How do you more effectively influence product roadmap priorities and timeline?

In my experience, the most powerful tool for influencing the Product Roadmap as a PMM is customer insights. If you can clearly demonstrate customer pain points and inspire empathy, that tees up the opportunity to be part of the discussion around how you might meet those needs through product solutions. From a timeline standpoint, I find aligning on prioritization to be the most effective lever. One way to approach this is to look at the roadmap, estimate the business impact of all key initiative ...Read More

My biggest advice is be customer-focused.  I am a big believer in PMM being a strategic partner to Product Management.  Beyond this simply being my belief, it is hard to build a strong PMM organization unless the business sees the function as strategic. One of the ways in which I've helped Product Marketing to be viewed as an important and strategic function of the business is by influencing the product roadmap.  Each PMM on my team - including myself - is involved at Product Discovery. The reas ...Read More

One area where I've seen PMM historically drive a ton of value is with market and competitive insights. By bringing insights from the market, competitive landscape, buyers, and/or analysts, PMM can ensure that product has considered all inputs when they narrow down on their target user, pain points, and finally solutioning. Here is a deck we've used internally to help build collaboration between PM & PMM. If you're still struggling with being brought in too late, my advice is to focus on 1-2 ...Read More

It’s really important to understand your product’s team development process. How is the Product team structured and why? What and when are their sprint cycles. How do new tasks get on the backlog and how is the backlog prioritized. If possible, attend backlog prioritization meetings so you can understand what information PMs look at when making decisions. This will help you be much more strategic in how, when, and why you add on the backlog. Also it’s key to develop a close relationship with a f ...Read More

I have always loved this quote by Robert Johnson (notably a musician, not a product marketer!):  “Leadership is the ability to influence people and motivate them to do what needs to be done to accomplish a goal, vision or mission.” Those last three parts: goal, vision, and mission, are the keys to influence. Know what you are trying to accomplish (the goal), the vision of where that accomplishment will take you, and the why (the mission).  I always like to have a stack-ranked list of requested f ...Read More

DATA. But I don't think the word "influence" is quite right. I really don't think PMMs should have an agenda when it comes to roadmapping. I think our role is to represent the needs of users, and bring data to PMs to help them navigate that decision making process. We can provide: NPS score trends Customer interview themes Data on win/loss rates Insight into competitive investments Product feature usage by differnet personas Data on where folks get stuck in using the product Top questions asked ...Read More