Have you ever been part of a launch where the eng/product team brought in product marketers or customers after work has kicked off (but before launch) and influenced feature development? What was that like?

Sometimes when product kicks off work they have assumptions about how people think about certain features. Marketing, support, and even customers can come to the table with real stories that may invalidate the assumptions product had early on in the feature dev process.

Answer

4 Answers

Launch Channels Launch Strategy Influencing the Product Roadmap

Mary Sheehan

Adobe Head of Lightroom Product Marketing | Formerly Google, AdRoll • 6y

Yes, definitely. Although it’s not ideal, it can happen and you can make an impact in terms of helping them understand product feature prioritization, since they probably already have some idea of what they're building, and (hopefully) who they are solving a problem for. If there are a ton of potential feature options, say over 15, a good method to prioritize internally is the RICE model, which le ts teams rank features based on Reach, Impact, Confidence (that the feature will solve a problem) ...Read More

2,004 Views
Caroline Silverkorn

Freed Director of Product Marketing | Formerly Quizlet, Udemy, San Francisco Ballet • 6y

Yes. One of product marketers’ jobs in the process is to continue sounding the alarm for user validation at each phase of the process, but that’s easier said than done. Pressure to ship product work quickly directly conflicts with this. The reality is that some product teams are more user-centric than others. If you have a product org that is not as user-centric in the early stages, it’s an opportunity for you to get more involved at that point. Develop better relationships with your PDE orgs a ...Read More

1,043 Views
Katherine Kelly

Instructure Head of Product Marketing | Formerly ExactTarget (Salesforce Marketing Cloud), Zendesk, Slack, Salesforce • 4y

I'm potentially not understanding this question - all of the companies I've worked at beta test features and products prior to launch, so product always explicitly solicits this type of feedback prior to a launch. In fact it's a great place for product marketing to get feedback and customer stories that can help with launch positioning, messaging and content as well!

436 Views
Lindsey Weinig

Twilio Director of Product Marketing • 2y

Product Marketing can often bring in the voice of the customer to influence in the development process. I've been involved in product launches from ideation to general availability and the most powerful insights come directly from customers. Interviewing customers on their pain points, to validate the problem we need to solve; and then interviewing other customers on the solution, to validate what the team built solves the problem we identified, have been enlightening and have heavily influenced ...Read More

1,381 Views