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Katherine Kelly

AMA: Slack Former VP of Product & Solutions Marketing, Katherine Kelly on Influencing the Product Roadmap

December 7, 2021 @ 9:00AM PT

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  1. How do you develop a voice of customer (VOC) program when there is only an ad-hoc feedback process in place?

    Katherine Kelly
    Katherine Kelly

    Instructure Head of Product Marketing | Formerly ExactTarget (Salesforce Marketing Cloud), Zendesk, Slack, Salesforce • 4y

    VOC is so powerful and it's a great place for PMM to help build that connection between product and GTM. If there's already an ad-hoc process in place, essentially what you're looking to do is add guardrails and formalize a process. Here's three things I'd focus on developing: What information will you collect (deal/opp size, use case, industry, competitor, etc) and where will it live (this can be as simple as a google sheet to start, don't let a tech decision stand in your way) A regular forum ...Read More

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  2. How do we get our product management team to be more customer focused than timeline focused?

    Katherine Kelly
    Katherine Kelly

    Instructure Head of Product Marketing | Formerly ExactTarget (Salesforce Marketing Cloud), Zendesk, Slack, Salesforce • 4y

    This feels like an executive level misalignment of goals. I don't know the specifics in your company but if product management / product leadership is being measured by how well they hit their timelines, then that will trickle down to their teams and be what those teams focus on. This is probably feedback you should share when crafting next year's goals and metrics.

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  3. Have you ever been part of a launch where the eng/product team brought in product marketers or customers after work has kicked off (but before launch) and influenced feature development? What was that like?

    Sometimes when product kicks off work they have assumptions about how people think about certain features. Marketing, support, and even customers can come to the table with real stories that may invalidate the assumptions product had early on in the feature dev process.

    Katherine Kelly
    Katherine Kelly

    Instructure Head of Product Marketing | Formerly ExactTarget (Salesforce Marketing Cloud), Zendesk, Slack, Salesforce • 4y

    I'm potentially not understanding this question - all of the companies I've worked at beta test features and products prior to launch, so product always explicitly solicits this type of feedback prior to a launch. In fact it's a great place for product marketing to get feedback and customer stories that can help with launch positioning, messaging and content as well!

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  4. How do you advocate for adding a new feature to the roadmap when it's something competitors have launched and customers are asking for, but internally it isn't seen as a priority?

    Katherine Kelly
    Katherine Kelly

    Instructure Head of Product Marketing | Formerly ExactTarget (Salesforce Marketing Cloud), Zendesk, Slack, Salesforce • 4y

    A critical piece of information is missing from this question: why isn't it seen as a priority internally? There are several valid reasons not to launch something even if your competitor has it and customers want it - the main one that comes to mind is that it takes you too far out of your core audience and core use case which would then require a significant investment not only in product to maintain that new line, but also in GTM to spin up a motion to build that new funnel. It could be a simp ...Read More

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  5. What type of marketing activities should be considered in parallel while products are in development?

    Katherine Kelly
    Katherine Kelly

    Instructure Head of Product Marketing | Formerly ExactTarget (Salesforce Marketing Cloud), Zendesk, Slack, Salesforce • 4y

    While products are in development the best thing to focus on to get a jump on your GTM is defining the target audience. The specific features may change and that may impact your specific messaging and content etc, but the overall use case should be fairly stable if it's in development so you can work on who you're going to go after and what you want them to do (adopt, upgrade, buy, etc) and then start making links to any existing GTM plays, is this product going to be part of an existing play or ...Read More

    460 Views
    1 request

  6. How do you change the culture of your company so that product marketers have more of a voice to influence the product roadmap?

    Katherine Kelly
    Katherine Kelly

    Instructure Head of Product Marketing | Formerly ExactTarget (Salesforce Marketing Cloud), Zendesk, Slack, Salesforce • 4y

    The hard way - you earn it.  First, I should clarify that when I think about influencing roadmap, I'm not thinking about it as "getting a feature I think is important onto the roadmap" - if that's the approach you're putting yourself in the same category as every other person who lobs requests at a product manager and they'll see it as just more clamouring for more, more, more. When I think about influencing the roadmap, I think about building a real partnership with product. Understanding the t ...Read More

    486 Views
    1 request