How do you get your product team to involve product marketing early enough in the strategy and product planning phases?

If you can get it, the most important thing is executive buy-in for a team structure that honors marketing not just in the end phase, but also as a crucial thought partner to product and design. If you’ve had product launches that haven’t landed with the impact expected, those are great case studies to use to ask for that.

After executive buy-in and team structure, pure relationship building can get you a long way. If you get to know your PMs and show your support in other ways they are more likely to have you top of mind when they are making important decisions.

Another way to go about it is to take initiative on market research when you hear murmurings about a product direction. You can do competitive research and/or user research to bring tangible value to the questions at hand, which shows you can be a real collaborator worth having in early stage meetings.

Lastly, if you can show your value in helping provide structured thinking in the form of slides, problem statements, and useful data, PMs will generally be really happy to have you in the room at earlier stages.

This is a common issue across the board. To address these situation, you have to set expectations with your product manager well. For instance, there are certain experiences such as upgrade path, purchase experience within customers account, inapp notifications messaging that impact your role as a product marketer. You have to make sure the product manager involves you in those meetings at least as it impacts the revenue which is what you are accountable for. 

Be a strategic partner and show them you can add value to the planning process. You and your PM should be joined at the hip, so if you're not getting involved early and often you need to fix the relationship or find a new PM to partner with. 

We have had some success in educating the PM team to start with positioning before they build anything. We use a modified version of the product positioning document (PPD) from Pragmatic Marketing and are asking them to write one before they build anything. It has to be the foundation for a discussion with PMM about the go-to-market, though, rather than being perceived as just another artifact to be thrown over the wall to marketing.

This is a question so many teams struggle with and is super important - the more you are involved up front, the more you can help your team build great products and set yourself up for successful product launches. But this doesn't just happen, it takes work and partnership to build.

Put yourself in the PM's shoes - lots of people have opinions on their roadmap, they probably are getting lots of questions and requests from sales, they've got pressure from engineering to finalize the roadmap so they can figure out staffing, and you're another person asking to get into the fray.

So where to start? My advice is to show how you can help before you start asking your PM to change the way they work. It's rarely effective to come in and have a list of asks of things you want to be involved in, own, and influence in the roadmapping process before you've shown that your involvement can be helpful. 

A good way to start is by looking at a product or feature that's being created and ask leading questions while still being supportive of the work that's being done. Ex "This looks great, I love that we're making this experience better and I know our support team will be really excited about it. I'm curious, have we done digging around how this compares to what our competitors offer?" or "I love where this is going, it looks great. I'm curious if we have an understanding of the total addressable market for this customer base?" 

If the answer to either of these is "I'm not sure" or "We haven't dug into that yet" them boom, you've got an opening to offer up how PMM could help provide insight or do some research to help create a better product. While you deliver that, you can bring up that this is something that product marketing would love to help with for future launches, and that it might be helpful to have a conversation around the current roadmap and what's on the team's mind so you can help. 

At the end of the day, a fundamental shift in how product and PMM work together usually come from your leadership, but there's plenty of opportunity for an IC to work their way into the development process. As you're able to provide more and more value to your team, you become more and more likely to be someone they turn to early in the process for thoughts or insights.