in the gaps" in PM's knowledge of the market or customer.