How do you measure the success of feature releases and how do you influence the product roadmap that leads to new releases?

I've seen many product marketers who work really hard on a product launch, ship a beautiful campaign, and report back on their email open rates, click thru, page views, etc. While these types of metrics can be useful for an early signal of the product launch's success, they are not the best way to measure success and influence the future product roadmap.

The best measure of success is true product adoption that can be attributed to you launch activities. Are customers using the product that you launched because they engaged with your email? Are your top product KPIs impacted because of this new product? Feature releases need to have really clear metrics for success that are aligned on with product ahead of time. In my experience, the more impactful metrics are the same ones that product is using to measure success. Help tip - keep measuring the impact after the launch for 3, 6, 12 months. You'll start to see trends and find opportunities to grow adoption.

Let's talk about influencing the product roadmap. I always tell my PMMs that your superpower needs to be the voice of the customer. PMMs should know their customer better than anyone and use that information like a secret weapon. Think about it - you're in a product roadmap review and you're discussing prioritization. If you're able to tell your product team that customers prefer feature A over feature B based on data and learnings, then it's going to be hard for someone to argue with that.

Here are some ways to dig into the voice of the customer:

• Customer feedback through support tickets, success managers, sales 

• Chatter and comments on social media 

• Sales deals in the pipeline and their feature requests

• Close lost reasons