AMA: Quizlet Product Marketing Lead, Caroline Walthall on Influencing the Product Roadmap

If you can get it, the most important thing is executive buy-in for a team structure that honors marketing not just in the end phase, but also as a crucial thought partner to product and design. If you’ve had product launches that haven’t landed with the impact expected, those are great case studies to use to ask for that. After executive buy-in and team structure, pure relationship building can get you a long way. If you get to know your PMs and show your support in other ways they are more likely to have you top of mind when they are making important decisions. Another way to go about it is to take initiative on market research when you hear murmurings about a product direction. You can do competitive research and/or user research to bring tangible value to the questions at hand, which shows you can be a real collaborator worth having in early stage meetings. Lastly, if you can show your value in helping provide structured thinking in the form of slides, problem statements, and useful data, PMs will generally be really happy to have you in the room at earlier stages.

Every team has a different dynamic with this. In my experience, the PMMs who are highly empathetic and clued into team dynamics do best in this scenario. One of the fears many designers and PMs share is “design by committee”. It’s important to ask for a seat at the table but in a way that’s not forceful or prescriptive. Here are a few tactical ways to get in on that part of the process: * Volunteer to help with user testing of prototypes * Propose quick user research to gather user perceptions, expectations, and satisfaction so that you can better frame your marketing messaging. Bring those findings back to your designers to talk through any implications those insights might have. * Ask smart questions about how the design appeals to your target user(s) * Ask to help with copy (if you aren’t already doing so). Design and copy need to have a strong interplay and sometimes design can lead copy and other times copy should lead design. If there is time and space for it have a weekly or biweekly meeting with your key design lead. It might make sense for your PM to attend that meeting as well, or if they are really busy, there is still a ton of value in having 30 minutes a week set aside as a working session to gather each other’s feedback and clear through any blockers together.

Yes. One of product marketers’ jobs in the process is to continue sounding the alarm for user validation at each phase of the process, but that’s easier said than done. Pressure to ship product work quickly directly conflicts with this. The reality is that some product teams are more user-centric than others. If you have a product org that is not as user-centric in the early stages, it’s an opportunity for you to get more involved at that point. Develop better relationships with your PDE orgs and bring more value to the table in the form of distilled customer insights and future projections around target markets, market sizing, and expected GTM impact. It’s hard for PMs to ignore clear, concise, and helpful information that could help them make better decisions. In my career, the launches I’ve been “brought into” at a late stage have almost always been less impactful, and sometimes that’s okay. Not everything needs to be a big splash. Sometimes when these are pure “feature parity” launches that merely bring you up to industry standard or simply provide parity across platforms, you don’t need to be so involved in the product cycles. But if you're making bigger investments in the product than that, you should absolutely have a seat at the table. Try using data to make your case. If there was an example of a disappointing launch that you were brought into last minute, use that business failure as a reason to try something new in the process. It’s also helpful to define what types of launches you can offer the product org and to clearly articulate what their side of the bargain looks like to get those levels of service from you. For example, “tier 1 and tier 2 launches must involve product marketing in the discovery and/or validation stages of product development.” However, if you've tried those things and your product team is exploring new features or serious directional changes without your input, I’d recommend finding a better playground. While you can make significant headway in influencing individuals or certain leaders you work with, if you’re in an environment that doesn’t respect PMMs, it’s better for you to take your talent somewhere that does!

It’s almost a cliche, but a really well-made slide deck can go a long way. Gather insights from all parts of the organization (sales, user operations, customer success, marketing) and from users themselves and distill them into a well-made deck that outlines your segments and target markets and illustrates customer problems and perceptions. Also, it almost always shows up somewhere in the metrics. It’s important to have a good relationship with product analysts or data analysts. Experiment with the best ways to gather customer sentiment in micro-ways to help you make your case. Whether that’s something like NPS, CSAT, or even small in-line product satisfaction prompts, you may need to do the legwork to expose the disconnect between product and your customers. I think product and engineering can get out of touch with customers most when they are 1) chasing the quick wins in terms of immediate revenue impact 2) letting technology pipedreams lead things 100% rather than also validating that those ideas have clear and meaningful use cases to customers. To help combat both of those problems, in a speed-driven organization, you need to meet your product partners where they are. I recommend designing really lightweight user research that can be done quickly and cheaply. If you want to halt everything to do a perfectly robust customer study, you may need to change your approach. Offer to help direct lightweight research throughout the product development cycle and set expectations around how quickly you can turn it around. A lot of times you can parallel path customer research and product development if timelines are tight. You just have to start somewhere and you can prove the impact over time.

This may be bold, but I like to help facilitate the roadmap development process when PMs are okay with it. Not all PMs will jive with this, but if you can develop a strength as being a good facilitator, that can get you a long way. The key is to provide open frameworks to support discussion. I think of myself as a “right hand woman” to my PMs and I can assert subtle influence by priming slide decks, agendas or google docs with categories, visual organization patterns, and smart open questions that help show I’m someone who you want to “bat ideas around with.” I see that facilitation as a way to shape the team vision and coordinate team members cross-functionally. This is often an area owned by PMs, but in my experience there is usually more than enough work to go around. My best PM-PMM relationships have been those that aren’t overly precious about who can pitch in on roadmap planning. Sometimes you don't have that luxury. In that case, you just have to make sure that you are consulted before the roadmap is solidified for a given quarter since it has major downstream implications for your workload. 

