AMA: Vimeo Senior Director of Product Marketing, Monty Wolper on Influencing the Product Roadmap

As someone who didn’t start her career in product marketing and has since supported several internal transfers into PMM for perspective sharing and career growth, this question is near and dear to my heart. I can honestly say that some of the best PMMs I’ve hired and worked with have had very diverse backgrounds across sales, product, analytics, research, and marketing. PMM is an amalgamation of so many aspects of these roles, that experience in them often translates directly. It also helps you build empathy for your stakeholders in those positions that you’ll be working with closely as a PMM. This brings me to another core competency hiring managers tend to look for in candidates: strong collaboration skills. PMMs are the hub of the wheel, bringing together almost every other facet of the org. Your financial model is going to be much stronger if you collaborate with your analyst; your customer insights will be much richer if you collaborate with your data, sales, CX and research partners; your marketing strategy will drive more revenue if you collaborate with each channel owner to leverage their expertise. Demonstrating that you know how to support, and lean on your partner teams when necessary, is important. I’d recommend framing your skills in terms of what will be expected of you from an “inbound” and “outbound” perspective. In most of my interviews, I’m looking for candidates who are analytical and methodical in their thinking, can translate those inputs into strategies, and tap the creative side of their brain to bring those strategies to life with compelling messaging and creative. Being able to translate complex concepts into simple communications is key. Lastly, it’s important to show the hiring manager that you’re able to take educated risks and learn from past failures. Understanding how you’d apply those learnings to your role in Product Marketing will give them the confidence they need to take a chance on you.

When evaluating what products to prioritize, you’ll want to consider several factors: 1. Mission Alignment: Does this addition to the product portfolio support the company’s mission, and what you’re trying to accomplish? 2. Opportunity Size: What’s the TAM? Will this product expand the addressable market by solving customer needs in adjacent or new markets? Does it expand your value proposition for existing customers, driving upsell and/or retention? Or does it close a competitive gap? 3. Business Impact: What’s the primary objective of this product initiative? Which topline KPIs will this move the needle on for the business? 4. Customer Impact: Will this addition to the existing product portfolio address a distinct customer need, pain point, or expectation? Is it something they’ve been asking for? Does it increase the perceived value of your product and/or make it stickier? 5. T-Shirt Size: Is this an XS or XL effort? How much time do you estimate the build will take, and does the team have the capacity for it? Matrix the value against the complexity — less complex efforts that provide greater value are your sweet spot. Whether you’re part of the product organization or not, try to approach prioritization as a partnership versus a transactional request process. This will allow you to evaluate the proposals potential more holistically, and bring your product stakeholders along on the decision making journey.

I’m so glad to have been asked this question, because I’ve been fortunate enough to lead teams through acquisitions at almost every company I’ve worked at. In order to effectively integrate the newly acquired company into yours, you’ll need to understand what drove the acquisition: was it a strategic, product or acqui-hire? It sounds like your question is referring to a product buy. In that case, you’ll need to develop a deep understanding of the new product itself, as well as the audience, so you can identify overlaps with your current portfolio. Once you’ve understood the target buyer, you can figure out where in your segmentation strategy and messaging this new addition fits in, so that it becomes part of a holistic solution. There’s of course a human element to this, and in my experience, the integration of company cultures can either make or break the acquisition. Making your newest team members feel as though they are part of your company is critical. Invest time in getting to know each other as individuals so you can build these new relationships on a strong foundation, which will pay dividends in the long-run. While it takes significant effort and time, embedding these new employees into existing teams, processes and workflows goes a long way. It also ensures that the two product teams can identify synergies between their areas. Once they’re bought into how their products can work together to better meet the needs of customers, and differentiate the company in market, they’ll be motivated to unblock cross-team dependencies that arise. This is an exciting time because it presents both teams with opportunities to drive more entry points to their products, and tap into a larger addressable market. One team, one dream.

