AMA: Zapier Former Head of Product Marketing, Gregg Miller on Influencing the Product Roadmap

It's all about doing great work that matters to the business, matters to your partner, and fits into the context of the relationship! The playbook below can help get the ball rolling. Sorry for the long answer, but it's a complex question with big implications for your ability to add value as a PMM. 1) It's essential to understand your business — the market you play in, the strengths/weaknesses of the competition, how customers feel about you, etc. — better than just about anyone else in the company. Your level of fluency (or lack thereof!) will be visible in how you show up: the insight you’re able to share live in meetings, the feedback you leave in Google Docs/Slides comments, the deliverables you create, and so on. Showing you really know what you’re talking about means people will see you as someone who’s opinion matters and should not only be considered when you provide it, but that they should proactively seek you out in the future. 2) It's similarly important to understand how the product marketing team has typically partnered with your product counterparts in the past. If you’re at an organization where product marketing has typically played a role laser focused on launch communications, you may inadvertently erode your credibility by regularly sharing your feature pitches with the product team. That’s not to say your ideas aren’t going to be valuable, just instead that it’s helpful to recognize the starting point of your reputation and strive to be highly credible within that frame of reference before progressively branching out into other areas. 3) Ask your product counterpart(s) what matters to them individually: where do they see the greatest PMM need, where could the existing way of doing things be improved, and what are some of the biggest risks/uncertainties they have around their existing roadmap? 4) Go out and get some quick wins in service of THEIR agenda — do some customer interviews or quick market research that might be helpful. It's best not to try and make a big ask of them or a product proposal right off the bat. Instead, nurture the fragile sapling of your reputation and credibility -- the stronger they are, the bigger a seat at the table you earn, the more influential you've earned the right to be at your organization. There are a lot of great resources out there that talk about establishing credibility agnostic of your function — it’s generally the same set of rules regardless of whether you’re in product or operations or marketing or somewhere else. There’s a short book out there called “The First 90 Days” that I’d highly recommend if you’re looking to learn more.

My guess is your product team might benefit from PMM partnership earlier on in the product development process. However, that’s easier said than done! In order to move from downstream value addition (what’s the timeline of something that’s supposed to launch, what comms are we developing for the launch, etc.) to upstream influence (what are we building and why), you need to first establish credibility. Someone else asked “how do you establish credibility” in this AMA so check out that response as well. It’s important to demonstrate you know what you’re talking about with respect to the business as well as establishing some base hits with whatever has typically been “in your PMM lane” before trying to get a seat at the table for upstream influence. Once you’ve established your credibility, I’d recommend trying to establish a rhythm with the product team where PMs and PMMs sit down together during roadmap planning and create a “product on a page” for each new feature/product being considered. People buy stories and solutions to their pain points, they don’t buy features, and we as PMMs can shine by helping get the story right early on in the process. For each of these product on a page exercise, I’d recommend considering: * Target audience: Who exactly is this for? Be as specific as possible! * Market problem: What are buyers/customers struggling with that this feature seeks to solve? * Solution summary: What’s the layman’s terms explanation of how this feature will solve the market problem? * Value proposition * Supporting benefits * Value vs. alternatives: Why is this better/different from solutions and alternatives that already exist in the market? * Pricing and packaging: What’s the rough plan for how this feature will be distributed? I find this product on a page framework to be hugely helpful for a number of reasons. By keeping it to a single page, it’s easily digestible as a reference doc and the source of truth for other people trying to understand the direction of this roadmap item. By focusing on the market and customer perspective, you can ensure that the end product that ships is both important and marketable. By co-creating this with your PM counterparts, you develop mutual accountability to your shared vision. It’s important to treat these as living documents since plans evolve based on the business’s needs, but keeping it up to date helps make sure the market/customer focus never gets lost. You can use these docs, too, as a method to stay plugged into the product development process and partner with your PM counterpart on where either the product on a page needs to evolve or the product development process needs to fill in important gaps before you’re in a position to launch the feature.

