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Christina Dam

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

October 13 @ 10:00AM PST
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Square Head of Product Marketing, Square for Retail, Christina Dam on Influencing the Product Roadmap
Top Questions
If product marketing is a relatively new function at your company (relative to product), what advice do you have on becoming a strategic partner and more involved earlier in the product roadmap development process?
Christina Dam
Christina Dam
Lightspeed Commerce Vice President, Brand & Product Marketing • October 13
This is a great question and a situation that many PMMs will find themselves in at some point in time! A few thoughts here: 1. 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 the......Read More
5254 Views
3 requests
What tools should Product Marketing use to relay customer feedback to Product management?
Christina Dam
Christina Dam
Lightspeed Commerce Vice President, Brand & Product Marketing • October 13
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:......Read More
18694 Views
3 requests
How much of your product design is data driven based on product marketing learnings and experimentation vs trusting the word of the designer?
Christina Dam
Christina Dam
Lightspeed Commerce Vice President, Brand & Product Marketing • October 13
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......Read More
714 Views
2 requests
How do you balance feature updates that dev wants to get pushed out vs. trying to hold their launch due needing to do sales training?
Christina Dam
Christina Dam
Lightspeed Commerce Vice President, Brand & Product Marketing • October 13
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......Read More
653 Views
2 requests
How do you handle the conflicting voices between sales, marketing and product?
Christina Dam
Christina Dam
Lightspeed Commerce Vice President, Brand & Product Marketing • October 13
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 discomfo......Read More
874 Views
2 requests
How would you recommend a PMM influence the product team to think more about longer term value rather than just always building products geared towards low hanging fruit/quick money?
Christina Dam
Christina Dam
Lightspeed Commerce Vice President, Brand & Product Marketing • October 13
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 dis......Read More
1395 Views
4 requests
What's the best way to leverage product marketing for product changes/updates post customer feedback? How do we re-introduce a product to users to change their perspective on a product they've tried but not necessarily liked/understood as much?
Christina Dam
Christina Dam
Lightspeed Commerce Vice President, Brand & Product Marketing • October 13
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 ......Read More
1664 Views
3 requests