AMA: Twilio Principal Product Marketing Manager, IoT, Elizabeth Grossenbacher on Influencing the Product Roadmap

Any time I’ve influenced the product roadmap, it was a direct result of a customer-centric research initiative. Here are two examples of this: Focus Groups! After dozens of Voice of Customer interviews, I put together a face-to-face focus group. The event coincided with a key industry event, so all of our focus group participants were in the same area at the same time. I worked with the PM ahead of time to select participants and establish the goals and agenda. Together, we created a set of exer ...Read More

I use both primary and secondary research. Here is a non-exhaustive list of research sources to help you get started: customer interviews, customer surveys, customer usage data, recorded sales calls (or interviews with sales if recorded calls are not available), sales data or win-loss reports, analyst research notes (Gartner, IDC, Forrester, Omdia, and 451 are the first ones I’d go to, but there are many others out there). Once I gather all of the data, I look for themes or trends. If I need mor ...Read More

Story time! I once worked at a small company where two stakeholders disagreed on the product roadmap. The CTO disagreed with the CPO. In that scenario, the CTO had the experience as the customer, so this person felt that the experience was valid and warranted a seat at the table in product development discussions. As the PMM on the product, I took extra care to understand why the CTO disagreed. I took an inquisitive approach and treated the conversation like an interview with a Key Opinion Leade ...Read More

My first thought is: Have you asked your PM this exact question? ;) In my experience, balancing customer wants and needs is typically handled by the PM, while PMM supports recommendations based on market and customer intelligence. How we handle this is by answering a handful of questions: What is the customer trying to do? What’s the best way to help the customer achieve this (based on time, money, resources, experience, etc.)? Can we help the customer do it better, faster, and/or cheaper? What ...Read More

First I try to understand why it isn’t a priority. I’ve seen this happen a lot. Many times, it’s because our brilliant product managers are trying to build a better way to “do it.” Other times, it’s because the feature doesn’t really make sense for the market, and it’s just a marketing ploy. For example, imagine that your company offers cellular connectivity to non-phone devices (think, a water meter in middle-America). In the telecom world, 5G is a really hot topic. And it’s a great technology ...Read More

Anyone can lead a Customer Advisory Board (CAB). But when you put together the goals of the CAB, you’ll see that it’s more efficient for it to sit under PMM. Here are two main reasons for this: It’s part of our job. 😉 PMMs are uniquley positioned to lead the CAB because we already aim to inform the product roadmap, create the GTM strategy, and influence the way we do business. We acheve these by delivering market and customer insights, which fits so naturally with a CAB. PMMs are trained to unde ...Read More

This will depend on how your organization defines the PMM vs PM role. While I’ve never seen PMM “owning” product-specific analytics, I’ve also never seen PMM function without utilizing these metrics for analysis. Whoever “owns” these metrics will vary by organization. I would start by having a frank conversation about what datapoints the PMM can easily gather, and which ones you need to complete your analysis. Just because you need a datapoint doesn’t mean you “own” its gathering. In our busines ...Read More

I view these as two different things: (1) informing the future vision of the product roadmap and (2) impacting the roadmap in the short term to meet current customer requirements. An example for #1: A few years ago, I partnered with a PM to dream up a product that was unlike anything else on the market. Once we had a few big ideas, we did some market research with secondary data from analysts. From there, we put together a focus group to get customer feedback and validate the secondary research. ...Read More

We have never quantified this, but I will say that we always start with assumptions (i.e., “the work of the designer”). But then we go on to validate (or disprove) and further iterate on those assumptions with what PMM uncovers from customer data. I come to every collaboration with the assumption that the designer I’m partnering with cares deeply about the usage of her design. I have a degree in design, and I can tell you that user-centric design is at the core of any formal training. World famo ...Read More