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

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’s important that we show them what’s coming in (roughly) that timeframe. How the roadmap is communicated depends on the size of the customer and your relationship with them. For smaller customers and prospects we have a quarterly webinar which does a look back and look ahead of all the product releases. This is a scalable forum for customers to see everything we’ve built and ask questions on what’s coming. For larger customers, we partner with Sales and Customer Success to do roadmap walkthroughs. Finally, it’s rare to show large prospective customers a detailed roadmap. We will explain our long term goals and vision, but getting into the minutiae of individual features is usually not relevant for prospects.

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 different times. What matters the most is credibility. Do your Product peers see you as a product partner or a customer communications manager? If they see you as a peer you are likely to be able to both influence and debate over the roadmap. So, how do you build credibility? The big areas areas to invest in are: * A thorough understanding of the product (you should know it almost as well as the PM), * Insights into your target customer base (who they are, what they want, etc.), * Data, data, and more data. If you can back up your point with a datapoint you’ll usually win most arguments My best relationships with PMs have been when I can bring some tangible insight to the table that helps shape the decision making.

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 risk, number of votes, and alignment with long-term strategy. I don’t think damaging negative reviews have ever been a factor we've considered. There are two types of customer: one that posts a negative review and decides never to be your customer again (this happens sometimes) or one that is more thoughtful about how they go about sharing the same feedback. I would say that the latter is going to be a better long-term customer and one worth investing in.

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 what problems it would solve. It's the Product Marketers job to make the connection between the feature and its real world benefits. Second, you want to provide a holistic roadmap that tells a unified story. So, it makes much more sense to have a Product Marketer understand the different features that are coming and weave it into a narrative that is relevant for the different segments or verticals you are targeting. Even if a Product Manager is able to describe the benefits of a feature, it’s unlikely they have the time to look across all the other products and weave them together. So, Product Marketing should create a roadmap that sells the benefits and tells a clear story to the customer. Sales and Success can then take this and present it to the customer as part of their regular meetings.

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 have any immediate revenue impact. Therein lies the mistake. Many studies have shown that it can cost 5x as much to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. So when making product roadmap decisions, I would encourage all Product Marketers to optimize for the features that drive product stickiness. For example, the Zendesk trends report showed that businesses were increasingly turning to messaging as a support channel. Instead of attempting to build features for an entirely new segment, we doubled down on ensuring that our existing customers had all the channels they needed to support their customers. So, we spent most of 2020 building integrations into various messaging services (such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram DM). This has increased product adoption and retention amongst our existing customers as they now have more ways to communicate with their customers.

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” activities. Put simply, “outbound” Product Marketing focuses on activities like developing marketing collateral, sales enablement, go-to-market strategy, targeting specific customer segments - all with the goal of driving product adoption. These activities are core to any Product Marketing role at virtually all organizations. “Inbound” Product Marketing deals with the question of what to build and what goes on the product roadmap and this often overlaps with the role of Product Management. The article I linked to above, has a helpful spectrum which illustrates the different stages of product development. In smaller organizations, the role of the Product Manager is hired first and includes a lot of the traditional “inbound” Product Marketing functions, including figuring out what market segments to go after, what order to go after them, what customer/user types to prioritize, etc. In larger organizations, the role of the Product Marketer starts to fulfil many of those same functions. So, summarizing and answering your question: * First, identify what areas of Product Marketing you are interested in. If it’s the “outbound” activities (like developing marketing collateral, sales enablement, etc) you are clearly going to be more satisfied as a Product Marketer. If, however, you prefer the “inbound” activities you might still find a great Product Marketing role, but Product Management might be a better fit. * Second, look at the size of the company. In smaller companies a Product Manager is likely to be doing the majority of the “inbound” activities. It’s unlikely you would have the opportunity to set product strategy. So, if you want to work more on developing the product strategy and roadmap you either need to move to Product Management at a smaller organization or look at PMM roles at larger companies (>500 employees). * Finally, it’s important to think about your long-term goal. The Product Marketers career-path leads to the CMO role, while Product Managers will probably become CPOs or CTOs. Long term, which role do you see yourself in?

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 they had committed to using it). I was tasked to gather feedback on what was going on. After conducting a few customer interviews it became clear that while the integration was solid, customers were looking for more than just a basic connector. They needed reporting, routing, and a whole host of other features. I put a roadmap outlining the features, the customer's making the requests, as well as the revenue associated with each opportunity. This was one of the more straightforward examples in my career where I was able to influence the roadmap and it was because the issue was discovered as the product was being built and the roadmap was being constructed.

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 intoxicating. The compromise you make though is that it’s the Product Managers that are the ultimate decision makers. As a Product Marketer, I more often than not, would play a supporting role in ensuring a feature launched. In the last 4 years at Zendesk, Product Marketing has reported into the CMO and this has allowed the team to become far more strategic. When Product Marketing reports into the Head of Product, your role becomes supportive and the goal becomes making a product launch successful. This is laudable, but you don’t get much of an opportunity to influence the roadmap. Reporting into marketing, let’s PMM keep product at arms length and take an unbiased view on what’s important. It also let’s PMM align closer with sales (and by extension customers) to get an unvarnished picture into what’s working and what isn’t with respect to the product. So, sitting outside of product allows PMM to be better overall partners. However, coming back to your questions, are PMMs better able to influence the roadmap if they report into marketing? This is trickier, but in my experience the answer is "yes". As long as you have the credibility, sitting outside of the product org allows a PMM to bring a holistic picture of what customers need and by extension what needs to be built. It also allows PMM to bring an outside perspective (e.g. from sales) that product may not have. My colleague Teresa Haun has written a great answer on why PMM should report into Marketing and not Product: https://sharebird.com/where-should-product-marketing-report-into-product-management-or-marketing.