AMA: Square Banking Head of Product Marketing, Margueritte Harlow on Influencing the Product Roadmap

Customer needs and feedback are fundamental drivers of product strategy, prioritization, and roadmapping. It’s also important to align on goals for the business to ensure all teams are working toward the same outcomes. If product management is seeking to expand the addressable market while product marketing wants to increase penetration in an existing market - it will of course be more difficult to align on which feedback matters most! Once goals are aligned, framing specific customer feedback i ...Read More

When product marketing is embedded in the product team, we share learnings on an ongoing, organic basis through a variety of team rituals - daily stand-ups, sprint retros, demos, etc. If product marketing is running a specific research project, we typically share the research plan and early draft of discussion guide or survey questions with the rest of the product team (product manager, designer, engineering manager, etc.) so the research design benefits from cross-functional perspectives. We th ...Read More

While the working relationship between product marketing and sales and success may depend on how the organization is structured, these teams provide crucial insights into customer needs regardless of where they sit. At Square PMMs are embedded in product teams and sales and success sit in different parts of the org. PMMs are responsible for representing the voice of the customer in product development and sales and success teams provide critical inputs into that voice. It’s really helpful to hav ...Read More

I’m sure the answer to this question varies dramatically depending on where product marketing sits within the organization - is it within product? marketing? elsewhere? At Square, product marketing sits within product teams, which operate as small interdisciplinary sprint teams composed of product management, product marketing, engineering, design, data science, research, and creative. While this is the ideal state and it’s not always practical or possible to mirror that team composition across ...Read More

Data is a great place to start. It helps to identify which hypotheses have the most promise and to prioritize where to dig in. Designers can have great intuition about what customers want and how to build it. However, when it comes to product design, particularly for something new, data can't always tell the full story about how customers actually react and behave and it’s risky to lie on intuition of an individual team member. Experimentation is crucial and that can take many forms when it come ...Read More