AMA: Zendesk Former Product Marketing Director, Abhiroop Basu on Influencing the Product Roadmap

In almost all cases you want to have Product Marketing creating the roadmap deck and delivering it, rather than Product. There are two main reasons for this.First, some PMs (please don't hate me) tend to focus more on describing the feature rather than articulating the value and benefit. Of course there are many skilled PMs that can do both, however it’s unlikely all your PMs will be able to do it consistently. Customers don’t care about the specifications of the feature, they want to understand ...Read More

It comes down to which aspects of the role excite you the most. Depending on the company you are working at, Product Marketing and Product Management can have a lot of overlap. I’ll first discuss some of the similarities and differences in the roles before summarizing how you should think about making the choice. Early in my career I found this Medium article instructive in deciding which path to pursue. Product Marketing really has two sets of functions, “outbound” activities and “inbound” acti ...Read More

This is a really interesting question. Leadership typically look at a number of factors when determining what goes in the roadmap. For example, at Zendesk we look at industry trends, innovative use cases, new market expansion, our competitors, partners, and of course customer feedback. For customer feedback we run a robust “Voice of the Customer ” program that looks at feature requests across all our customers and then ranks them based on a number of factors including revenue opportunity, churn ...Read More

You would assume that being in the product organization would allow a PMM more influence. However, I’ve actually found the opposite to be the case.  For a brief period of time at Zendesk, Product Marketing reported into the product org. This let us foster very close relationships with our product counterparts. We would go to all their meetings, offsites, planning sessions, etc. and be joined at the hip when it came to launching features. As a junior Product Marketer this experience can be intoxi ...Read More

The mistake some Product Marketers make is to only think about net new revenue potential. For example, let’s say you are deciding between two features that will take equal amounts of development time. Do you build the feature that will help you attract new customers or one that will retain your existing ones? If you only considered net new revenue potential, almost everyone would recommend building the feature to attract new customers. This is because the feature that helps with retention won’t ...Read More

This happens a lot more than you might think. The Product team looks at the market and decides to build a feature. The feature is rolled out as an early alpha and customers are disappointed. What do you do? This is actually one of the easier scenarios in which to influence the roadmap. A few years ago we rolled out an integration with a 3rd party instant messaging service. The integration worked without a problem, but we noticed that not many customers were signing upto the Alpha (even though th ...Read More

You’ve done an admirable job of describing the differences, however the reality can be a lot more nuanced. There are many situations in which I have felt strongly about adding something to the roadmap and have argued with PMs to get it built. In other instances I’ve played a more supporting role providing data points and customer feedback, all in order to help them make a decision. Good Product Marketers aren't going to be only an "influencer" or a "partner" - they are likely to be both at diffe ...Read More

Discussing the roadmap with customers is a critical step in product development because it helps validate and clarify your strategy. It’s tough to give a one-size fits all rule for when to share the product roadmap as it depends on the industry, customer maturity, segment, and numerous other factors. For example, at Zendesk, we sell to customer service and sales leaders and their time horizon is in the 6-12 month range. That is, they are budgeting and planning at least a year in advance. So, it’ ...Read More