AMA: Microsoft Director of Product Marketing, Microsoft 365 Security, Raman Kalyan on Influencing the Product Roadmap

We have different types of product marketing teams: 1. Core product marketing - responsibile for working closely with engineering on influencing the product roadmap and developing the value proposition with associated assets to drive awarness, consideration and adoption of our solutions 2. GTM - responsible for training our field and partners to ensure they understand the value proposition and can clearly articulate it to drive consideration and adoption of our solutions 3. Events - responsible for all first party and third party events where we will be present 

We establish multiple listening channels ranging from our field to direct customer conversations to engagements with analysts. The insights we receive from these channels allow us to then identify the general areas of opportunity which we then partner with engineering on researching further through qualitative and quantitative research. This allows us to priortize the highest areas of opportunity which get added to the product roadmap.

Focus on developing strong relationships with engineering and bringing a point of view to the table that is based upon data and insights that you gather from both first party and second party research, customer/partner/sales conversations and analyst engagements. You should be the voice of the customer and bring in the prespective of the market. 

We have established a process whereby we partner closely with engineering to condut both qualitative and quantiative market research on areas where we believe there may be an opportunity for growth/or closure of gaps. Partnering closely allows us to leverage the results to both influnce the roadmap as well as our outbound marketing messaging. 

A successful product roadmap is one that is developed in partnership between engineering and product marketing. This allows you to both identify the trends/opportunities that will help you to grow your business and an understanding of how to speak to the value once it is delivered. Product marketing should bring to the table customer insights, market research, analyst insights, competitive landscape and business model implications to ensure that what gets built will allow you to maximize the opportunities identified.

We focus on specfic moments where we make product annoucements to maximize our PR/AR/customer awareness reach. We share the timelines with the product teams typically 6 months in advance and then work closely with them to both ensure we are staying on track as well as know how to effectively market the value that we are delivering. Since we don't typically do off cycle announcements this allows us to ensure that the items committed to on the product roadmap are delivered in time for our moments.