How would you recommend a PMM influence the product team to think more about longer term value rather than just always building products geared towards low hanging fruit/quick money?

This is a really important topic, and for me, what's worked well is setting up what I call the product maturity model. Sometimes, the product team just gets too much into the weeds of the product, and the day to day problems our users are facing. Its important for teams to step back and look at what are we really trying to acheive with our product, what should the product look like in 5 years, what is the "perfect" scenario. I always joke, how do we build a product to the point that we don't have jobs anymore? 

A product maturity model helps lay out how your see your customers using your product today, tomorrow and in the future state. By building one out, it helps teams understand the longer term value of what your product is for your customers. Visualizing this helps teams also see the gaps, and undestand what's important, rathering than solving for problems at that specific moment. 

Assuming product(s) are being built to grow and last the test of time, there should always be a balance of building for short-term vs. long-term impact. The exact balance between those two can vary depending on the vision and goals of the business. 

In my experience, we spend the most time discussing and aligning on short- vs. long-term investments during the Annual Planning cycles, which at Square happen once a year. During this time we take a step back to restate our Vision for the solutions we are building (which is a 3-5 year view), and identify strategic priorities that we believe will help us move in that direction in the next year, and the metrics we’ll use to measure progress. This gives us space to explore how we build value over the longer term, either by expanding to different audience segments (TAM expansion), increasing customer value and retention (LTV, ARPU), or introducing new products (just a few examples!).

Knowing that we typically have these discussions about product strategy and future direction during Annual Planning, it allows our PMM team time to prepare our perspectives and spend earlier parts of the year conducting research, deep diving on competitive and market trends, and shaping perspectives and business cases around what we think will set up the product / business for longer-term success. If your company doesn’t have a formal planning period, I believe PMMs can still proactively take on the work of thinking about the future and longer-term growth strategies. Similarly, if there isn’t a shared vision that PMM and Product are working towards, then that would be a great place to start collaborating and aligning!

This is when strategic planning – either annually, semi annually or even quarterly – would be valuable. When product teams can think about their north star, big picture vision, they can dedicate resources and commitment on those longer-term value features than those with low hanging fruit/quick money. I would recommend that PMMs bring in data to help support their position – do you have customer feedback, sales or customer success data, market analysis or competitive insights on the longer-term value features that can help influence how product is planning their capacity for the rest of the year? Is product leadership questioning if they want to go down a more experimental path that will give the product more growth opportunities in the long run? These are methods PMMs can utilize to refocus Product’s attention.

Working toward building long term value depends on your product vision and overall company strategy. When working with the product team leadership to establish the roadmap, its critical that you start with a vision that will align all of the feature deliverables into core themes that support the customer and their needs in current and future markets.