AMA: Wealthsimple Director of Product Marketing, Shezana Manji on Influencing the Product Roadmap

As product marketers, we need customers to believe in the why (value, benefits), the how and what become proof points. This is also a critical input for the design team to create the right solution to the problem. I have never struck out by telling the PM and UX lead that I will be better at my job by being part of the design process and see it come to life. At first you may be an observer in design reviews, and as you build context arout the product, customer, competitors.. you'll bring a more meaningful voice to the table. Remember that it's the PMs job to guide the requirements for the design process, too many competing voices can derail projects very quickly. If you're real objective is to influence the requirements, do it early. As with everything, have a clear objective of why you want to be part of these discussions, how does it make you better at your job and what you can contribute. 

Working from a place of positive intent, some R&D teams may not realize that launch activities are as much work at building a new product/feature. They don't see all the planing and activities that go into it. Whether or not you have program managment function: build a clear project plan for gtm activities, circulate it and create rituals to ensure it's on track. If you break down any GTM delivery into talks, it'll naturally create trip wires. ex/ team needs final UX to build help docs and marketing assets. If that's not delieverd by an agreed upon date, it sends red flags early on risk to the timelines. One organization that I was in had seirous challenges with meeting goals, but also focusing on too many big bets vs tackling the smaller wins, being experimental. They implemented the 6-week cycle model (I'm a big fan). There are quarterly goals and in each quarter there are 3 cycles. The PMs are responsible for defining the deliverables for the cycle during week 5 (ideally collaborating with the rest of the R&D team). Ideally there is a meeting with R&D leadership and PMMs to review these goals for the upcoming cycle weeks and accomplishments from the previous cycle. We got really good at being realistic and transpartent. 

A wise mentor once told me, there is a very big difference between being respected and being liked. You don't need your PM to like you, you need them to respect you. With that being said, remember that as a PMM you're a strategic partner to the product management team. PMs are ultimately responsible to make the decisions about the roadmap, our role is to help them make the right bets. There is no way that PMs can champion all the workstreams needed to understand competitive landscape, product usage funnels (or win/loss data if you have a sales team), growth performance, customer insights, etc. Ask how you can help. Better yet, find a gap and suggest that you lead the work to bring those insights together. If you have valuable context that's your enterance fee to have a seat at the table and build trust with your PM. 

If your'e missing the mark, take a step back. Make sure you have a clear understanding of the business challenge you're trying to solve (why do we need this research, what decisions will it help drive). I will share a tangable example of how we approached "how does our tech stack up" At a previous company we were evaluating the decsion to build or acquire to fill a gap in our offering. The first step we took was to be clear on who our target audience was (if we invest in this, who will care and does this align to our business goals). We then outlined various jobs to be done partnering closely with our UXR team shadow a few customers in our target audience to build this POV. We also scored how critical these jobs were for the customers business (emotional and tangible). We then did an assessment of the features and capabilities of competitors (including paper/pen). There is so much content online, so much of this can be pulled from desk research if you know what you're looking for (don't forget to talk to your sales team!). We also coupled this with a survey to prospects using competitive solutions to get a pulse on how well the competitors serve those jobs to be done. The artifact we created was a spreadsheet with a scoring model and a few slides for insights and recommendations. Was it 100% perfect, no. But it gave the team the directional input they need to make some really big decisions. You don't have to have all the features your competitor does, you just need to solve the most impactful problems better than they do.

I believe most organizations product marketers are leverage as either Inbound PMMs or Outbound PMMs. Inbound PMMs are focused on insights that feed the product roadmap; pricing and packaging, and product positioning that feeds into the marketing strategy. Outbound PMMs are focused on go-to-market planning and execution of launches and adoption KPIs (The PMs are responsible for building the product/feature and their PMM counterpart is responsible for strategy and execution to drive the KPIs) It's more of a spectrum, not one or the other, but there is a dominant expectation on what success looks like. Most of the organizations I've worked in skew more towards "outbound product marketing". We need to be totally in sync with our PMs, working as partners towards the same goal of building something awesome and getting people to use it. We just have different roles in making that happen.