How to influence the roadmap when product managers are held to their own goals that only mildly align with yours?

In a perfect world, your goals will complement the goals of other teams across your organization, including your Product counterparts. Think about it this way: As a PMM, you are (hopefully) acting as your product’s CMO. As such, you should be focused on:

• Driving high quality pipeline (TOF assets; paid and organic search, events, etc)

• Helping move leads through the funnel (MOF assets)

• Enabling the field to qualify and win (discovery questions, pitch decks, demos, etc) that leads to revenue

• Driving post-sales product engagement and expansion that further increases revenue

All of the above motions and their associated outcomes should be complementary to the Product org’s goals.

In the event that your goals are misaligned with Product’s goals, you’ll need to work with your manager to understand how far off they are, and in what ways.

Goal misalignment is an organizational issue that needs to be identified and reconciled at the leadership level. Sometimes, you’ll have no ability to work around this, which complicates or impedes achieving your own goals. In these cases, the right course(s) of action may be non-obvious, but minimally, you need to flag this to your manager to see how your own goals may need to be modified, if at all.

Bringing it back to the initial question: The roadmap ought to be rooted in driving revenue by solving new use cases and/or existing use cases in a better way, leading to:

• Increased win rates against competitors

• Reduced churn for existing customers (increased “stickiness”)

• Increased engagement that drives incremental revenue

• Expansion to new personas (or entire teams) within your existing customer base

• Serving new customer segments

• Serving new industries

Hopefully, the aforementioned should complement and be consistent with your Product org's goals.