Influencing without Authority

Quick answer: Data. Bring them snippets of real customer conversations or data points that they haven't seen from customer interviews, surveys, CSAT, NPS, customer service feedback - you name it. This will show the value of talking to customers, and will leave them wanting more.   To be even more influential, if your product or design team isn’t listening  - make sure your exec team is. Get an executive sponsor who wants to champion the “voice of the customer” - and leverage their position to promote the customer insights you’re finding.   It’s really dangerous when a product / eng team...

I agree with Mary. Data. How you package that data, though, really matters. Some people are swayed by facts, some are swayed by process/method, and some are swayed by stories. Know your audience and package your facts accordingly. 

One thing I'd add to Mary's response is what I think is the hardest part of your question: identifying the questions that matter most to the business. Getting and using data is critical, but it will fall on deaf ears and undermine your credibility if you aren't getting the right data at the right time for the right decision-makers. How do you identify what data to go get? Look for one of the following: * Internal disagreements: Are members of the Product team regularly having a philosophical argument that impacts the direction of the roadmap? For example, does one camp think user...

While I agree with Mary's answer ("data") and the other great points that have been added here, I would caution against taking the exact same approach you would to influencing product as you would to influencing culture. If data were sufficient to change culture, the world would look dramatically different.  Culture is theoretically owned in people, HR, operations, and exec leadership. It's an intangible and can be attached to personality. That's a different audience and perspective than a group of product managers and engineers. Put your marketing hat on and adjust your approach accordi...

To me, it's about creating a customer-centric culture, not just a "market research" culture. "Market research" is a bit of a stigmatized term - most of it is considered not valuable, not actionable, and an expensive "nice-to-have". I'd encourage you to re-orient around building a habit of listening and talking to customers - often. What I try to do, very tactically is:  1/ help make the case for "discovery" in roadmaps as an official line item. Make sure formal product development time accounts for talking to relevant audiences before anything is built or designed.  2/ i invite product, d...

This is concerning to hear. Unless you have the next Henry Ford on your design team, this mentality will ultimately lead to a poor product-market fit. That’s not saying that your design team should not have a voice at all – they may have a solid product vision and if they are market experts, then they will have an equally strong understanding of the market’s needs. But that understanding doesn’t just randomly come to them. It is carefully honed by having a close pulse on the customer. For instance, there is one particular product leader at my current company who understands our customers b...

Market research is the most powerful tool for influencing product. I recommend applying your marketing skills to your internal stakeholders in the same way you use them for your externally-facing initiatives. If you have some great market insights in hand, consider these steps: 1. Understand your internal target audience: Why does product and design consider themselves as the consumer? Where are the largest differences between our internal teams and the actual customer? How do internal teams best consume information? 2. Create a messaging strategy for your insights: What are the key takeaw...

It is important for all functions across the company to build empathy for users. Regardless of your segment, small advisory boards are helpful for this, and can be set up to feature 10-20 key customers who meet quarterly (or more or less often) to review roadmaps and provide feedback on either new initiatives or existing products. The key here is getting leadership buy-in across the exec team, as they will likely be the main headlines to actually get key customers to attend these sessions. Depending on the level of budget you have, getting teams together to go onsite with customers and a...

I'd say lead the way. Use a traditional PMM responsibility like refreshing your buyer personas as a reason to kick off a joint research project and pull in your partners from the product and design team. Set up customer interviews. Get outdoors and do a workshop. Have some fun with it. Bribe them with candy and fizzy drinks :o) If you can't get buy-in for that, go talk to customers yourself and present a read-out of what you learned.  Get with the sales and client services team and use them as a proxy for the customers if there is too much red tape around direct customer interaction.  Co...

Influence comes from repeatedly bringing fresh insights and a distinct point of view to the table. To influence product strategy and the roadmap you need to take a broader view of your market and the customers than your friends on the product management team. Invest in a deep understanding of your customers, your competitors, and the market at large. Map out mid- to long-term threats and opportunities. Validate those threats and opportunities with customers, industry experts, and your internal experts across product, user experience, customer experience, sales, sales engineering, and client...

My biggest accomplishment was in a prior role at a different company for a SaaS product. I was able to persuade the product and executive leadership team to invest in a redesign of the user experience of a product that had become stale compared to new entrants in the space. Redesigns can be a hard sell as they do not produce immediate revenue and at best have a neutral impact on customer satisfaction. The key to getting buy-in was making a compelling case for the change based on customer and competitive research. The product has since grown in its revenue contribution and turned into a long...

To be an effective product marketer my view is that you need to be a deep expert on your product. You don't need the same technical expertise as your product management counterpart but you need to deeply understand the customer, their pain points, and how your product solves these pain points. AppFolio is a B2B SaaS platform that property management companies run their entire business on - accounting, maintenance, marketing, leasing, rent payments, everything is done through our platform. It is a complex product to understand and the steep learning curve is compounded by our team members ne...

Conflicts become entrenched when what was a simple, solvable problem, starts sweeping up other issues to become a messy amorphous thing. So many times with team members have come to me with an issue that is really a half dozen issues tracing back months. Conflict resolution in those cases really comes down to untangling all the bad feelings back to tangible conflicts. So that's where I start. Doing this requires tabling some parts of the conflict temporarily to work on one thing at a time. Most work conflicts come down to one of a few different sources: Situational causes (two people accide...