AMA: VMware Sr. Director Product Marketing, Joshua Lory on Influencing the Product Roadmap

Great question with the most votes. In my experience, Product Marketing owns a large percentage of the market analysis, pricing and packaging effort. At VMware, Product Marketing works hand in hand with Product Management, executive staff, finance and sales to carve out pricing for new and incremental offerings. We split pricing related responsibilities in the following way. Product Marketing: Customer & market intelligence i.e. customer segmentation, addressable market, competitve insights and analyst research Pricing & packaging i.e. product price points, bundling, tiering and discounting Sales enablement i.e. how is the product priced, deals structured and overcoming any sales objections Product Management: Product line tiering i.e. features ABC available to customer segment 1 and features XYZ available to customer segment 2 Product prioritazation i.e. based on customer feedback, market intelligence and companies what features will see the light of day Product requirements i.e. delivering epics, user stories and task with engineering

By presenting a particular customer segement in the light of the total addressable market. You'll be in good shape if you can clearly show a business case that carries signifigance in the following areas. For example, how does addressing a particular segment move the needle on revenue, competitive positioning, company vision and customer satisfaction vs addressing other segments? 

In many cases product marketers are the window to the customer. We’ve walked a mile in the customer’s shoes. We have our fingers on the pulse of their needs, problems and feedback. We meet with customers, sales and partners regularly to understand the market forces at play. We are in the best position to synthesize vast amounts of inputs to help leadership, product management and our partners in engineering to influence product direction. With that for context, my team is currently measured on the following metrics (for a cloud service that identifies issues before they occur using advanced proactive intelligence). 1. # of customers/companies registered 2. # of active users 3. # of features used 4. # of issues proactively remediated 5. # of qualified leads

First, changing a culture is hard. You can do your best by setting an example, being curious, solving hard problems and helping your peers grow the business. Second, you do not have a product without adoption. PMMs usually own or share the adoption goals with product management. PMM is in a unique position to capture and unify qualitative and quantitative data to increase adoption and usage. This process never ends and should be injected in every step of the product life cycle not just the start.

In partnership with the product leadership team, establish a 360 degree feedback loop that takes the plethora of feedback channels and terminates them into one like AHA or Jira. Once you have all the feedback and requests in one place for all to see, develop a criteria to prioritize. How many customers will this feature impact, how much perceived value will they gain, how much energy and cost will it take to build, etc. That way you can serve up feature requests on a silver platter for leadership and product management.

A few thoughts on delivering roadmap commitments: 1. Get the product leaders involved in direct customer feedback sessions and events. Hearing customer problems and requests directly from the horses mouth requires response head on. 2. Publish your high level roadmap for customers and sales. Once you commit to a feature publically it is harder to back out of it. 3. Hold regular product review sessions with exectuive staff to ensure commitments are being met.

Product marketing should understand product requirements and feature velocity at a high level i.e. how hard it is to deliver a solution and how many features can your team deliver in a quarter. That way you can bucketize feature requests into t-shirt sizes; small, medium large efforts. The onus is on product managament and engineering to determine exact costs and timing of features. 

If you're doing your job right, both. I believe everything PMM does should end up in the product at some point. Marketing doesn't have to be external or disconnected from the product. If you have this in mind, you can take the vast amounts of knowledge and insights and turn it into your companies’ .next. This means that partnership with Product Management is essential. Being able to synthesize all of the touchpoints for your extended product management team is a key service to your organization. For example, PMM at VMware owns or contributes to the following body of work which directly impacts product vision and functionality: 360 customer feedback Customer adoption and usage data Customer feedback surveys 1:1 customer meetings Beta design sessions Customer events Market research and competitive analysis BI / biz ops reporting Day 0 (net new), 1 (starts using the product) and 2 (how do i get the most out of the product) marketing and enablement Sales enablement AR & PR Lead and demand generation Promotions and gamification as long as it is done in a tasteful fashion Consumption engagement tools i.e. Pendo for SaaS

Yes, at VMware this is called Sales Kickoff. It usually consists of sales, technical pre-sales, professsional services and customer success gathering for a few days to discuss the company's strategic priorities, solution areas, product positioning, roadmaps and relationship building. It is split out by the functions above to dive deep into each phase of the customer lifecycle.