Influencing the Product Roadmap

You need to prove that there's market demand for it and that the customer is willing to pay for it. Or that it's a major cause of churn which clearly shows monetary impact. That can be validated in a number of ways: analyst validation, customer/prospect validation, willingness to pay research. A good place to start would be talking to Sales. Are we losing deals because we don't have that feature? What was the impact of that loss? What risk does it pose to the business by not building that capability? I would also talk to Customer Success (if you have that team). What are they hearing from c...

It's definitely should never be about just one thing - the customer wants it, our competitor has it, etc. This is a mistake that's often made when product teams build without including PMM, or other teams. There is that requirement to have multiple levels of evidence before a decision is made, however one I think is most overlooked is - ROI, mainly because it takes so much time and effort. I started my career as a financial analyst, and spent my days doing line by line forecasting of our product SKUs on a monthly basis to understand what our projected revenue forecast would be. I've tried t...

1. Focus group or survey data from customers or prospects 2. Market research study showing the need for certain capabilities 3. Survey data from sales, customer success showing the need 4. Deal loss analysis showing that lack of a capability is killing deals If you have all of these, thats a perfect storm. But even one of these, provided its accurate and unique data can go a long way in convincing PM.

Ultimately I view roadmap as a path to your company's vision to get more customers to use your service. Thus, I definitely dont think that meet-comp features by themselves are justfiable evidence to get something into roadmap--because the market already has that and is it really going to differentiate your product. In certain cases it will help you not lose deals because of a gap, but its not really making you a visionary, so a healthy balance of when to add competitive features is nice.   I'd say a must have feature is some combo of high forecasted customer usage, high addressable marke...

I’m going to assume that by data you mean customer research. In general, it’s difficult to drive a roadmap or any type of strategy without insights. However you don’t always have to do formal research to understand your customers and to make recommendations advocating for their needs. Some areas you can look at are your own data on user behavior and adoption patterns, popular customer support questions and trends, NPS software comments, feedback from your sales team, website interaction, engagement with your content, and finally ad performance so you can get a sense if a particular product...

It can be tough to get access to data sometimes depending on how your org or team is setup. Maybe you are small and don't have people dedicated to digging into this, maybe team siloes create too much process or your industry is highly regulated. If that is the case I'd encourage you to go out and get the data yourself - can you test competitor products and write up your findings? Can you have some friends or relatives sign up for your tool and gather feedback? Social listening is another great way to get cursory data - tools like Tweetdeck or SproutSocial can be great for seeing trends in y...

There are various inputs into the product roadmap that Product Marketing can provide, beyond data and customer anecdotes. Where Product Marketing can be most valuable is in connecting the dots across the various insights to share a point of view and answer the question 'why this matters'. For instance, you can share competitive trends but take the analysis a step further to share 'why this matters'.  Additional inputs into the product roadmap:  * Competitive Analysis: Understanding key competitors, including primary competitors, competitors in verticals, and global competitors to un...

If you dont have data or customer anecdotes, I'm not sure you should be driving roadmap. Influencing roadmap is an earned outcome and not something to just "do" for the sake of checking a box. Think of the roadmap as a business mechanism, and do you have enough to convince stakeholders that the direction of your company should be steered in another direction? For most cases, that is going to be user data, market research, competitive positioning, customer feedback, etc. Without that, I'm not sure I'd be comfortable trying to take on the responsibility of driving roadmap. 

When determining if certain features should get more market focus or attention, I typically ask a couple of questions: 1. Does this update include changes that you are legally obligated to inform your customer about (e.g. terms of service or privacy policy changes) 2. Is this update a quality of life improvement? If so, is it enough of an improvement that customers will get excited about it? 3. Will this update require a change in existing customer behaviour? Is so, is that change minor or major? 4. How close is this update to an upcoming one, and how do they compare in ...

I would put yourself in the shoes of your customers and decide whether the feature update matters to them (or not). You can consider different channels/formats that better highlight the more significant ones and others where you keep customers informed but might be more trivial.   Sometimes, no update is fine too if there’s no material impact. People do appreciate it when companies don’t inundate them with every little update. If all the features ladder up to a broader theme, you can consider grouping them together in a larger update so that customers can see the big picture.

