AMA: Zynga Former Director of Product Marketing, Sangita Sarkar on Influencing the Product Roadmap

Establish trust. Throughout my career in gaming, I have seen silos of functions where product doesn't communicate with marketing or design doesn't communicate with engineering- leading to fragmented consumer experiences. The way to break past territorial boundaries between marketing and design is to build trust with the individuals by asking questions about how design process decisions are currently made and following up with feedback from consumer testimonials on any proposed changes. Showing genuine intent around optimizing the end user experience is the easiest common ground to find- so try to begin and end the conversations with what's best for the consumers. The few gaming companies I've worked also have an open feedback forum for feedback on design as features are being tested in beta- so get that dev build and provide regular feedback! The time is now.

Very closely! We sit together, work together, debate together and ultimately take shared ownership and accountability over each strategy. As Director, I am a stakeholder in the roadmap meeting to discuss prioritization of key feature development based on my perspective of the consumer needs. Each PMM on my team is paired with a PM to own and deliver on a key feature that the teams have aligned on. The Words with Friends team has a thorough spec process which involves Marketing’s input from the outset of the process, allowing for appropriate resourcing from the dev team across design, engineering, producers, etc.. Recently, we’ve adapted the process to ensure that Marketing signs off on the product spec at each phase before being greenlit to the next phase.

Analytics, Attribution and Awareness (of the consumer) Analytics Product Managers are constantly looking at key metrics and data to inform roadmap and resource allocation decisions. To speak the quantitative language, I recommend creating and referencing a marketing dashboard to track not only core marketing KPIs but also products’s core metrics on a campaign level. Then, use those numbers and data to show effectiveness or learnings of your marketing strategy. Attribution I recently integrated Branch, a third party vendor, to help with deep linking and attribution for Words With Friends’ Friendiversary campaign (via reengagement- focused email and social campaigns). Having a deeper level of attribution per channel was valuable to PMs to understand how better to support and resource ongoing initiatives based on where our high value reacts were coming from. Awareness Again, PMMs represent the consumer voice. Coming to the table with aggregated data on consumers’ top issues week after week should give your voice the heaviest weight in the room. No one can argue with the end user! 

As a representative of the consumer voice and market demand, PMMs' involvement in product development from the early stages is critical to success. More specifically, Product Marketers can make themselves an invaluable stakeholder to the process by 1. Conducting and synthesizing early market research to identify the product's core target audience and user profiles and 2. Becoming subject matter experts on the industry landscape to identify a differentiated positioning from competitors By doing so, PMMs can represent the consumer's needs and interests at the table and influence the overall vision for the product. My belief is that marketing’s influence on product roadmap is equal and continuous to product’s influence on marketing's roadmap. This type of ongoing feedback loop allows product and feature development to respond quickly to evolving consumer needs.

There is a vast breadth of research that can inform Product decisions. Being at a larger company affords me the opportunity to take advantage of our highly skilled Consumer Insights team and methodologies. Working with a 10-year old brand like Words With Friends, immediately signaled to me a necessity for a refresh on consumer research. We conducted a category segmentation study to understand new potential types of gamers that may be interested in word games as well as their motivations for wanting to play. Longitudinal studies are valuable in understanding the qualitative types of behaviors and emotions over long periods of time. How does a certain type of boost or feature make our players feel or react over time? Lifecycle studies allowed us to understand where in the game experience our players were engaging and converting and where the drop-offs were occurring. The tangible output being specific improvements that we could pinpoint in the meta experience. For shorter, cost-effective research, PMMs can always conduct in-game surveys to glean awareness of a feature/campaign or sentiment around a feature.

Every organization will structure this differently. I've seen most success when PM and CS take the lead with the advisory of the PMM. Due to the sheer technical aspects of most issues, the majority of issues can be quickly addressed and foreseen with PMs taking the lead; however, it is critical for the PMM to be involved in preventing or mitigating consumer sentiment with adverse effects on product in the long haul.