As a product marketer, how have you been able to advocate for a product feature related to your GTM strategy?

There are three elements that I typically use in such conversations:

• customer proof;

• competitor analysis;

• analyst insights;

• revenue potential.

If you bring evidence of what customers want, how competitive the feature is, and additional market insights (e.g. analysts) as unbiased sources, there's a good chance you can make your case for why certain features should be prioritized.

Last, but not least important, is revenue potential. If you are able to identify a number of sales opportunities that have not been able to close because of a feature and the revenue impact it had, that's also a good argument. The caveat to this last item is that it can be very difficult to get the data and also difficult to validate.

If there’s alignment on the ICP you’ve helped codify — alignment both where you win today and where you want to win tomorrow — it’s significantly easier to influence product roadmap. But there’s two ways to think about this:

1) advocate for the problem to be solved

2) advocate for the solution to a known problem

If you have an established product management function #1 tends to be the fastest route to action. PMs always need help collecting data about the market and users, and PMM should be doing this at least quarterly from customer calls/interviews and market surveys. But they also tend to have the most expertise on the functional requirements for solving that problem in a way that fits engineering capacity, user experience, and budget.

If you feel strongly about a particular feature, you can also advocate for that (#2), but you’ll need to prove that exactly what you’re describing is what customers have asked for. This often comes up in follow-on questions in an NPS (“Why did you choose that score?” Or, “what would have to change for you to give us a 10?”), and so can be a direct source of evidence when speaking with product, design, and engineering.