AMA: TeamSnap Senior Director Consumer Product Marketing & Strategy, Rayleen Hsu on Influencing the Product Roadmap

In my opinion, competitive intelligence is one of the most impactful ways product marketing can help inform product roadmaps and ensure your company has a differentiated and unique offering in the market. By digging into what competitors exist, what their value props are, what feature sets they offer, how much they charge, etc. competitive intelligence can become a critical resource for informing what to build, why to build it, who you're building for and how to message it. Plus, doing competitive research can often be done in the absence of a large budget. You just need to have time, focus and ability to prioritize. Regardless of the stage of the product, the planning process, breadth of the competitive set, competitive intelligence can be incredibly informative and thought-provoking. When approaching competitive intelligence, I focus on the following outcomes: * Identifying product features amongst our competitors and similar offerings that are tablestakes * Clearly painting a picture of what choices exist for customers today to inspire the product team to think outside the box on how to stand out in a sea of competition * Leverage competitive insights to inform a differentiated and unique value prop When thinking about how to get started with competitive research I'd recommend the following steps: 1) Identify what customer needs and problems you're trying to solve for. For example, are you trying to build a new shopping platform that taps into the resources and tools of a social network? Or are you looking to build a hyperlocal communication platform for local communities? 2) Identify the competitor set you want to research. Dont forget to think outside the box beyond the obvious competitors. For example when thinking about building communication tools for a youth sports management platform, you should probably look beyond your direct competitors and include communication tools like GroupMe or WhatsApp since those are popular modes of communication and planning for youth sports teams. 3) Next, narrow down the core inputs you are looking to better understand. Do you have a feature set in mind that you want to compare competitors to? Are there key problems you are looking to solve for and how do each of the competitors solve for those needs? 4) Thoroughly document your findings in a easy to digest table to compare competitors across different data points. Take plenty of screenshots and videos of the competitive set's UI and marketing messaging. Document open questions along the way as well that you need to come back to answer and specifically call out things that are out of scope for so that you avoid scope creep. It's really easy to go down a neverending rabbithole when doing competitive intelligence so it's important to stay focused and prioritize what things you want to dig into. 5) Lastly, summarize your findings and recommendations on next steps for you and your product team and be sure to share your work broadly with not just your product partners but with leadership and the cross-functional team.

Regular check-ins with your product partners is a critical part of being an effective product marketer. If you don't know what big new initiatives are top of mind, when new products are launching, what optimizations the Product team is working on, you'll have a really hard time partnering with them to help inform the product roadmap, properly preparing for GTM and knowing what marketing campaigns and messages to prioritize. When thinking about cadence and types of check-ins with Product, I would recommend the following (some of these are likely already built into ways of working at your company so hopefully most of these touchpoints are already in place): * Regularly scheduled strategic planning sessions (e.g. annual, half-yearly and quarterly planning) to help paint a picture of what's on the horizon and what are the company's big bets and what are the key initiatives Product Marketing should align themselves closely with product on. * Product initiative specific check-ins (weekly or bi-weekly or possibly even daily stand ups) Once planning has been completed and work is underway, you'll likely have initiative specific check-ins based on product roadmaps and development stage. These might present themselves as "Tiger Team" meetings that meet regularly for a period of time or are topics discussed at recurring team check-ins. Either way, for bigger product launches, as GTM approaches, the cross-functional teams should be meeting regularly for larger tier product launches while and smaller scaled launched may require less frequent check-ins. * Recurring 1:1s with Product partners As a best practice, I also schedule recurring check-ins with my product counterparts. This could be a bi-weekly or weekly check in but it's super helpful to have that 1:1 time with them to build a strong relationship and to fold in important recurring topics like product roadmap to make sure you're always aligned and communicating any updates to plan and timelines. * Monthly business updates are also an important way to stay up to speed on product roadmap updates and help executives stay apprised of the business.

I like to think about a dedicated customer research team or a hired 3rd party researcher as a huge boost to your research superpowers! In my experience, even when working at large companies with significant resources, there is always enough work to go around and having more resources and more support is always a win. The main things to consider when dividing and conquering with other research partners are the following: * Coordination across the different research teams on what key research needs you're solving for * Prioritization and timing of those key research needs * Identification of which teams and people are best equipped to answer which problems * Coordination of research findings and recommendations where applicable While PMM is often experienced and well-trained to do a variety of different types of research, the reality is that Product Marketers often don't have the technical training to do more robust and analytical research that a dedicated user research team has and in those cases, having a formally trained research team to fall back on is a great win. I've also found that formal research teams often own relationships with research partners and PMM can be most effective through conducting the more scrappy research (surveys, desk research, competitive intelligence, user interviews, etc.) Lastly, in addition to dividing and conquering where it makes sense, partnering closely to present a united front and cohesive research plan is critical. By making sure you have regular touchpoints with other research partners to coordinate, align and aggregate findings and recommendations, you'll all be able to be much more effective and impactful partners for the product team.

