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

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 outs ...Read More

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 ...Read More

Analytics, Attribution and Awareness (of the consumer) AnalyticsProduct 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. AttributionI recently integrated Bra ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 wantin ...Read More