How to anchor product initiatives / influence product priorities based on member journey / customer priorities.

Data, data, data! Once you are able to identify your customer’s unmet needs, motivations, and attitudes, you can put your customer at the center of your business cases to influence product priorities. And couple that with market insights on your competition, your product counterparts will have to listen. Are you able to identify any gaps that your current feature set does not address? Is there an opportunity for your product to be first to market by fulfilling an unmet need that they cannot get anywhere else as part of their journey to find a solution? For SaaS products, is there any point in the funnel that there is significant drop off that you can test your way into optimizing conversion? Do you have any NPS data or verbatims that you can share areas for enhancements or net new solutions?

In product marketing, we often focus on brand-new features that can attract new customers and expand our market. But for existing customers who've already bought in, sometimes the little updates make the biggest impact.

To ensure that the product team prioritizes these updates, it's really important to have visibility into how customers are experiencing the product. While average NPS score is a useful benchmark, support inquiries can provide more valuable feedback. By analyzing support tickets and live chat conversations, you can identify areas where customers are experiencing friction and prioritize fixing those sharp edges.

A product ideas forum can also be a helpful tool for quantifying customer impact. By tracking the number of upvotes on ideas, you can identify which updates will have the most significant impact on customer satisfaction.

By creating a culture that values customer feedback and encourages the sharing of insights across the organization, you can drive urgency and ensure that the product team prioritizes the updates that matter most to customers.

If I understand the question correctly, this is about allocating time for journey/experience improvements when PMs are focused on feature/capability development. In short, it starts by getting aligned on goals.

At the highest level, start with your company's current strategic priorities. What's most important right now? Perhaps you've placed an emphasis on retention/NRR over new customer acquisition. Ok, so how does this proposed journey/experience improvement tie back to retention? When you make your case through the lens of company goals (or even better, specific product team goals), you're on the right track.

For example, let's say we know that users who regularly rely on feature X retain longer and expand more, but today only 30% use feature X. If you believe the team can increase that number to 50% by making changes the new user journey, go make that case. If it's a strong case, and everybody's working toward the same goal (in this case, improving retention), the product team will have to listen and respond.