What systems have you put in place to ensure your product marketers are kept up to date with changes to product timelines?

My philosophy on this is that PMMs should almost be embedded into their counterpart Product/Engineering teams. Schedule or scope changes shouldn't come to them as a surprise.

We have utilized multiple tools like shared calendars, regular update meetings, dependency tracking tools, etc. Those are all useful but they are just tools. The intent is for PMMs to constantly stay in touch with the Product team to understand the what, why, and when of the customer value being delivered. Having this mindset and being an active participant in decision-making builds empathy within PMMs for the realities of Product delivery and empathy within partner teams for the downstream dependency pressures that PMMs feel for Product GTM.

Notion. Notion. Notion.

We use Notion for everything and build product and product marketing operating systems on Notion. My VP of Product and myself have built databases that automatically alert us as items move across the product development lifecycle. This triggers cues for PMM when we need to lean into certain projects (once they've hit the development stage v. scoping for example). Beyond Notion, I've established a formal tiering process for new features that involves a calculator and product marketing brief to suss out impact/launch plan. These are my tools for managing scope creep and timeline adjustments.

I'm not sure I've ever used a 'system' but I would say that alignment with product is key! This isn't just around roadmaps and product timelines it's for everything from product development all the way through launch and beyond. Product Marketing is an invaluable resource for product to have 'at the table' to ensure everything from product:market fit, positioning, messaging, and so much more. So many 'mistakes' can be caught early if PMM is part of early conversations (earlier the better!) So from that alignment comes a regular interlock and with that strong comms etc. By and large this will take care of all updates, timeline adjustments and so on.

I am assuming you have a fairly large and complicated product suite that faces lots of roadmap changes

Here are the processes I have seen work 

- All roadmap tracked via a central tool. This could be Jira, Monday.com , Coda.io, Airtable, Notion or even a central spreadsheet. We have found success with Productboard (purpose-built for roadmap tracking and communication). Ideally someone in the Product org asking PMs to update the sheet regularly. This could be a project manager, or a product-ops person

- PMMs embedded in PM weekly team meetings. PMMs have 1:many mapping to PM by product area. The depth of relationships and interactions ensured timeline changes, even if not captured in central tool , are known

- A strong culture of communication between PMs and PMMs. Every PM should know who their PMM counterpart is. 

- Having a robust launch process which is well understood by the R&D teams. This could be updates to external facing customer roadmap (often published online), or monthly launch update emails/blogs, in-app modals, CSM trainings etc. If R&D teams understand the implications of missing communication, they will be more proactive in letting you know of timelines slipping

- A culture of shared accountability between PMs and PMMs on the success of the launches. Mis-communication happens when PMs believe their job is to build and ship features and PMMs job is to communicate features. Collaboration happens in a culture where PMs know the importance of timely customer communication for driving feature adoption, and are invested in helping PMMs be on top of timelines