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

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 u ...Read More

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-drive ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 pl ...Read More