How can PMMs get involved in the early stages of Product development, and how much influence should a marketing strategy have on the overall vision for a product?

To get involved in the early stages of Product development, I recommend PMMs bring a POV from the market that can shape the product. Some questions at the early stages of development might be: What is the segment of customers this product is built for? What are some alternatives available for customers for this product? What are some dynamics of the market (e.g. are there many players? or is the market very consolidated) What are some gaps from current alternatives in the market? What do their c ...Read More

As a representative of the consumer voice and market demand, PMMs' involvement in product development from the early stages is critical to success. More specifically, Product Marketers can make themselves an invaluable stakeholder to the process by 1. Conducting and synthesizing early market research to identify the product's core target audience and user profiles and
 2. Becoming subject matter experts on the industry landscape to identify a differentiated positioning from competitors
 By doing ...Read More

Ideally, very early on. If your org uses an agile methodology, its best if PMMs get involved at the release planning or 'epic' phase to help shape the bigger direction. Its not ideal for PMMs to get involved at the story level because that tends to be about technical tradeoffs and can lead to PMMs stepping on PM toes for no reason. If there is a clear hypothesis of target market/buyer/segment, then PMM can provide useful input on what capabilities and use cases should be prioritized.   PMMs shou ...Read More

As the PMM, you often may know more about the product that the product may know. This is due to the nature of PMM having a birds eye view across the entire company with how your features fit in with the rest of the solutions. As the eyes and ear on the market, you are also know your competitors, the market landscape, and what your customers are expecting. All of this knowledge is key to help with the early stages of product developement. A lot of times, product spends so much time focusing on th ...Read More

PMMs can get involved early by identifying patterns between feature adoption and personas/target markets and codifying that into consumables for product development. Maybe the engineering team has a hard time seeing beyond the code into who they're building for and what they want - that's where you can come in as a PMM and influence. In terms of how much influence a marketing strategy should have...let's take a page out of 6sense's book for a second. Their CMO now CRO Latane Conant astutely chan ...Read More