What template do you use when pitching customer/prospect priorities to Product leadership?

From my experience, it's usually product that is doing much of this prioritization, rather than PMM. What I've seen that PMM can do to help is two-fold:

1. Themes. Product knows the product so well, it's very easy for them to get lost in the nuances and intricacies of how different features might or might not be easy to implement in a particular order. But this is a constraint, rather than the critical prioritization framework, which should be market-driven. So help product create a market-driven prioritization framework, by thinking about the important themes that will reinforce and improve you company's positioning over time. Be a consistent advocate for putting priorities into those themes, and scrutinizing especially skeptically those items that don't have a theme at all.

2. Take the view of the voiceless customer. Your question asks about customers and prospects, but not future prospects in future segments. Make sure you're think about them, too, because likely no one else in the business is. It's very easy in B2B SaaS to let your feature backlog get wrapped around the finger of your most important customers. But unless these customers are also representative of the customers you need to grow to your next milestones, they could be leading you astray. So don't forget about the customers who don't have a voice at all!

A market requirements document (usually a spreadsheet) has been effective. When working with product, I’ve found that presenting requests as pain points, and preferably through actual customer quotes, is more compelling than feature requests. I would then score these pains based on how frequently customers have brought them up (volume), how painful they are (a simple high, medium, low will do), and which personas are affected. Then I’d add the competitive coverage - is this currently a gap for us, or an opportunity to differentiate since our competitors don’t solve for these pains today?

The data behind the pain points is most important. Depending on your goals, this can be gathered through customer surveys, qualitative research with customers or non-customers, aggregate data from recorded customer calls, or consolidated feedback from sales/CS teams.

This is an inteesting one. My first question is, "Why are you pitching to Product leadership?" A pitch is a judgemental situation. Instead, I'd urge you to discuss your ideas with them. Invite their feedback, instead of seeking approval. Try it - it will change the conversation instantly.

There's no single template for this. Your PM team probably has an existing rubric they use to vet and prioritize roadmap items. Lean into that as much as you can. If you're using their language, it's easier for them to understand your ideas. 

Some common elements, though:

• Who the roadmap item is for (customer segment, user, use case)
• What kind of opportunity is it (point of parity, market differentiation, delighter)
• Size the opportunity (customers, pipeline, bookings, cost savings, etc.)
• Message/strategy alignment ("our mission is to deliver the most secure content platform in the cloud...")

I can't really recommend a specific template as I've seen/used a variety of templates over the years and still don't have a strong preference. Here's what I think is most important:

• Establish a dedicated source of truth for this (ongoing) conversation. Every company I've worked at has customer feedback and requests coming at them through multiple channels. I wont get into recommendations for how to streamline that problem, but when it comes to pitching priorities to product, you need a single place to point them to that includes all relevant info. Otherwise, there's too much noise.

• Include the information product needs to assess the size and urgency of each opportunity. I recommend you start by including the customer request along with specific details for clarity, a few supporting anecdotes for each (eg. quotes from CS, sales, customers), count of customers requested, total revenue of customers requested, count and total revenue of customers impacted (if applicable, ie other customers who you can confirm are impacted but have not proactively requested), and other revenue impacts (eg. "20% of new business deals lost due to this gap"). Revenue timing (ie $ at risk by month, quarter if no action taken) can be helpful to include as well, if applicable.

• Communicate! Communicate a lot. Instead of just relying on what I have to say, ask your product leaders what they need to see from you. If you deliver and they still don't take action, ask them why not. If you don't already know, ask them what their top priorities are. Perhaps they're laser focused on driving expansion revenue and net revenue retention this quarter—now you can frame your pitch to highlight the biggest revenue expansion opportunities on your list and provide the data to support your case.