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

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 you're in a communication lapse because it's been awhile since a new product was launched, think about how you can get more juice out of the old products, customer stories, new blog posts, support offerings, or other angles. There are lots of ways to communicate with customers and the market without relying on new product offerings. Stop thinking of product marketing as just launching new products, and start thinking about it as turning company strategy into revenue growth, and you will find many things to communicate. At the same time, put some pressure on your product team to deliver the goods. In person events are a great forcing function for this. Conferences, sales kickoffs, roadshows, keynotes, etc.

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 your closed won/lost prospects. When you can connect feature gaps or priorities to actual revenue won or lost in a systematic way, you have a much better chance of influencing the priorities.

* 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 great way to put your writing skills to work. * Be consistent: The most success I've had with surfacing insights has been through weekly emails, regular updates, check ins. Don't assume your priorities are going to be acted on after just one update. It takes regular updates and repetition to be heard. * Offer unique value: Our product team does a lot of customer meetings themselves. As a product marketer, one way to add value is to become an expert in a data set, or customer type, or marry your customer insights with a set of market data. Then, product will seek you out over time, and you will be able to offer them value beyond what they can get themselves from just talking to customers. 

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 terms of: * Under consideration: Backlog items that may or may not happen, but will be updated once a month or so * In development: Features actively being worked on by engineers, could take up to 6 months to be generally available * Launched: Things that are new in the past 6-12 months to show velocity

I just finished reading Obviously Awesome by April Dunford, and really enjoyed it. She’s a good Twitter follow too. I get most of my info from Twitter these days instead of blogs/bloggers, and find good insights from product management experts as well. I like Marty Cagan (good blog posts too), Melissa Perri, Gibson Biddle, John Cutler, and our own CPO at Optimizely Claire Vo.

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 generating revenue. You’ll be more successful if you can do a few things really well instead of trying to cover more surface area. One example of this might be with the product launches you mention: How many product launches do you need to run each year, and how much time could you free up by not launching everything? We made the switch a few years ago at Optimizely to only putting PMMs on major launches and letting a number of smaller feature updates go unannounced. This enabled us to focus on driving other strategic projects, like broader marketing campaigns that drive demand and revenue, new company messaging and positioning, and enablement initiatives independent of launches.

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 (something we offer for free here at Optimizely :) can help you by letting developers deploy new features into your product behind a switch, so that customers can't see the feature, and then marketing can turn it on for specific customers as you're ready. 

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. They will inevitably write a blog post or PRD or some kind of document that requires some critical feedback. Get good at editing and being a thought partner on external facing materials.