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

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 comes to product and marketing. Getting early prototypes into the hands of customers to hear their raw feedback and see reactions can be incredibly enlightening. Running small alphas or betas and observing real customer behavior and utilization is a promising indicator of future behavior. As a result, much of product design can be based on learning from real customers and experimenting for optimal outcomes.

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 every product, there is a recognition that including those diverse perspectives is valuable and improves outcomes for customers. When you have a culture that values interdisciplinary expertise for product development, functions contribute to roadmap discussions as early as possible by design. When there isn’t an expectation of shared ownership, there is a lot of pressure put on one function, usually product managers. Product managers may play an outsized role in roadmap development, but in an embedded sprint team model, they rely on thought partners to provide functional expertise and diverse perspectives. If you’re not operating in a sprint team environment with product marketing embedded in product orgs, I would recommend developing a close relationship with your product counterparts, aligning on customer needs and business goals, and creating feedback loops and cadences that create opportunities for integrating cross functional input into product development planning.

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 then distill learnings and synthesize into actionable next steps that we align on with the team. From a campaign perspective, we typically share strategy and KPIs beforehand and report on performance afterwards. To ensure broader visibility of learnings across the product team, we also share findings out in larger forums, for example, we conduct regular bi-weekly business reviews where we provide updates on key metrics and learnings with a bigger group of stakeholders. In short, having the right team rituals or forums makes a big difference for sharing ongoing learnings. When there’s a specific campaign or project, we engage with our cross-functional product teams early on so that everyone has visibility, the opportunity to share feedback, and aligns on next steps.

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 in terms of impact to the business can really help with influencing stakeholders and aligning priorities. Here are a few tactics that can assist: * CSAT - Is the feedback significantly impacting customer satisfaction scores and can you demonstrate a trend of degrading CSAT based on specific features (or lack thereof) or bugs? * NPS - Who are your top detractors in your net promoter surveys and what do they cite as top reasons for low scores? Can you tie detractors back to features / fixes? These top detractor drivers can also have brand and reputational implications. * Churn - Is a lack of a feature or fix actually driving churn? It’s so helpful to survey customers who are churning - even with one open-ended question about why they are choosing to leave so you can start to identify patterns. * Conversion - Are you trying to break into a new segment, for example, a new merchant category or size of business? If yes, try getting some quant intel on how important certain features are for driving incremental conversion within your target segments. If you can quantifiably tie key features to increased conversion, it will help teams coalesce around the importance of the work.

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 have an established, measurable feedback loop with those teams to understand how certain feedback is impacting customers and business results, for example what is impacting win/loss with sales? What are the top inquiry drivers from success teams? PMMs are responsible for collecting customer inputs across sales, success, and several other teams, synthesizing those inputs into actionable recommendations, and partnering with the rest of the product team (PM, Eng, Design, Data Science, Research) to prioritize based on a holistic plan to both create customer impact and drive business goals.