AMA: Lyft Former Group Product Marketing Manager, Sarah Khogyani on Influencing the Product Roadmap

Product Marketing OKRs are really important to keeping teams focused on driving the most impact for the company. At a Product Marketing OKR level, it often depends on what the company goals are for that particular time period. If the company is going after a new market or focusing on customer retention, that's going to influence what a PMM's KR will be. Second, I think it's importnt to set a KR that you have direct influence or impact on. Sometimes, PMMs at Lyft share KRs with PMs, but ideally, ...Read More

I view the role of PMM as a strategic partners to product management, and it's important to have this frame of mine when approaching product teams with learnings. Product Marketers are the voice and champion of the customer throughout the product development process. The best way I've found to do this throughout my career is owning customer and market insights. I've done this in a few different ways: Build a sales or customer feedback channel: Whether you purchase a feedback tool or create your ...Read More

First, I listen. It's important to understand in depth why these needs/deliverables are being asked of Product Marketing. What is the underlying problem? How can Product Marketing solve this?  Then, I assess company goals and revenue by product. The Product Marketing function is meant to support the company goals and I find that using this as a guidepost for prioritization is key. Assessing revenue by product helps as another factor in prioritization, but isn't the only factor as some companies ...Read More

Communicating customer and market learnings to product teams is something that happens throughout the product development lifecycle. In terms of medium/format, it really depends on your team's work style. I suggest adapting to the product team's style, so if they prefer docs and silent reading, then that is probably going to be the most effective way to communicate the information to this audience. I think it's important to assume that the product team wants to hear learnings from PMM, whether i ...Read More

As a strategic partner on the product team, I believe PMMs should be involved throughout the product development lifecycle.  For larger initiatives at Lyft, PMMs create 'Market Requirement Documents' or MRDs that are meant to serve as input to the PRD. This helps gain alignment on market insights, opportunity, key use-cases, audiences, and value prop before the PM starts work on the project.  This helps provide product teams with market and customer insights to inform product development, result ...Read More

My advice would be to build this into your regular team processes. If your company has an OKR setting process, this would be the right time to cross-functionally align with product partners on shared KRs or KPIs at a high level. Beyond that, I would suggest gaining this alignment at the PRD and GTM plan stages of the product lifecycle. In an ideal world, PMs, PMMs and Tech Leads collaborate on launch objectives (financial, product, marketing, risk), which make up the shared launch KPIs. Data Sci ...Read More