How to make sure the voice of our consumer is heard when product marketing may not be involved during the product roadmap development process.

Buckle up, I've got a lot of opinions here. I think the first question PMMs should ask themselves is, what unique value do they want to provide to the roadmapping process? Oftentimes, PMMs feel like they should be included in things without having a clear POV as to why. I’ve been guilty of this. It's natural to hear hear about something that feels related to your work and wonder why you’re not there. In this situation, you need to be clear about what goes into the product roadmapping process tod ...Read More

Great question, especially for Product Marketing organizations that are still scaling to meet the footprint of much larger Product and/or Sales teams.  Although you may find your bandwidth consumed by executional activities, it's important to ensure you continue to bring market intelligence and customer understanding to product roadmap planning. A few tactics for doing this could include: Going direct. Find out where/how roadmap decisions are made, and request to be included those meetings and f ...Read More

An age-old question: how do you get product marketing a seat at the table? Product marketing has a vital role in product and roadmap development even within a product-led organization. There are many reasons why product marketing deserves a seat at the table. Here are a few: Product narrative drives product roadmap: The product narrative should drive the product roadmap, not the other way around, and product marketers are the storytellers behind the product. Voice of the customer, sales, and mar ...Read More

I’ve consistently joined companies when the product marketing team was still small and establishing its influence and what I think it comes down to is providing unquestionable, unique value to the team—most often through delivering actionable customer insights. Product marketers are acutely aware of the customer, they should be living, breathing customer research and keeping a close pulse on the trends of the market. I think product marketing really starts to earn their way into the product road ...Read More

The short answer is that everyone in an organization should care about the voice of the customer - regardless of craft. If you feel like voice of customer is not being represented during the product roadmap process, you should take action! Getting closer to the customer and bringing this intelligence forward can often be a ticket to a seat at the table with product. If nobody is doing it, step in and fill those shoes. R&D and commercial stakeholders will thank you for it and you will be buil ...Read More

My best advice for making sure the voice of the consumer is considered when product is developing their strategy and roadmap is to create forums for sharing consumer and market insights. This could look like: Establishing customer feedback loops between product and the customer-facing teams (customer success, customer support, client services, etc.). At SurveyMonkey, we have a quarterly cadence where frontline teams share the most requested features (with associated deal impact), product then ev ...Read More

This is hard, Product Marketers should have even more of a hand in a Product Led Organization. Your team should be the market expert on who this is being built for and why and how do we position what we are building to impact the customers coming in. With that being said, sometimes Product Marketing does not get a seat at the table in these decisions, from here I would use your data to tell your story, your customers journey should be seamless and straight to the point so they know what they are ...Read More

The product roadmap is ever-changing! It's never too late to voice customer feedback. Most importantly, make sure to document your findings are provide visbility. If these conversations are just happening between the PM and you, expand the visibility to include others!  I like to talk with at least 5 customers per quarter minimum. In addition, I record these sessions and share it with the product and marketing teams with a recap of the highlights.  Lastly, whenever you have wins, include how cus ...Read More