What's the best way to communicate learnings to product teams?

Communicating customer and market learnings to product teams is something that happens throughout the product development lifecycle. In terms of medium/format, it really depends on your team's work style. I suggest adapting to the product team's style, so if they prefer docs and silent reading, then that is probably going to be the most effective way to communicate the information to this audience.

I think it's important to assume that the product team wants to hear learnings from PMM, whether it's customer insights survey results, your GTM strategy, market analysis, or a performance recap. I advise my team to arrange the meetings, own the agenda, and present their work or learnings to their product teams and other cross-functional partners.

When product marketing is embedded in the product team, we share learnings on an ongoing, organic basis through a variety of team rituals - daily stand-ups, sprint retros, demos, etc.

If product marketing is running a specific research project, we typically share the research plan and early draft of discussion guide or survey questions with the rest of the product team (product manager, designer, engineering manager, etc.) so the research design benefits from cross-functional perspectives. We then distill learnings and synthesize into actionable next steps that we align on with the team. From a campaign perspective, we typically share strategy and KPIs beforehand and report on performance afterwards. To ensure broader visibility of learnings across the product team, we also share findings out in larger forums, for example, we conduct regular bi-weekly business reviews where we provide updates on key metrics and learnings with a bigger group of stakeholders.

In short, having the right team rituals or forums makes a big difference for sharing ongoing learnings. When there’s a specific campaign or project, we engage with our cross-functional product teams early on so that everyone has visibility, the opportunity to share feedback, and aligns on next steps.

I’ve touched on this in the answer above, but to summarize: 1) speak their language as much as possible by prioritizing customers pains points, not features; 2) bring a unique perspective (share research on an audience segment they don’t have access to, or market/competitive intel); and 3) lead with data (quant and/or qual).

When I'm communicating with product teams, I always want to start by making sure that I'm heard, then that what I'm saying is understood and considered useful, and then finally that what I've shared inspires action. To break it down, here's how I would approach.

1. Be heard

Always start by considering what your product team cares about. What KPI are they assessed upon? How does what you are sharing help to influence their success? If you start here, you'll be much more likely to get the attention of your product team. For example, when I was working on launching a public product roadmap for the first time (a daunting task) I started by thinking about how the PMs I was working with cared about adoption. The roadmap would be a way to inspire enthusiasm from customers as well as prospects and could create higher adoption at launch.

2. Be understood

This is the fun part! As a product marketer, you have the dual skills of storytelling and also data-backed insights. When you blend the two together, you'll have insights that both hit the emotional high notes to cause your product team to care, and the data to attract the rational side of the brain. For instance, when I was working on presenting win/loss analysis insights to a team, I started by pulling a few quotes from the win/loss interviews to help emotionally explain what customers loved and didn't love about the product, and then backed it up with the data around how prevalent these sentiments were among the cohort we assessed.

3. Inspire action

Insights are nice, but action is better! Since you've already started thinking about the KPIs of your product team, you can connect the dots from your learnings to what direction you want them to take. In one situation, my team presenting marketing insights around the lack of product-market fit for a product that was launched. This wasn't an easy storyline, but we ultimately wanted to help product understand what they needed to improve in the product to drive more adoption.

You can do it!

I think this varies by organization and which 'ways of working' your company prioritizes.

Personally, I have found it most effective to create a presentation based on the research and insights you're wanting to share that tells a story of why those learnings matter. Aligning the learnings to recommendations and where they would be most impactful when applied helps to bolster the narrative. My biggest piece of advice is to always have a perspective on the insights you're sharing and why they're valuable, even if the findings are not in line with what you were expecting.

Next, use that presentation to go on an internal roadshow, where you present your findings to a group of stakeholders that would benefit from hearing about the learnings and how it applies to product, and broader business objectives the company is working towards. The best part about customer, market, and competitive insights is that the information is relevant in a lot of different areas. Take a hard look at what your data is showing and think about all the different ways it can be used to refine strategies, support customers, and drive new product initiatives.