At what stage of product roadmap planning and execution should you step in as a product marketer?

As a strategic partner on the product team, I believe PMMs should be involved throughout the product development lifecycle.  For larger initiatives at Lyft, PMMs create 'Market Requirement Documents' or MRDs that are meant to serve as input to the PRD. This helps gain alignment on market insights, opportunity, key use-cases, audiences, and value prop before the PM starts work on the project.  This helps provide product teams with market and customer insights to inform product development, result ...Read More

Product teams benefit the most when Product Marketing stays connected from inception of new features/products to actual delivery. At inception, product marketers help with gauging potential impact and thereby help priortize the roadmap. Once a feature/ product is commited to a roadmap and is on a predicatable release timeline (90-180 day window is typical fast moving software teams) is setup, product marketers help communicate out to the roadmap to the field or key customers. As with anything el ...Read More

This may be bold, but I like to help facilitate the roadmap development process when PMs are okay with it. Not all PMs will jive with this, but if you can develop a strength as being a good facilitator, that can get you a long way. The key is to provide open frameworks to support discussion. I think of myself as a “right hand woman” to my PMs and I can assert subtle influence by priming slide decks, agendas or google docs with categories, visual organization patterns, and smart open questions th ...Read More

There are varying opinions on this, but from my POV, it should be as early as possible. It's a journey to get to this though, and won't happen overnight. Also, our contributions will change as well. In early roadmap planning, it's about ideation (both blue sky thinking, and what's possible near-term). If you have data on what feautres customers have requested, it can be a quick win for short-term roadmap prioritization. For bigger themes ti's a broader conversation abotu where the market is head ...Read More

I consider three basic steps in product development -- pre, during and post.  Pre -- is when the product is still in concept mode. Product Managers and Product Marketers are 2 sides of the same coin. They both need to know what is problem being solved, why "company A" is uniquely positioned to solve the problem, why does it matter for the customer -- meaning does the customer even know they have a problem ?...and how is our solution / approach going to solve their problem. Is this solution uniqu ...Read More

Ahead of roadmap planning. Part of your job is to bring market, competitor, and customer context that you have gathered through your research. Bring a different point of view - something that the product team doesn't already know. This earns you credibility and they'll be more apt to invite you to these discussions.   If you don't have the domain knowledge yet - perhaps because you're new to the role - you still need to have visibility into the roadmap to be able to do your job effectively. If y ...Read More

I think there are three stages to product planning that involve a product marketer: 1. Before the roadmap is set (helping inform what the product should be),  2. While the product is being built (ensuring it'll make sense to customers), 3. When the product is getting ready to launch (positioning it and GTM).  I think your question is directed at the third point specifically in which case it probably varies on the type of product launch. We have relatively minor launches where a PMM gets pulled i ...Read More