AMA: Miro Group Product Marketing Manager- Enterprise, Mandy Schafer on Influencing the Product Roadmap

As the PMM, you often may know more about the product that the product may know. This is due to the nature of PMM having a birds eye view across the entire company with how your features fit in with the rest of the solutions. As the eyes and ear on the market, you are also know your competitors, the market landscape, and what your customers are expecting. All of this knowledge is key to help with the early stages of product developement. A lot of times, product spends so much time focusing on th ...Read More

This is a really important topic, and for me, what's worked well is setting up what I call the product maturity model. Sometimes, the product team just gets too much into the weeds of the product, and the day to day problems our users are facing. Its important for teams to step back and look at what are we really trying to acheive with our product, what should the product look like in 5 years, what is the "perfect" scenario. I always joke, how do we build a product to the point that we don't hav ...Read More

I work closely with analytic and strategy experts at our company to perform the market research required. At the end of the day, I'm a PMM, not a trained data scientist, nor a researchers, our jobs as PMMs is to help shape the the research, to ensure we ask the right questions, and leverage the results to help find the answers needed to shape the roadmap. For example, I've done a pricing and packaging project in the past around which new products we should build next, how to package them, and wh ...Read More

Sharing roadmap is essential for any tech company, and I'm a firm believer of sharing more information with customers brings more trust, and better relationships. Currently at Miro, we share our roadmap in a monthly webinar that we give to our existing customers. This is a closed webinar and invitation only so we are more free to discuss what's coming without worrying about affecting revrec. We also have a more polished customer facing roadmap, with things on it that we are more certain are comi ...Read More

In my experience, prioritization for what's being requested in the roadmap can be done in the following ways: 1) Identifying customer need/ask: Sometimes this is the easiest way to determine which products should be built next. However, this can lead to misalignment with your overall product strategy.  2) Cost analysis - what's the ROI on this feature, how long will it take, how quickly can this start bringing in customers, or expand existing ones. How much does it cost IT. 3) First to market - ...Read More

Recently, the way my PMM teams have been structured has been Inbound (or Core, Stream, etc) and Outbound (GTM). This type of team structure divides up PMM teams with those that  1) Work closely with GTM - sales plays, customer advisory boards, ABM camapign and 2) Those that work closely with Product, Engineering and UX design - Product roadmap, launch preperation, sales enablement, demos, etc.  I find this to be the most ideal when being asked to influence product roadmap is a core part of your ...Read More

It's definitely should never be about just one thing - the customer wants it, our competitor has it, etc. This is a mistake that's often made when product teams build without including PMM, or other teams. There is that requirement to have multiple levels of evidence before a decision is made, however one I think is most overlooked is - ROI, mainly because it takes so much time and effort. I started my career as a financial analyst, and spent my days doing line by line forecasting of our product ...Read More