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

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 ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 competiti ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 fac ...Read More