How do you continue to innovate when your product team(s) have stalled and are no longer bringing new developments to the table?

This is an interesting one where I'd want to understand more. Is the innovation slowdown temporary? What is the cause or strategy behind it? What are the expectations on your organization in light of this?

In many ways I see this as an opportunity for your team to step up as experts in the market and audience. What are the problems that your customer is facing that hasn't been solved yet, but could be with creativity using what you already have in market? I'd suggest pairing closely with your product managers, sales, customer success or other external customer-facing teams to understand what stories you could amplify.

I'd first seek to understand why there may be an innovation stall that you may not be aware of. Below is what I commonly see. If you know the 'why' it'll better help inform how you might proceed.

• Product leadership is changing - it may be happening in the background of someone on the way out, or someone new being brought in. Usually in these times, CEOs can be hesitant to invest heavily in new products and features (vs. just maintaining current) before a new leader joins.

• Product strategy / goals are changing - With or without a leadership change, they may be changing their north star metrics so are going back to the drawing board which means they're likely re-evaluating the whole roadmap. Perhaps you're no longer focused on acquiring new users, but retaining the ones you have.

• M&A - your executive team may be considering acquiring a company, or you're getting acquired, or ownership is changing.

• Bugs, maintenance, platform instability- the prod/eng team has gotten a ton of feedback from existing customers about bugs, existing features or uptime and so the eng team is entirely focused on keeping the lights on, so to speak. While this isn't a product marketers favorite scenario, it is the reality sometimes!

To get insight into the 'why' - I'd also come to the table with your product counterparts (whether that's a chief product officer or a junior PM) with curiosity and an observation and ask something like: "Ive noticed that our shipping velocity has slowed down versus where we were X months/years ago. Have you noticed that too? That will open the door for conversation on why that might be and how you might be able to get back on track faster so that you're not waiting around 3-6 months for a new strategy to get in place. Also, your product leader may not be engrained with individual PM teams the way you are, so they may not even realize that innovation had stalled.

A great way to navigate during these 'transition' times as PMM, is to turn to an often overlooked strategy—enhancing existing features rather than just launching new ones. Find out what products and features are most highly correlated with customer retention and focus on campaigns on driving adoption of those. If you don't know what those features are, now is a great time to work with a data scientist or get access to your product usage data yourself and do that analysis.

I'd also say that product is not the only function responsible for bringing new developments to the table. As the PMM, and often the voice of the customer/prospect, we should be empowered to share our customer insights and influence where the roadmap should head and what features to prioritize! Product may have 'insights blindspots' that only you can open their eyes to!

My last note on this - some organizations prioritize shipping fast and it is a critical part of their DNA and culture. This is an incredibly important facet and variable I consider when looking at new roles. There are pros and cons for a product marketer- high shipping velocity can make back-to-back launches a huge part of your job. But if that's incredibly important to you, and its just not part of the culture of the organization you're in, it's worth re-evaluating if this company is right for you.