As a product marketer, how do you ensure that your customer research & insights are relevant and actually actionable/useful for product teams as they develop the product roadmap?

Set super clear research goals whenever you talk to customers or conduct a research study. As part of those goals, explain what the physical output of the research will be and articulate next actions the team should be able to take. 

Examples might be something like "create a customer journey map that highlights key gaps that we aren't serving well today" or "stack rank potential core value propositions based on what resonates most with customers." 

For the "fuzzier" insights about your audience such as personas, you have to do more work to make these relevant and actionable. I've seen product marketers or researchers create personas before that just don't "stick" or gain widespread adoption throughout the org. Part of that is because personas aren't always as validated as they should be. As much as you can, for these types of insights, try to back up your qualitative insights with behavioral data analytics to help prove it's more than just "marketing fluff."

The best way is to really loop in your product and design org along the way and ask for feedback often. 

In your final synthesis deck for any research you conduct, try to propose potential "next actions" or "fast follow tests" that help put your more informed hypotheses to the test in the wild.

• Be objective: Use customers' exact words and quotes as much as possible. Be the notetaker, the objective observer, and people will start to trust your observations.
• Be concise: Once you've listened, sat in on meetings, taken good notes, get good at synthesizing them into short summaries. Most people don't read long emails or sit through long meetings, so it's important to be brief. I got into product marketing with a liberal arts background, and synthesizing customer research and insights is a great way to put your writing skills to work.
• Be consistent: The most success I've had with surfacing insights has been through weekly emails, regular updates, check ins. Don't assume your priorities are going to be acted on after just one update. It takes regular updates and repetition to be heard.
• Offer unique value: Our product team does a lot of customer meetings themselves. As a product marketer, one way to add value is to become an expert in a data set, or customer type, or marry your customer insights with a set of market data. Then, product will seek you out over time, and you will be able to offer them value beyond what they can get themselves from just talking to customers. 

In partnership with the product leadership team, establish a 360 degree feedback loop that takes the plethora of feedback channels and terminates them into one like AHA or Jira. Once you have all the feedback and requests in one place for all to see, develop a criteria to prioritize. How many customers will this feature impact, how much perceived value will they gain, how much energy and cost will it take to build, etc. That way you can serve up feature requests on a silver platter for leadership and product management.

Ask them. 99% of PMM<>PM challenges can be resolved by better communication, whether at the individual level or further up the chain of command.

• "What kinds of insights are relevant and actually useful to you? Why?"

• "How could I better package/present insights like these?"

• "What else would you need to know in order to feel confident acting on these insights?"

More generally,

• "What's keeping you up at night?"

• "What gaps or blind spots exist today?"

• "If you could wave a magic wand and answer any single question about our market or customers, what would it be?"

As you start to identify patterns (ie the same question comes up repeatedly, across PMs), look for opportunities to streamline and bake steps into the formal product development process.

When you take this approach, you'll not only learn a ton, you'll also establish yourself as a trusted, valuable resource to your product managers. They may even start getting you involved proactively! :)

The best way to ensure customer research and insights are relevant and actionable/useful for product teams is to align research to short-term, mid-term, and long-term product goals. Aligning on goals and priorities the product team is setting up gives product marketers a view into how they're thinking about the evolution of the product vision which can then be actioned into research that can then feedback into more detailed roadmap planning.

Key things that product marketers can do to drive impact of customer research and insights:

1. Involve Product Teams Early: Involve product teams in the research process from the outset. Collaborate with them to understand their needs and priorities, and involve them in defining research objectives, hypotheses to test, and methodologies.

2. Share Insights Effectively: Communicate research findings in a clear, concise, and compelling manner that resonates with product teams. Use a mix of qualitative and quantitative data, storytelling techniques, and visual aids to bring insights to life and make them more actionable.

3. Provide Context and Recommendations: Provide context around research findings by highlighting key trends, patterns, and customer pain points. And offer actionable recommendations based on key findings that product teams can use to inform their decision-making and shape the product roadmap. This last piece is probably the most important thing. Showing that your role is not just to conduct the research, but also to interpret it and provide ideas on how product managers can action on insights is invaluable in building trust as collaborators and integrating the PMM role into how PMs works.

4. Integrate Research into Roadmap Planning: Integrate research findings directly into the product roadmap planning process. Use insights to inform feature prioritization, define user stories, and validate product hypotheses. Ensure that research is an ongoing and iterative part of the roadmap planning process, rather than a one-time event. You can do this by creating work-back schedules for research plans that align with the annual/bi-annual/quarterly roadmap planning process.

5. Measure Impact: Track the impact of research-driven initiatives on key product metrics, such as user engagement, retention, and satisfaction. Use data to demonstrate the value of customer insights and make a case for continued investment in research efforts. Make note of which features were added or introduced to roadmaps in the planning process based on customer insights and research you provided and follow-up to see how those features are being adopted.