How to tackle a situation where Product Managers can often wary when hearing that Product Marketers want to "influence the product roadmap"?

Of course Product Managers are wary. They don’t know what “influencing the product roadmap” might mean and everything about it signals a loss of their control and autonomy. It’s important to reframe the situation to minimize the ambiguity and negative stigma associated with it. Product Management and Product Marketing should not be a “them versus us” relationship. Instead, it’s a “we” relationship where we share the same goal of making sure the product roadmap meets the needs of the customer and ...Read More

(Hot take?) I, too, am wary when product marketers' stated/primary motive is to "influence the roadmap" b/c influencing the roadmap is just a means to an end; it's not the end itself. (This is perhaps a slim bone to pick, but in my experience, genuine collaborative intent makes all the difference b/w a trusting/productive partnership vs. a guarded/challenging one.) Once there is right intent, you can influence the roadmap by becoming the absolute authority in the world (yes, I said world) in you ...Read More

If approached with those terms, I would be wary too. For example, imagine PMs coming to you and told you that they wanted to influence the marketing roadmap. If you heard this, I’d imagine you’d tell them politely to go to hell. What do they know about marketing? What do you know about building a product? Can’t be that hard?The core challenge denoted above is actually the relationship between PM and PMM. It’s not “not being able to influence the product roadmap." Think about what you’re trying t ...Read More

A quick win you can do, to gain trust - is ask from your PM for a list of features that are on the roadmap or consideration for the roadmap, that do not have engineers working on yet. Take those features, and use whichever your favorite feature prioritization method is, and conduct some customer/market survey based research to provide a feature importance report back to your PM. I can promise you that your PMs are hungry for as much data to make an informed decision, if you can come back with in ...Read More

This is an interesting topic since I have worn both hats - product manager and product marketing, in case of formal multi-product solutions with SKUs -- I wore all-in-one hat. Most recently at BabbleLabs as well - it was all-in-one. My learnings from these experiences if I had a product marketer -- here's what I would have appreciated  1) Thorough research on the market /industry segment including data that helps us assess the business opportunity, pricing and packaging vis-a-vis competition or ...Read More