AMA: Optimizely Former Senior Director, Product Marketing, Robin Pam on Influencing the Product Roadmap

Become an expert in a data set that's close to revenue. Knowing as much as you can about how market interest turns into revenue (i.e. your entire marketing & sales funnel) is the easiest way to make yourself indispensible to both product and company strategy.  When you know more than anyone else in the company about how leads turn into pipeline turn into closed business for your product line or area of ownership, product will start to seek you out for your insights.  Also, be a good editor. ...Read More

We have a few processes for this at Optimizely. First, the sales team provides feedback directly, primarily through our sales engineering team who document feature requests and gaps in sales cycles within a Salesforce workflow that connects to Jira tickets. PMM isn’t too involved in this (we don’t have to be involved in everything! Hard lesson to learn). Second, win/loss analysis is a powerful tool, whether you conduct it at a point in time, on a regular basis, with your reps internally or with ...Read More

Your product team is not unique! I've never heard of a product team that sticks to deadlines exactly. The best lesson I've learned on how to mitigate this in enterprise software is that you can launch a product many times.  There are different ways to do this: pre-announce at your conference with a preview/waiting list, beta launch, general availability launch, internal re-launch with your sales team with new training and collateral, momentum launch with PR on usage and metrics...it goes on. If ...Read More

In enterprise software, you can usually let the product and engineering team push new features when they are ready, as long as sales training is coming soon. Adoption of new features tends to be slower in enterprise software, particularly if using those new features depends on getting through a sales cycle. So, this is another area where it's ok to let go of a little control, and focus on the things you can control as a product marketer.  The other thing to note here is that feature flags (somet ...Read More

Our amazing product team maintains a public facing product roadmap. And by “public facing”, we mean a slide deck that is presented to customers and prospects only in 1:1 meetings by a salesperson or customer success manager. It gets a major overhaul once a year, and small updates 1-3x/quarter based on new information. The key is to set the expectation that priorities will likely change more than 3 months out, and stay relatively high level in the categories. They currently present the roadmap in ...Read More

Be objective: Use customers' exact words and quotes as much as possible. Be the notetaker, the objective observer, and people will start to trust your observations. Be concise: Once you've listened, sat in on meetings, taken good notes, get good at synthesizing them into short summaries. Most people don't read long emails or sit through long meetings, so it's important to be brief. I got into product marketing with a liberal arts background, and synthesizing customer research and insights is a g ...Read More

Focus on what your team can deliver on with your current staffing, and be very clear about what’s not possible to cover. It may be doing your team a favor to have these other teams taking some responsibility, since it frees you to focus. Now the challenge is to define the areas you want to have an impact, so that you can ultimately make the case for stronger leadership and more resources. To make that case, you need to drive results, and show the strategic importance of product marketing to gene ...Read More