Our job as product marketers is to help the organization maximize the capture of market opportunity — whether that’s becoming more competitive, entering new markets, increasing the value we deliver to existing customers, or numerous other ways. Thus I think it’s important to start with “what opportunity will this new feature/product unlock?” Ultimately the feature/product should drive some core value for the business in the form of a measurable KPI. Often this will be revenue. But if you can’t deliver an estimate of revenue/monetizeable opportunity, there are plenty of other KPIs that directly and indirectly impact revenue: free trials, conversion rates, customer churn, a core engagement/usage measure (and it should be a proven value driver like “likes" and “shares" on Instagram as opposed to something peripheral), etc. The next step is demonstrating how the new feature/product will have a huge impact on that dependent business measure. For example if you think your proposal will help reduce churn, you should bring information to the conversation showing that a significant share of lost customers/users in the past 12 months left because feature/product X wasn’t part of your offering. Or if your proposal is meant to increase conversion rates, go out and do 20 interviews with people who did a free trial but failed to convert and show that in a majority of these conversations people cited feature/product X as being a key product gap. And if you are targeting a KPI like churn or conversion rates, that can yield a monetization target (for example if churn is costing you $5M/yr and you think this could reduce churn by 10%, this feature would be worth $500,000 per year for the existing customer base plus an X% increase in LTV for every new customer signing up thereafter). If you aren’t able to figure out both what KPI your proposed feature/product would improve as well as provide evidence for why this would be the case, you likely need to keep iterating on the idea and/or the research to support it.

Before delivering any feedback, it can be helpful to take a minute and empathize with your product managers. Most are constantly bombarded with product feedback and things people think they should build: customer support, your biggest customers, CSMs, executives, their own boss, and even friends and family members! What’s more, they often shoulder a lot of the responsibility of the business outcomes — both good and bad — of roadmap decisions. PMs have an incredibly challenging job! With that said, feedback from sales is incredibly valuable. Sales will always have more feedback on changes they think are important, though, so be judicious with how hard you go to bat for a given idea and view it as your job to help out the PM by answering “what level of urgency should we associate with this feedback?” When it’s truly an important idea, you can strengthen your case with the following tactics: * Get quotes directly from as many customers as possible. Many B2B orgs record sales calls so leverage those. Right or wrong, PMs (and executives) will often give more weight to the customer than the salesperson. * Calculate the combined $$$ account value of the customers represented above * Do win/loss and churn interviews to find further instances of how this gap has led to missed/lost opportunities * If relevant, do competitor analysis to demonstrate that the product gap is a differentiating point for your peers

In an ideal world product and product marketing should be embedded in one another’s efforts from start to finish (see my other response on “customer needs” and getting PMM further upstream). In this world product marketing has played an active role in helping set the vision for the feature, doing research to support its validation/market opportunity, and coordinating the launch priority (e.g. is this a “nice to have” vs. a tentpole launch). In such a scenario it can often be appropriate for product and product marketing to sign up for shared KPI targets on things like free trials, signups, active engagement in first 30 days, 3-month retention, etc. However, many teams are still working toward that ideal world. If the product team only involves the product marketing team at the very end of the product development process as “the team I go to when my feature is ready to launch” then it might make more sense for the product team to own much more of the adoption KPIs. Why? Because in this scenario PMMs have very little latitude with the tools at their disposal like messaging and launch tactics since many of the core decisions around the value prop and target audience — which ultimately play a huge role in product/market fit and therefore adoption — have already been made.

In a prior role (B2B) the team found it helpful to set expectations with customers on what communication to expect from us. Product hosted a quarterly roadmap review where they would share the big boulders they were planning on shipping in the next 6-9 months with *rough* quarterly estimates on timing -- definitely better to not commit to an exact date and thus disappoint your customers if that date slips. This was mostly a knowledge share from our company to our audience, but there was time for Q&A as well. Whether or not the above works for you, be mindful of (a) not spamming your customers with every tiny roadmap item but instead focusing on the big features/products/themes and (b) delivering only the most important messaging points and sparing them the detail since there's only so much customers can absorb from us.

I don’t think my team experiences specific advantages and challenges of remote work that other teams at Zapier would find different from their own experience. I think what matters much more is how the company overall treats remote work. Let me provide two specific examples of things at the company level that matter a great deal: * Team vs. company-wide remote work: I firmly believe that remote only works — and especially so for PMMs who rely deeply on cross-functional relationships — if the entire company is remote. When the entire company is remote like Zapier is, every single team needs to come up with strategies for making the system work. The company thus adopts shared values, norms, and expectations (see below). When just you or your team are remote, on the other hand, you’re missing out on invaluable in-person interactions that arise from spontaneous or impromptu conversations with peers, onsite team-building events, etc. * Company culture and values: You need different rituals and ways of working if remote is going to help rather than hurt your people. I’m regularly amazed at how well Zapier has intentionally built a remote culture that works really, really well. Just a few of many examples: two companywide week long in-person retreats for fostering relationships and collaboration on the biggest questions facing the business; one function (e.g. Marketing) in-person week long retreat; extraordinary transparency and over-communication such that practically every piece of data, presentation, and deliverable are visible to anyone in the company; and a monthly budget to meet up with fellow Zapiens in-person.