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As a product marketer, how do you prioritize the features that you are requesting in the roadmap?

April Rassa
April Rassa
Clari VP, Solutions Marketing | Formerly HackerOne, Cohere, Box, Google, AdobeApril 3

To be clear, Product marketing doesn't priortize feature on a roadmap, you enable Product with the data and business case to prioritize features. Arm the teams with the data and insights needed to drive your case. Can you pull in product usage data, sales pipeline and revenue impacts, support tickets and NPS data, user testing feedback, etc. If you have these elements, then you can provide a rationale for why certain features are ranked in the order they are to drive the discussion with Product.

1313 Views
Jessica Webb Kennedy
Jessica Webb Kennedy
Hummingbirds Head Of Marketing | Formerly Atlassian (Trello), HubSpot, LyftDecember 9

Some of the best prioritization I've seen and been a part of is based on the ICE framework:

  • Impact: what do we think this feature will do for our user-base, our metrics, our bottom-line. This is also a place to consider the size of the opportunity, is it going to impact your whole userbase or a small subset of users? Is this a longer-term feature or a quick fix?
  • Confidence: how sure are we of this, do we have the right data to back it up, can we test it? I'm going to sound like a broken record but again, bring the data or go out and get it, especially anecdotes from conversations you've had with real users! These mean more than pretty much anything. That being said, the competitive intel is also something that PMMs are looked to fold in. We are best positioned to understand market trends and higher-level positioning of features in the market. This can all help with building confidence in deciding which features to prioritize.
  • Ease: how difficult will this be to build, market, sell? Thinking about the ease at every level is helpful here, again if a feature is not hard to build but impossible to market then that's a conversation to have with your product and sales teams.

You score each of the above on a scale from 1-10 and then add up what you get. This total can be compared to other features you are considering building, and be ranked accordingly. The idea is that the three areas should balance one another out, for example - something may be really high in Ease, maybe it's relatively simple to build, but if Confidence is low or you think the Impact will be small, that will drop the score significantly and create space for a conversation about priorities!

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Mandy Schafer
Mandy Schafer
Mastercard Director of Product Marketing | Formerly Miro, Dropbox, Drmandbase, Autodesk, Oracle,July 15

In my experience, prioritization for what's being requested in the roadmap can be done in the following ways:

1) Identifying customer need/ask: Sometimes this is the easiest way to determine which products should be built next. However, this can lead to misalignment with your overall product strategy. 

2) Cost analysis - what's the ROI on this feature, how long will it take, how quickly can this start bringing in customers, or expand existing ones. How much does it cost IT.

3) First to market - how far behind, or ahead of the competitor are you on this. Will building this be for catch up, or put you ahead?

368 Views
Harish Peri
Harish Peri
Okta SVP Product MarketingAugust 3

Always think of a unique prioritization angle to help PMs make their decisions. Chances are they have talked to customers and users and have a good sense of their needs. But many times there are blind spots in terms of sales needs and competitive intelligence. Specifically:

1. What will make the product more sellable? Better demo environments, easier self serve experience, quicker billing, easier implementation process, etc. Things that aren't directly related to user needs but have a big impact on the success of the sales team. PMMs can provide strong inputs there.  

2. What will help the product win against competition? This isn't usually about whizbang features but again about deeply communicating competitive capabilities to PM (beyond 'they have the same feature').

587 Views
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