How do you track and demonstrate how product marketing has influenced the roadmap?

The honest answer: I don't formally track it, and I don't think you should either. When PMM and PM are working well together, influence doesn't feel like something you need to prove on a spreadsheet. You're both looking at the market together and making decisions as a team. If I'm keeping a running tally of "my ideas that made the roadmap," I'm optimizing for the wrong thing. Your goal isn't to mandate what gets built. You're contributing signals – what customers are asking for, where competitor ...Read More

If you are already tracking KPIs and metrics for your product marketing team, you are well on your way to demonstrating how product marketing has influenced the roadmap! It's important to be able to tie each feature or product requested to the direct data you have provided to support the request. You can track and measure things like: Win/loss data: which deals have cited the particular feature/product in their closed/lost reasons. Look at new business losses but also and maybe more importantly, ...Read More

Product Marketing's influence comes in many shapes and forms, including but not limited to: Feature prioritization Naming Pricing & packaging GTM motions Part of your job in PMM is to bring a more holistic view to the release process, help the product team understand how different releases fit into the bigger product narrative, and coordinate the go-to-market motions to make that release a success. The mindset to have here is of an "active participant" of this process, which means being voca ...Read More

I don't think there can be meaningful tracking for this. I also don't think this is worth measuring as a metric. I know it sounds hand-wavy but usually organizations can see when PMMs are truly adding value in the product planning and roadmap creation. Everyone in the org then also automatically gravitates towards such PMMs.Putting an artificial metric around this will only lead to people optimizing for this metric e.g. "I entered three product suggestions into the internal product input portal" ...Read More