Does your product marketing team have an efficient system for quantifying technical costs for new roadmap items that you request? If another team is required for estimating certain roadmap item costs, what's the best way to approach them?

Product marketing should understand product requirements and feature velocity at a high level i.e. how hard it is to deliver a solution and how many features can your team deliver in a quarter. That way you can bucketize feature requests into t-shirt sizes; small, medium large efforts. The onus is on product managament and engineering to determine exact costs and timing of features. 

I tend to think that teams like to hear their work is appreciated and their processes are modeled. So if another team is required for estimating roadmap costs, I'd ask them questions about how they do this level of modeling? What's their process and what are their inputs? Then I'd take a stab at doing something similar and then set up time with them to review. 

At my current company, things tend to be measured based on resource allocation (X full time-employees required to work on the project for Y time frame) to measure technical costs. 

The item that I would add to this though, is that I often come across roadmap conversations where technical costs have been estimated--but rarely come across roadmap conversations where market costs have been estimated. What is the potential impact to your audience if you add a feature (or deprecate one) and is that being measured in the same manner as technical costs? Does launching a feature give you first to market advantages? Does being quick to ideate and release features build better trust amongst your user community? And how do you measure those market advantages against customer awareness and preference? If you think of it as an ROI conversation, you can probably estimate how much it will cost to staff the work required to build a product and can probably forecast usage, but if market perception were also on that list, it could help you have a full picture of the costs associated to your roadmap decisions. 

Currently, we do not.

I don't believe it's the product marketing team's role to quantify the technical costs of a product or solution investment. That's stepping too far into the role and expertise of product and engineering, and frankly it's just an inefficient use of resources. 

That's not to say you should wave a magic wand and wish for the impossible. Product marketers must have the technical depth to understand the limitations, constraints, and possibilities of a technology. Without it, they lose credibliity quickly. And so you ought to have a rough sense of the difficulty or feasibility of a request. 

But quantifying it is cheeky, bordering on insulting. If you don't trust your R&D teams to properly scope a request, something else is rotten, and you should look there first. (Yes, that means you might be the problem.)

If there is a team dedicated to scoping roadmap items, that's a good indication you have a pretty mature product management process. Work in the process - understand how it works, where the right places to insert suggestions are, and plan accordingly. Be open about your goals, and what you do and don't know. You'll be surprised how often thoughtful ideas are welcomed and incorporated. 

I'm not the best person to answer this question, but my team interviewed somebody who is. I highly recommend you check out this take from Conor O'Mahony, who served as Klaviyo's Chief Product Officer at the time of recording: https://www.productled.org/blog/interview-connor-omahony-klaviyo

He shares a great story about how he changed the way an organization measures R&D costs and ROI.

Here's an excerpt:

And then I got up in front of the company and I said, "Hey, you know what? For the last six months, the company has spent $400,000 in this particular feature, $20,000 in this other feature, and so on." And it was real interesting because the people who had worked on those features had an immediate visceral reaction. They talked to themselves, "Oh, $400,000 on this feature that had no impact on the business? $20,000 in this feature that had a big impact on the business?"