How do we get our product management team to be more customer focused than timeline focused?

My guess is your product team might benefit from PMM partnership earlier on in the product development process. However, that’s easier said than done! In order to move from downstream value addition (what’s the timeline of something that’s supposed to launch, what comms are we developing for the launch, etc.) to upstream influence (what are we building and why), you need to first establish credibility. Someone else asked “how do you establish credibility” in this AMA so check out that response a ...Read More

Product teams can get myopic with mandate from leadership or long term vision. But this is exactly where product marketing can be an excellent value partner to their product peer. Timeline focus assumes at features selected and priorities are spot on and set in stone. But that is often not the case, especially with constantly changing marketscape and customer needs. By presenting a case for change backed by data - customer interviews, sales interviews and pipeline analysis, you can bring new inf ...Read More

It’s almost a cliche, but a really well-made slide deck can go a long way. Gather insights from all parts of the organization (sales, user operations, customer success, marketing) and from users themselves and distill them into a well-made deck that outlines your segments and target markets and illustrates customer problems and perceptions. Also, it almost always shows up somewhere in the metrics. It’s important to have a good relationship with product analysts or data analysts. Experiment with ...Read More

Covered this a bit in another question. PMM can bring a very strong customer perspective when it comes to product development. To have a seat at the table though, you have to do the work. This is what we do to bring customers perspective to our product teams: Visit, shadow, do work at our customers. No research can compare to the insights you get by actually being in the shoes of our customers - in our case, small businesses Talk to customer facing teams (Sales, Account Management, Support) and  ...Read More