How do you influence the roadmap for highly technical products?

Short answer: you have to be more technical :) You don’t need to be an engineer or admin, but you do need to understand the product deeply enough to hold your own in technical conversations. I still have a long way to go and a lot more to learn, but here are a few things I've done to help me learn faster: Get hands-on. Use the product yourself. Learn how to demo it, test key features, and understand how customers actually experience it. When you can speak from real usage, not slides, your feedba ...Read More

As someone who has solely worked in tech, this is a great question! Because you want to build rapport with your product team when you make suggestions, but also need to understand the technical side of things. A couple things to consider here: Speak the (technical) language: Learn enough about the product’s architecture, tech stack, and engineering constraints to accurately frame your suggestions in terms that resonate and build trust/confidence with technical teams. For example, do you know wha ...Read More

You need to lean harder on partnership with your technical PM and engineers. PMM focuses on the "why" not the "how." You bring the signal from customers and the market to understand customer problems & potential business value. The technical team can help you figure out if it's actually feasible and what the trade-offs are. The fundamentals are the same, though. Customer pain points matter. Competitive gaps matter. Market trends matter. You just need technical partners to help you assess wha ...Read More

Have a learner’s mindset. In your spare time, keep reading technical briefs, whitepapers, documentation, and even JIRAs to understand your products' architecture and technical details. This will help you better understand and better position yourself when discussing the feasibility of a new roadmap item with your PMs. You can also ask to be a fly on the wall for product and support ticket review meetings to familiarize yourself with the terminology. I’ve also made it a personal goal for my team ...Read More

When influencing technical roadmaps without deep technical expertise, focus on use cases rather than technical specifications. Start by establishing relationships with your engineering counterparts, just as you would with product managers. Instead of dictating technical solutions, frame conversations around the problems you're trying to solve and the end state you want to achieve. For example, when advocating for personalization capabilities in our CRM platform, I painted a picture of what our u ...Read More