While the impact of shifts in company strategy and product roadmaps can materialize in similar ways day-to-day, the altitude at which they need to be addressed differs. In both cases, however, you’ll need to understand what’s at the root of the change. Most companies I’ve worked at set long-term goals (think 10+ year vision) and short term goals (think focus for the next 1-3 years). Things can shift more regularly on that shorter time horizon, as teams take a flexible approach to tactics used to deliver on their goals. As long as the company vision remains as a north star, I’d expect the daily/weekly/monthly changes to be adjustments as opposed to a complete shift in direction. However, if the company's long-term strategy has yet to be solidified, there are bigger questions that need to be addressed at a leadership level before individual product teams can be set up for success. You’d be surprised by how much less volatile the product roadmap will be if there’s a steady, and clearly communicated company strategy in place. OKRs are a great way to ensure company-wide alignment and hold teams accountable for making progress towards that north star. While objectives remain constant longer, KRs can be adapted on a quarterly basis to refine the approach. Helping your PMs understand GTM dependencies, and working with them to set shared KRs can help avoid some of that back and forth it sounds like you’re experiencing. If your roadmap is still constantly shifting despite having this type of structure in place, it may be due to poor processes, unrealistic scoping, or inappropriate resourcing to deliver on the plan. If you have a project manager who can help with this, you’ll want to work with them on resetting that. If you’re part of a leaner team, you’ll want to partner directly with your PM.

In my experience, this is something we’ve done for Level 1 or Level 2 launches that involve dozens of stakeholders across various functions. The goal for these pre-mortems is really to anticipate pitfalls and increase project success, whether that’s simply by eliminating the fear around negative outcomes or identifying potential mitigations that can be put in place to avoid those altogether. The key players in sessions like this are typically PMM, EPD (Engineering/Product/Design), Enablement and Marketing Leads including PR.

A strong VOC program has the potential to illuminate customer priorities before they become challenges, so consistency and accessibility are key. A few suggestions: * Dedicate a certain amount of your team’s time to this program, even if it’s as simple as committing to 1 customer interview or call a week. * Provide opportunities for stakeholders to hear from customers directly, whether that means listening in on support calls, monitoring chats, participating in interviews and focus groups, or joining sales calls. * Develop case studies, featuring them in materking materials but also distributing them internally, to humanize your customers for those who aren’t in a position to hear from them directly. * Create a centralized knowledge hub for customer insights, collating interviews, NPS or CSAT scores, feature requests, social listening trends, website behaviors, product usage, etc. * Turn these insights into an action plan: identify trends and common themes, visualize those, and develop scalable personas that allow your teams to rally around who it is that you’re building for and selling to. * Identify other customer champions throughout the organization who can help you ingrain a customer-centric mindset into the company culture. A big part of PMMs role is storytelling, which you can (and should!) be doing internally as well as externally. Think about ways in which you can surface the latest VOC insights, whether it’s via an internal newsletter or spotlights during company-wide meetings, plugging them in where relevant, sharing broadly, and often.

The first step here is often the most easily overlooked: understand the product team’s goals, so you can figure out how to position and prioritize your projects in a mutually beneficial way. Secondly, you’ll want to level set on the company strategy before honing in on the product roadmap in a particular area. Once you’ve done that, you can start outlining the market opportunity, identifying the target audience, developing solution-level GTM strategies, and helping partner teams understand how to uniquely position the company to meet market demands in a differentiated way. This empowers you with a clear framework you can reference when making a business case for new product initiatives. Just like you, your PMs will be more motivated when they understand how their work drives broader company goals. From a more tactical standpoint, you’ll be able to influence much more effectively if you lean on both quantitative and qualitative data. Without this, you’re just advocating for subjective beliefs as opposed to objective facts. Represent the voice of the customer by leveraging sales feedback, support requests, and interviews. Paint a picture of the market, mapping out the competitive landscape to highlight trends and identify user needs. Product Managers are problem solvers — demonstrate that there is a real problem to be solved by tapping into the vast amounts of user data at your disposal. Even if you do all of the above to make a strong business case, you never know how your hypothesis will play out once you go to market. I always recommend working with PMs to outline a validation plan, implementing milestones that present learning opportunities along the way, so you can adjust the trajectory accordingly. In doing so, you’ll build strong habits around influencing the roadmap regularly, rather than viewing it as a one off event.

Ideally, any roadmap shared with your sales team would be owned and presented by PMM. The sales team doesn’t just need to understand when a product will be released, but when they’ll be enabled to sell it effectively. PMMs can leverage release timelines to craft a market-ready roadmap based on the GTM strategy. Here are some ways in which a market-ready roadmap may differ from a product one: * Bundled releases that deliver greater customer value, when most relevant (i.e. factoring in seasonality) * Solution or persona based sales plays, that tag each release by target segment * Sufficient lead time for GTM enablement and support requirements * Marketing campaigns/activities that will be leveraged to boost the launch, making more noise in market around tentpole moments