So, I never use all these types of research, but here's a great menu of research phases that I keep at the top of my Research Plan Template. Usually at most I'd pick one of these per phase, that is most important and will produce the most actionable insights. Phase 1 - Early stage * Market understanding * Market segmentation and validation * Customer journey work Phase 2 - Early stage **This stage is so crucial if you don't already have data to support the direction pre-design phase** * Problem discovery * Problem validation Phase 3 - Mid stage * Defining or testing new product concepts * Solidifying pricing * Prioritizing features and releases * Investigating the best marketing options Phase 4 - Launch stage * Creating or testing messaging * Qualitative impressions of marketing programs Phase 5 - Late stage * Analyzing business success * Measuring customer satisfaction * Measuring brand equity

We have a product pod structure at Quizlet. Each product pod has 1-2 very clear business goals and usually owns certain product lines or domain areas. Every pod has a PM, a PMM, a designer, a product analyst, a product support specialist, an engineering manager, and an engineering team. This structure allows teams to determine the best working cadences and divisions of labor that work for them. I've found it to be a very liberating structure because it gives the teams a lot of autonomy over decision making and it promotes true cross-functional collaboration. Each PM I've worked with has been different. The pod structure has given us the space we need to negotiate our divisions of labor in the ways that make the most sense for us as individuals and to help us meet the team's business goals.

Yes! I can relate! Feature-level messages are so limited on the marketing side. Part of your job as PMM is help recommend the best way to 1) connect features benefits, 2) roll benefits into value props, and 3) provide positioning statements for your target markets. PMMs can take the lead on drafting this work but it's really beneficial to include your PM and other key stakeholders in the process to get their buy in. Once you settle on the place you want to go with regard to value prop, consider testing the messaging and putting it in front of customers. As you validate the strength of leading with higher level benefits and storylines, you can bring that as a key filter for product planning. Ask, "does this new feature help us shore up our core value proposition?" If not, "how does it tie into our marketing platform? Is it truly additive or does it complicate things unneccessarily?"

Other than the things already mentioned throughout my answers (relationship building, offering to facilitate planning sessions, etc.), I would also try to show them your own marketing calendar/roadmap. Share what you think your goals will be and ask to compare it to the rough product roadmap. Start by asking questions and sparking discussion. As you gain rapport and trust with your product teammates, they'll be more likely to bring you in at early stages, knowing that you are there to be a partner rather than an antagonist.

I would bake in as much buffer time as you can in your marketing timelines. If they have a track record of not shipping on time, I'd start assuming that. If your product partners get upset about that, explain the marketing dependencies that you can't deliver results when timelines are always in flux. This is super frustrating and I feel your pain. Perhaps you can also find other leaders who sympathize and don't want resources to go to waste to help you make your case and begin to shift the culture and expectations around timelines.

Before prioritizing product initiatives, it's important to help your product team get a handle on the market and estimate the market opportunity. I usually work with an analyst to do competitive and market research that are inputs into a bottoms up revenue model. These early models contain a ton of assumptions, but it at least helps start a conversation around expected impact. You can also follow up on qualitative insights you've gathered with bigger surveys to validate the "market sizing" of the problems and opportunities you've identified. Another top-down way to go about this is to look at the total market size and think through how these features might enable you to take a bigger slice of the total market. Do plenty of due diligence here in your competitive research and try to also project what key competitors' strategies might be to help justify your position.

It depends what the real downstream problem is here: - Does it hold up your launch campaigns? - Does it create a poor or unconsistent customer experience which damages brand credibility? - Do minor updates and overflow and bugs dominate instead of meaningful work that pushes the product forward? Perfect planning doesn't exist, but if it's consistently off, I'd try to set more interim milestones with your product, design, and engineering teams to ensure work is on track and hasn't had any major changes in scope. It's best to outline these check in dates at the kickoff of project and then set 15-30 minute calendar invites to stay in the loop. If launches are messy and create a poor customer experience, I'd enlist the help of specialists on your support team to help make a strong case in your project post-mortem for more standardized checks before launch. If scope creep and bugs bulldoze the roadmap, I'd work on getting the team culture to be more results driven and set more shared short tem goals. Quarterly OKRs can be great for this.

Set super clear research goals whenever you talk to customers or conduct a research study. As part of those goals, explain what the physical output of the research will be and articulate next actions the team should be able to take. Examples might be something like "create a customer journey map that highlights key gaps that we aren't serving well today" or "stack rank potential core value propositions based on what resonates most with customers." For the "fuzzier" insights about your audience such as personas, you have to do more work to make these relevant and actionable. I've seen product marketers or researchers create personas before that just don't "stick" or gain widespread adoption throughout the org. Part of that is because personas aren't always as validated as they should be. As much as you can, for these types of insights, try to back up your qualitative insights with behavioral data analytics to help prove it's more than just "marketing fluff." The best way is to really loop in your product and design org along the way and ask for feedback often. In your final synthesis deck for any research you conduct, try to propose potential "next actions" or "fast follow tests" that help put your more informed hypotheses to the test in the wild.

For a full-scale launch, yes, I do a pre-mortem about a month ahead of time so there is time to act on any key risk-mitigation activities before launch date. I like to do an async brainstorm in a google sheet with two tabs. 1. 🤕 Everything failed miserably... 2. 🤩Everything was beyond our dreams! The prompt for tab 1 Imagine we launched product X... We thought we did everything we could, but the product is not taking off like we hoped. * What did we do that we SHOULDN'T have done or what did we NOT do to set ourselves up for success? * What did we get wrong? The prompt for tab 2 Imagine we launched product X... Everything surpassed our wildest expectations and users love it. * What did we do right to end up here? I ask *everyone on the team* in all functions to contribute at least 2-5 rows to the brain trust. I ask them to select a preset category from a dropdown, write a brief description of what the item is, and add their name in an "author" column. Then we have a meeting to go through and prioritize potential issues or risk mitigators. As we prioritize we assign owners to make sure those safety measures are put in place. For lighter launches, we may host a kickoff meeting to ensure alignment as we head into public announcements, but I don't tend to do a full pre-mortem.