How do you balance customer input from PMM with what PM is already gathering?

As outlined in another question, there are multiple ways to analyze i) your product-market fit, and ii) your position in the market relative to your competitors. All of these inputs need to be analyzed systematically to determine your product strategy, and thus, your roadmap that will fulfill that strategy. To be explicit, PMMs need to gather more than just customer input to build out their point of view.

Ideally, both PMMs and PMs will analyze many/most of the same inputs. While this may seem redundant, the reality is that determining the right product strategy (and roadmap) is difficult, ambiguous work that requires ongoing and healthy debate amongst multiple stakeholders to give yourself the best chance of getting it right-ish (it’ll never be perfect). If a PMM is only investing in direct customer feedback, and the PM is only reviewing, say, a backlog of FRs (feature requests), then you’re reducing the likelihood of making the right long term strategic decisions.

Finally, by maximizing the diversity of your feedback channels, you reduce the risk of over-rotating to any one channel of feedback, giving you a more holistic understanding of your place in the market and what decisions you should make to improve your position.

On the consumer side, we rely heavily on consumer research and product analytics since we don't have sales teams or industry analysts in the same way B2B companies do.

We launch products iteratively and experimentally, breaking down the roadmap into small pieces and analyzing signals to understand what's working or not working. Customer support (which we call 'customer happiness' at MyFitnessPal) provides invaluable feedback since they're on the front lines hearing both pain points and positive reactions. They're especially helpful when we need to make decisions about removing features from the product - which is an important part of roadmap planning that often gets overlooked. Sometimes you need to make room for innovation by sunsetting features that no longer align with your future direction, and customer support can help you understand the potential impact of those decisions.

Customer feedback should be weighted most heavily since they're the ones giving you budgets at the end of the day. But it's important to talk to a variety of customer personas, especially in B2B where 7-20 different stakeholders can influence a purchase.

Sales feedback is excellent for go-to-market insights and can identify burning customer issues that need immediate attention. However, sales teams may not always help you peer around corners to see where the industry is headed next or identify blue sky opportunities. To get that kind of strategic feedback from sales, you need a more structured approach through formal voice-of-field programs rather than passively waiting for input. For future-looking insights, competitive analysis and analyst perspectives become particularly valuable to complement what you're hearing directly from customers and sales.

The customer always comes first when weighing different inputs for the roadmap. They are the end users of your product, so their feedback is most important.

However, other sources provide valuable perspectives too. Sales teams offer broader customer feedback from the field and insights on how to make messaging actionable. Analysts provide industry-wide perspective, competitor intel, and market trends that individual customers might not see. When weighing these inputs, I categorize them by their unique value: customers for direct product feedback, sales for go-to-market perspective, and analysts for broader market context. This helps balance the different types of feedback appropriately while keeping customer needs as the priority.