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 ...Read More

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 leadershi ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 impa ...Read More

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 g ...Read More