What are some tips for helping drive product roadmap as a product marketer if you don't have data or customer anecdotes at your disposal?

There are various inputs into the product roadmap that Product Marketing can provide, beyond data and customer anecdotes. Where Product Marketing can be most valuable is in connecting the dots across the various insights to share a point of view and answer the question 'why this matters'. For instance, you can share competitive trends but take the analysis a step further to share 'why this matters'.  Additional inputs into the product roadmap:  Competitive Analysis: Understanding key competitors ...Read More

It can be tough to get access to data sometimes depending on how your org or team is setup. Maybe you are small and don't have people dedicated to digging into this, maybe team siloes create too much process or your industry is highly regulated. If that is the case I'd encourage you to go out and get the data yourself - can you test competitor products and write up your findings? Can you have some friends or relatives sign up for your tool and gather feedback? Social listening is another great w ...Read More

I’m going to assume that by data you mean customer research. In general, it’s difficult to drive a roadmap or any type of strategy without insights. However you don’t always have to do formal research to understand your customers and to make recommendations advocating for their needs. Some areas you can look at are your own data on user behavior and adoption patterns, popular customer support questions and trends, NPS software comments, feedback from your sales team, website interaction, engagem ...Read More

If you dont have data or customer anecdotes, I'm not sure you should be driving roadmap. Influencing roadmap is an earned outcome and not something to just "do" for the sake of checking a box. Think of the roadmap as a business mechanism, and do you have enough to convince stakeholders that the direction of your company should be steered in another direction? For most cases, that is going to be user data, market research, competitive positioning, customer feedback, etc. Without that, I'm not sur ...Read More