How can you involve your product marketing team in roadmap discussions early on without being seen as intrusive or kingdom-building?

• Build relationships. Show up to add value; ask, remind, repeat.
• Bring the voice of the customer to the table. Leverage customer interviews, NPS verbatims, third-party research findings, competitive intel. Bring data to validate and strengthen your recommendations with the customer wants, needs/unmet, and motivations at the center of said suggestions.
• Bring your marketing calendar with you. Create shared aspirations to get as much exposure and adoption of products set to release while opening discussions on what else can be invaluable product additions to the overarching brand story your marketing team will be pushing out. Time and again, we are finding at Glassdoor that when we are able to anchor or couple product releases with marketing campaigns, it is stronger in every sense.
• Bring your GTM launch proposals to get feedback. Involve your product counterparts in the sausage-making. How might your team help move these products off the shelf? How might your team help arm product with data to help with prioritization, especially in high growth orgs where ruthlessly prioritizing is the name of the game?

I’m sure the answer to this question varies dramatically depending on where product marketing sits within the organization - is it within product? marketing? elsewhere?

At Square, product marketing sits within product teams, which operate as small interdisciplinary sprint teams composed of product management, product marketing, engineering, design, data science, research, and creative. While this is the ideal state and it’s not always practical or possible to mirror that team composition across every product, there is a recognition that including those diverse perspectives is valuable and improves outcomes for customers.

When you have a culture that values interdisciplinary expertise for product development, functions contribute to roadmap discussions as early as possible by design. When there isn’t an expectation of shared ownership, there is a lot of pressure put on one function, usually product managers. Product managers may play an outsized role in roadmap development, but in an embedded sprint team model, they rely on thought partners to provide functional expertise and diverse perspectives.

If you’re not operating in a sprint team environment with product marketing embedded in product orgs, I would recommend developing a close relationship with your product counterparts, aligning on customer needs and business goals, and creating feedback loops and cadences that create opportunities for integrating cross functional input into product development planning.

Again, I'm a firm believer that product marketing should be in lockstep with their counterparts in product. As a new product marketer, taking the time to forge those relationships and build trust with the product team is an essential first step.

It's also important to align around higher-level company objectives. This helps establish common ground and ensures that everyone is working towards the same outcomes.

With a strong foundational relationship and a shared goal, it's much easier to influence the product roadmap. There will always be points of tension or areas where priorities will not be interpreted in the same way across teams. And that's okay! If you've established a baseline, you can still have really productive conversations about what you're trying to accomplish and why.

At Wistia, we've incorporated GTM input as part of the product team's planning process. Those GTM inputs are directly tied to the company OKRs, so there is some consistency and familiarity there. We've baked in that time for leaders across sales, customer service, and marketing (including product marketing) to share what's most important to their success and the product team is able to weigh that in their own prioritization and planning. Making it part of the process vs. an intrusion is definitely a nice cultural shift that we've been able to achieve.

In short, relationships and process.

Great product marketing can make a product manager look like a hero. But great product marketing requires getting involved early. It's your job to help your PMs understand what you need and why, and more importantly, what's in it for them.

• Meet with the PMs you support at least every other week (weekly is better).

• Bring something (anything!) of value to every one of those meetings (ie market feedback, relevant competitor updates).

• Ask your PM for their opinions—make it a discussion, not a lecture.

• Get aligned on a shared vision of what success looks like.

When that relationship and alignment exists, it's time to formalize your process, or productize it! Process creates clarity and predictability. Think about all of the times you've worried about "stepping on toes" or been annoyed by somebody stepping on yours. Clearly-defined process can all but eliminate those situations.

For example, at Appcues we've baked a couple of product marketing-sourced questions into the formal product discovery process (ie PMs must answer X, Y, Z questions before we move on from the discovery phase). They don't do it because "product marketing makes us," they do it because our PMMs and PMs have a mutual understanding of why it's important to answer those questions that early on. Phrased another way, they know that answering those questions up front will give us the best chance of a successful product launch.

Experienced product managers know that we need to start planning launch as soon as we start planning a release. Alas, many inexperienced product managers (and most product owners) assume that BUILDING is all that matters. (Sigh). They're the ones who think release and launch are the same thing. 

That said, more than one marketing person has said, "We need to know what's shipping a year in advance!" Which is impossible. We know what we know when we know it. 

Release is the end of a development project; Launch is the beginning of a marketing project. Both parallel projects need an understanding of the roadmap, the problems being solved, the personas being served, and the priorities.