AMA: Qualia VP of Marketing, Charlene Wang on Influencing the Product Roadmap

The product team ultimately wants to be successful and launch products that will help the company achieve better outcomes. Most teams are happy to give you a seat at the table if you can bring valuable insights that they didn't previously have. Great Product Marketers often dive deep into the market, competitors, buyer personas, buying process, analyst community, voice of the customer, etc. The product team generally won't have the capacity or direct exposure to all of these areas to have a very ...Read More

Most disagreements come from people having different sets of assumptions or information. I've found that if you lay out the reasons why you believe the product roadmap should be a particular way and make it easy to prove or disprove your hypotheses, it's easier to make better decisions. For example, in one of my prior product launches, our sales team strongly disliked our mobile app interface and disagreed with the product team on whether the product was ready for a broader launch. Rather than a ...Read More

While monetization is a clear way to measure a product launch, it's not the only success metric. There are many other ways to measure a launch that are relevant to specific products or features. Broadly speaking, new products could also impact market awareness, pipeline creation, win rates, adoption, and upsell / renewal. Some features/products were specifically created to unlock new markets or future capabilities. Therefore, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to measuring the success of a l ...Read More

A Product Marketer can influence the product roadmap by bringing valuable insights to the table and building a trusted relationship with the product team. In terms of insights, great Product Marketers are experts on the market, buying process, and psychology of the buyer. Product Marketers can contribute to product decisions by highlighting relevant findings from Voice of the Customer programs, competitive analysis, sales analysis (e.g. win / loss programs), and market research. Product Marketer ...Read More

The closer you are to the product launch, the more tactical the PMM has to be in influencing the roadmap. Products that are coming out in a quarter are close to being built (if not already built) and have very little room for adjustment. If Product Marketers are only being brought in at this stage, the PMM's primary way to influence the roadmap is to work with Product to define launch success metrics and provide feedback post-launch on what did or did not work. This will help with future iterati ...Read More