What role should your brand story have in product roadmap planning?

The brand story ought to be the true north for the product strategy. There are so many competing priorities when it comes to setting the roadmap -- getting to feature parity with the competition, executing on customer requests, bug fixes, etc. -- the brand can serve as a useful filter and framework by which you can make decisions and set the appropriate priority.

At Gainsight, our purpose was to be living proof that you can win in business while being human first. Human first became our true north from a product strategy perspective -- how did each proposed feature or enhancement on the roadmap help us take on step closer to the ideal we were chasing?

If things are going right, these should almost feel one-in-the-same: The product direction reinforces the story and brand promise, and the brand messages easily and thoroughly communicate the value of the product.

But, this isn’t always the case, as timelines, teams and strategic visions shift. And that’s okay! Especially at nimble, early companies! If one or the other falls out of alignment, just be sure you make the time cross-functionally to identify and discuss why, re-articulate whichever strategy needs some changes, and make some commitments (ideally with a time bound ー e.g., we’ll make these changes and aim to keep them for at least 6 months).

So, how do you work with this in reality? The answer, at least in my current experience at Coda, is iteratively and with the assumption of positive intent across product and go-to-market teams. We’ve refined our approach to a point that feels really good going into 2021, which gives us a chance to aim high, exercise tactical proficiency, and tell great stories along the way.

Said differently, be open to testing & iterating upon the cadence at which product and brand story reinforce each other.

Twice per year, we engage in a company-wide planning cycle, setting our highest order goals.

Once per week, our product managers and product marketing team meet to discuss tactical updates on our productsーhow are launch timelines looking, has anything changed from a design or outreach strategy perspective, etc.

But what about the space in between “this is product xyz and what it does” and “this is the story of our company if we do what we intend to do?” For that, we’ve begun meeting with the PM + PMM team quarterly to think through: “What is the story of our product for the next few months?” “What are the headlines of what we ship?”

We’re continually testing & iterating upon this rhythm ourselves. With over 100 customer-facing launches this year, our PMM team can sometimes get caught up in the tactical and operational elements of our work. Thankfully, our broader marketing teamーincluding brand, copy, design, solutions, press & commsーkeeps us accountable throughout the week for imbuing our product with our brand promise. This bears out in everything from in-product UI strings and designs, to collaborative content marketing that highlights recent launches.

Your brand story is often rooted in how your company's core mission solves a critical customer problem. So in order to tell a unique and compelling narrative, you want to look at the company's core product DNA, tell an excellent story about how that landscape for that problem has evolved and continues to evolve, and link it to your audience's core need. 

• Why do you exist - what's the core problem or issue
• For whom is your product roadmap built - often times it's one of your founders in tech
• How is your product vision going to deliver this uniquely and consistently - easier said than done

I said "core" several times here because often times, marketers and product leaders get wrapped up in the quarterly product roadmap or monthly Marketing plan. But brand story is about the larger vision, which requires you to zoom out and articulate for the world the landscape for your customers' problems, how it has evolved, and how your product direction is addressing the need. From a planning perspective, you need to have this foundation established in order to influence product roadmap prioritization -- which is the super power that I'm always looking for within great product marketers. 

Without this zoom out, it's often easy to get lost in a battle over semantics or feature commitment timelines -- none of which are helpful for customers to understand why they should believe your business and team are worthwhile partners past this quarter's roadmap (especially in SaaS). And, are also not going to give you long term differentiators to tell that unique and compelling brand story. Roadmap planning itself is really an output of the foundations above.

When business is humming along and you're planning out your roadmap for product enhancements or new features, the brand story won't play a huge role in the product roadmap. Of course, you'll want to make sure features continue to reinforce your key value props, but that can all be spun as part of the launch messaging.

Here are a few examples of when brand changes can dramatically impact your product roadmap:

- A brand refresh: where you'll need to scope visual UI changes to your product to align with new brand guidelines

- A new brand launch: where you may need to update not just the UI but other elements like logo, navigation, login experience, etc. We had to consider this for a few of our solutions when SurveyMonkey announced a new company name, Momentive, and a few of our solutions were getting rebranded.

- Integration of an acquisition: Similar to the two above, you may need to plan for product updates depending on how the new acquitision will fit into your brand architecture.