AMA: Momentive Vice President, Product Marketing, Priya Gill on Influencing the Product Roadmap

Not sure I completely answer the question. Typically when I ask candidates to give a presentation, it's less about the specific products they're presenting, but rather HOW they present it. Can the candidate articulate how they effectively approached their GTM strategy, from ideation to execution and beyond. Can they effectively launch a product/feature and properly engage the right cross-functional partners to make that launch a success? Are they outcome-oriented and think about the metrics they ...Read More

Persistence? :) That's a tough one and something that I've experienced many times in my career. I've always approached that as a challenge that I strongly desire to overcome. Similar to a question I answered above, I always start by building a great working relationship with Product by clearly showing the expertise and value that I uniquely bring into the partnership. As a PMM expert, you want to be seen as the central hub for a lot of critical information regarding not only your customers, but ...Read More

If it's something that's truly needed, you will see many customers asking for the same thing. You can validate this by speaking to other customers or running a survey to assess business needs. Sometimes when you dig a bit deeper, you discover that they have a pain point that could be solved a completely different / better way, so I wouldn't always take what they say at face value. Additionally, if it's critical to their business, you will also see customers churning to competitors who do offer i ...Read More

Funny enough, this was completely a Marketing led rebrand. Product roadmap didn't play a role in guiding the process because we already had the right set of products, we just didn't have the right message or name in the market. An important part of this repositioning was strongly signaling to the market that we are no longer just a surveys company. This has actually been true for a while, but even our own customers had little awareness of some of the other products in our portfolio. But it’s har ...Read More

I would keep timelines directional but loose, but you need to include something to give customers an indication that you're continuously investing in your product(s) and innovating at a rapid pace. If you have high confidence that it's coming in the next 6 months, you can label that product/feature you're highlighting as "H1 planned" or "Q3 planned". If you're unsure, you could label it as "H2 under investigation". I would never give a specific date unless you're about 1-2 weeks prior to launch ...Read More

The start of building a great working relationship is clearly showing the expertise and value that you uniquely bring into the partnership with Product. As a PMM expert, you want to be seen as the central hub for a lot of critical information regarding not only your customers, but the products you sell, competitors, industry analysts, and many other constituencies. To be considered a subject matter expert, you need to continually gather and analyze data and business intelligence from all of the ...Read More

You need to prove that there's market demand for it and that the customer is willing to pay for it. Or that it's a major cause of churn which clearly shows monetary impact. That can be validated in a number of ways: analyst validation, customer/prospect validation, willingness to pay research. A good place to start would be talking to Sales. Are we losing deals because we don't have that feature? What was the impact of that loss? What risk does it pose to the business by not building that capabi ...Read More