AMA: Square Head of Product Marketing, Square for Retail, Christina Dam on Influencing the Product Roadmap

Great question and I would be very curious to hear how other companies do this! I mentioned in an earlier question that Square is very collaborative, and that means there is a mix of formal, and informal, ways in which we deliver customer feedback.  Formal research / customer feedback studies:  PMM often captures customer feedback through conducting surveys, commissioning external research, listening to calls from Sales or Account Management/Customer Success, analyzing dashboards, or conducting ...Read More

This is a great question and a situation that many PMMs will find themselves in at some point in time! A few thoughts here: Building trust takes time: Before you can be seen as a strategic partner, you need to build trust with the team and demonstrate you know and understand what they are trying to achieve. As quickly as you can, become an expert in the product, and your customers. You need to know both of them inside out in order to do the work to connect the amazing product being built to the ...Read More

I like to think of Product Marketers as co-owners of their product(s). It is PMM’s responsibility, alongside Product Management, to build a successful product and drive key business metrics. With this framing comes a responsibility for PMMs to own the success of a product not just at its initial launch, but throughout its lifespan to drive product satisfaction, retention, loyalty and advocacy from customers. This makes our role in communicating ongoing changes to the product really critical, as ...Read More

Assuming product(s) are being built to grow and last the test of time, there should always be a balance of building for short-term vs. long-term impact. The exact balance between those two can vary depending on the vision and goals of the business.  In my experience, we spend the most time discussing and aligning on short- vs. long-term investments during the Annual Planning cycles, which at Square happen once a year. During this time we take a step back to restate our Vision for the solutions w ...Read More

This is a great question and one that unfortunately can happen quite often. Whether it’s sales training or another aspect of the GTM plan, it can be challenging to get all the timelines to sync up -- especially if the PMM hasn’t been looped in early enough to prepare the GTM plan and deliverables. In this type of situation, I first like to remind the product/eng team that if Sales doesn’t understand the features they build, they can’t sell them and/or help ensure that customers are educated and ...Read More

My first piece of advice is to reframe ‘conflicting voices’ as different perspectives. When you think about it as different perspectives, it removes the negative connotations associated with conflict, and can be easier to dig into the perspectives themselves (vs. getting caught up in the discomfort of disagreement). Sure it would be easier if everyone’s perspective was the same or in agreement, but it would probably also mean you weren’t thinking exhaustively about a problem you were trying to s ...Read More

At Square, the product development functions all work really collaboratively and share a customer-driven approach. This means that product designers, product managers and product marketers are all providing data and insights about the audience, and then collaborate on product/feature discovery to ensure alignment on the problem we’re trying to solve (which typically all ends up in the PRD). This helps ensure that design starts with a bounty of insights and learnings, which is then supported with ...Read More