AMA: Sendbird Former Head of Marketing, Jack Wei on Influencing the Product Roadmap

Decision-making frameworks and corporate values (that hopefully include something about teamwork :) ) are needed at the team level to minimize subjectivity at the individual level. For one, roadmap decisions should never be made by 1 person. Yes, the most senior person in PM makes the final call, or the CEO does at a smaller company, when decision can't be reached by committee. But typically roadmap decisions are made based on inputs from multiple stakeholders internal and external. If these checks and balance processes aren't in place in your organization, and you're truly dealing with a strong-willed individual/solo PM, try to bring in a 3rd party to diffuse or act as a tiebreaker. I always say that an external customer's feedback is not only a gift but irrefutable, especially when you're at a smaller company that needs/wants to make every single large customer happy.

Leadership sets the tone. It would be less impactful (and therefore discouraging) for an IC PMM to try and influence the product roadmap independently without visibility or buy-in from the Head of PMM and PM. As qualitative as this answer might be, it's all about expectation management followed by stakeholder alignment moreso than the research quality itself. The PM team, starting at the top with Head of PM, needs to acknowledge and address with all PMs that research by PMM becomes one of the critical components that feed into roadmap decision making. Without this, the PMM's work will not get consumed. Now, when it comes to effective methods to come up with influential research: Nothing trumps customer feedback. Who is your ICP, and can you frame and collect relevant input from a customer that fits ICP criteria? That becomes research the PM team cannot ignore. Beyond the primary source of customer feedback, other secondary sources include: * Market / category data * Analyst relations * Partners * Internal stakeholder

Don't bother. Run the other way. Pardon my language but there's no influencing in this situation, it's just a pissing contest. Why work somewhere that's optimizing for activity vs. outcomes? A big picture vision (can be at the corporate or company level, not product) is absolutely necessary to steer direction. If it hasn't been established, then step 1 is crystal clear. Do step 1 before anything else.

In a product-led company, there is likely a product analytics tool in place to measure user behavior, conversion paths, etc. In other words, everyone is sitting on a plethora of data that can be analyzed. The question is how to best divide and conquer -- who is assessing what, for which objective. PMM and PM can divide and conquer in a product-led business using the following approaches, by: 1. KPI they're responsible for. PM success is often measured by product/feature/function adoption, PMM by funnel and/or paid conversion into MRR/ARR. 2. User types. PM learns about users and what drives stickiness, PMM learns about buyer personas (if different from users) and what drives revenue. I don't have a good answer about who "leads" this initiative. I get crotchety about ownership and DRI questions because I genuinely believe if someone doesn't work with an ownership mentality then they probably shouldn't be there to begin with. People who take initiative and work well with others don't care who owns what. They just get things done with humility, stay hungry to learn, and move forward. In summary, both PMM and PM can own this, whoever has the most bandwidth.

The cadence of formal product roadmap reviews vary by company and PM team. Of course the more mature the organization, the more standardized the cadence and process are. For companies serving the Enterprise, I've seen roadmap assessment with GTM teams range quarterly to semiannually. * Mediocre product teams take spotty customer input and pretend to negotiate the product roadmap with GTM teams * Good product teams do the above plus proactively review sales requests with a decision-making framework * Great product teams do the above plus look to Product Marketing (or have someone within PM) for market research and competitive intel to plan the roadmap further out Ultimately, the "negotiation" is no longer a negotiation when there's an agreed upon prioritization framework that moves departments away from debating opinions and towards ranking based on objectively-measured input: 1. Customer and sales requests (short-term) 2. Market data (long-term) 3. Strengthening existing differentiators (protecting moats) And if your team isn't doing any of the above, start there. Better late than never.