There is a tremendous amount of research that you can get done with limited budget, it just requires taking initiative, being scrappy and prioritizing what research is going to be the most useful and insightful for your team. Aside from finding the time and prioritizing amongst all the other things on your plate, there are a number of ways you can do robust research to help inform product strategy and roadmap. For example: * Competitive intelligence and market research, especially for consumer facing companies is little to no cost because most of the information exists on the internet. * Desk research. If you've ever worked at a large tech company with a seemingly bottomless research archive, digging into existing research is a great way to pull some meaningful insights together quickly without having to spin up an entire months long research track. Even smaller companies with limited research resources have treasure troves of prior research and there is truly no reason to spin your wheels repeating research to get what will likely be similar results (assuming the previous research you're leveraging is recent enough and there haven't been any monumental changes in strategic direction at your company). * User surveys. If your company has a large enough user base or if you have a small but highly engaged audience, user surveys are a quick and easy way to gather user insights. Even if you can't get a high volume of responses, surveys can still provide directional insights that you can further validate with follow up research, like user interviews or product/prototype testing. I've found that offering a giveaway ("Provide your feedback for a chance to win 1 of 3 $100 gift cards" results in much higher response rates than surveys without incentives. And spending up to a few hundred dollars to get a robust set of data is definitely worth the expense imo, even for a scrappy start-up). * User interviews. Speaking directly with customers to get richer, more open-ended insights is also a very effective form of research and often provides you with information that may have never crossed your mind. While 1:1 user interviews take more time, I find these more effective than focus groups (especially if conducting these virtually) and I find that you can get enough information from 10 or so interviewees vs surveys where you might want tens to hundreds of responses to feel good about the findings. Pro-tip: sometimes it's hard to get people to agree to interviews when you "cold-call/email" them. I've found that starting with surveys and using them as a prompt to get people to agree to future interviews is a great way to boost your interview response rate. Just include a question at the end that asks them if they'd be willing to share more via a user interview and offer a small incentive ($10-$25 gift card for 30 minutes of their time) when you reach out. * User data. If your company has a great analyst or user-friendly analytical tools, start digging into customer data. How are users interacting with your products today? Are there trends or insights that can help inform what the product team should test or focus on next? * Existing research on the internet. Oh the internet! Both a treasure trove of information and a bottomless pit of sometimes unreliable data and unhelpful commentary. Knowing where to look and what to look for will help you turn this vast resource into useful information or at the very least, provide you with some tidbits of information that can supplement the other insights you've gathered and the recommendations you may be making. My strategy when pulling research from other resources on the internet is to go with reputable resources like Forrester or The Aspen Institute. Companies who put out regular reports hyperfocused on specific industries and topics often offer you the information for free if you're willing to give them your name and email. Or if you're lucky enough to work at a company who will pay for a research subscription like eMarketer that is also a great resource. Long story short is there are a lot of ways to pull together meaningful insights to help inform the product roadmap, even in the absence of significant resources. It just requires your organization and focus on what answers you're trying to solve, a research plan and then clear learnings and recommendations and most of all, being scrappy!

This is definitely a tough one. It can definitely be hard to break through to a product team who is either unaccustomed to the PMM role or who is just not interested in PMM feedback. But I'll start by saying hopefully PMM exists at the company in the first place because someone with influence, someone in leadership, understands and believes in the value PMM brings to the table so there's always hope that PMM can break through those silos. That said here are a few ways I would try to help product understand the value of PMM: * Set up 1:1s with Product to build relationships, help them understand your role as PMM, better understand product priorities, identify any gaps or needs (especially as it relates to PMM capabilities) and identify how PMM can help and add value. * Ask to be added to any relevant recurring team meetings. Don't be shy especially as you're trying to break through. Attending more meetings early on to figure out who are the people in the room that you need to align with and the initiatives you need to stay on top of. Once you've broken through those walls, you can always step back from any irrelevant recurring meetings and focus on the high value ones instead (now that you're hopefully being added to conversations where needed). * Build relationships and allies in other cross-functional partners. Cross-functional teammates are great sources of information and aligning with them and making sure they know you exist is another great way to stay in the loop on what's going on. When your product partner forgets to add you to a meeting or forgets to include you in that key conversation, you've got extra eyes and ears out there to help loop you in. * Be vocal in meetings about things beyond marketing. When you do get your foot in the door, make sure those reluctant product partners know you're there and that you deserve a seat at the table. Sometimes it's easy to feel like you should limit your feedback when it comes to marketing related topics but we can all provide unique perspectives and all have insights that are valuable. Don't hesitate to be speak up with questions or perspectives especially on topics that relate to the customer experience. PMM's job is to be the voice of the customer and there are usually a lot of opportunities to be curious and share insights while also reminding product that PMM deserves a seat at the table * Show value early on. Even in scenarios where Product may be reluctant to include PMM in the conversation it's important to bring value to the table early on so they 1) know you exist and 2) can understand how PMM can help the product team accomplish their goals. Obviously, you have to start by understanding what the team's priorities and goals are and any gaps that may exist on the team but once you get that information you should be able to come up with ways you can concretely show value early on whether it be a research project (competitive analysis, user survey, NPS deepdive) or a lightweight marketing test. * Lean on those who understand the value of PMM to be a PMM advocate. I assume if the PMM role exists in your organization, someone with influence/someone in leadership supports and believes in PMM. Find that person and lean on them to be an advocate to get PMM a seat at the table, to help celebrate PMM's contributions, to communicate to others how they can leverage PMM.