How do you influence the product roadmap so that features and/or fixes stemming from VOC/customer feedback make it into the priority?

Customer needs and feedback are fundamental drivers of product strategy, prioritization, and roadmapping. It’s also important to align on goals for the business to ensure all teams are working toward the same outcomes. If product management is seeking to expand the addressable market while product marketing wants to increase penetration in an existing market - it will of course be more difficult to align on which feedback matters most! Once goals are aligned, framing specific customer feedback i ...Read More

I view the role of PMM as a strategic partners to product management, and it's important to have this frame of mine when approaching product teams with learnings. Product Marketers are the voice and champion of the customer throughout the product development process. The best way I've found to do this throughout my career is owning customer and market insights. I've done this in a few different ways: Build a sales or customer feedback channel: Whether you purchase a feedback tool or create your ...Read More

I saw this work really well at Asana with a VoC program, which was conducted on a quarterly basis and involved representatives across all “listening channels” at the company: Sales, CS, support, and PMM (which represented new market opportunities and competitors). The final deliverable was a consolidated list of feature requests ranked by pain level and frequency. If that kind of large-scale program isn’t possible (Asana had a dedicated program manager who ran it), then I’d lean into data as muc ...Read More

I suggest to follow a strategic approach that combines data-driven insights with effective cross-functional collaboration. Gather and analyze customer feedback from various channels such as support tickets, surveys, and social media. Then identify recurring pain points, feature requests, and areas for improvement. By quantifying and prioritizing these insights, you can build compelling case for product enhancements. It is equally important to foster close collaboration with customer-facing teams ...Read More

There are a few aspects to this. The first involves being proactive and enabling your team with insights ahead of time. The second involves bringing in other data/business rationale to round out your case as to why these user needs should be prioritized. Enabling your team ahead of time Think about ongoing customer feedback mechanisms you can set up. For example, weekly customer churn surveys, customer calls, sales feedback loops, VOC programs in conjunction with customer success, design and sal ...Read More