In organizations where you have a product machine that pushes new features or feature enhancements every two weeks or so, I highly recommend creating a GTM launch engine that can optimize to get the biggest bang for your buck! Having done this in several organizations, I start with partnering with our product and marketing teams (plus, GTM like Sales or CS if a B2B product) to identify the criteria for stack ranking product releases. The ranking would sort and “tier” or size release by things like business impact, differentiation, new vs enhancement, and price/packaging as relevant. You can...

At my last company we made a launch tiering playbook. It was a series of 6 steps: 1) First, we's look at product's roadmap to see what was on the horizon 2) From there, we'd review PRDs. Mainly, we'd use the PRD to know what was behind the scenes so that we could forecast impact so that we had an idea for meaty vs light features coming.  3) We'd use that to think about bundling and timing. Some features with like components could work well as a bundle, of which the bundle could carry more weight to customers. Some features could stand alone. This is really about your gut feeling, which...

Ensure you are part of the product roadmap discussions - weekly / bi-weekly meetings. If there is a "gate" process for each stage of development, have a seat at the table for each gate with a "vote".  Invite product management to marketing meetings.  Open/monthly catchups  Have them review messaging and walk them through content strategy, time it takes to create content and marketing budgets etc for launches, campaigns  Create awareness that Marketing is also aligned with sales by creating open /regular cadence with sales leaders.  Newsletters / email updates on new mark...

Here are a couple of the ways we ensure that PDE and Product Marketing are always aligned: 1. Product marketing is included in all of the long term roadmap discussion meetings with each PDE team. 2. Each product marketer has a product/solution area they focus on and set up either monthly or quarterly meetings to go over marketing material alignment and GTM work. 3. The Product Marketing team sits in every stakeholder review each month to see and hear about the status of what is being developed during the release, expectations and potential hiccups. 4. We are the voice of the PDE team fo...

At HackerOne we have open lines of communications across teams, everyone has visibility into each department's OKRs and we have a weekly company-wide AMAs where anyone can ask anything about the business to any employee. The AMAs are also structured with a weekly agenda outlining 2-4 topics that will be presented. We implement bi-weekly meetings with functional teams so everyone is clear on priorities. We've also implemented "squad meetings" where in a given time there are key stakeholders reponsible for a given project (i.e. product launch, webinar porgram, Fed GTM, etc.). Then if there ar...

Time and resource allocation helps me think about this. If I know I have 40 hours of work already lined up and a new project pops up, it helps me to talk to product about when we'll be able to support a new workstream if I can detail whats currently open. That helps us jointly prioritize so that we can spend time on P0s, hopefully get to P1s, and keep P2s alive until there is time. Having a running document (deck with project plans or spreadsheet/gantt chart) helps to visualize this. Though the conversation here is probably appropriate at an equal level. So PMM team lead can chat about reso...

This depends on the nature of the conversation but in general our Product team expects us to come to the table with an educated, data based POV on how to approach a strategy or a problem. However, I would reframe the second part of your question. We are not delivering to our Product team, instead together with our Product team we are delivering to our customers. With this mindset we develop shared KPIs that help our customers find the value in our product -- eg drive X lift in adoption of Y -- and both teams have strategies that ladder up to achieving this goal.

In many cases product marketers are the window to the customer. We’ve walked a mile in the customer’s shoes. We have our fingers on the pulse of their needs, problems and feedback. We meet with customers, sales and partners regularly to understand the market forces at play. We are in the best position to synthesize vast amounts of inputs to help leadership, product management and our partners in engineering to influence product direction. With that for context, my team is currently measured on the following metrics (for a cloud service that identifies issues before they occur using advan...

It depends what the meeting is. More generally what PM expects from PMMs include: 1. Intelligence on Customers - Trends, NPS data, insights from conversations or a Customer Advisory Board. In other words, what are you hearing from customers or trends in data are you seeing that should or will impact product or the strategy.  2. Intelligence on Competitors - It's important to be aware of what competitors are doing, but not blindly follow them. With that said, what products are they releasing and how is your differentiation changing. 3. Intelligence on the Market - For...

To bring the voice of the customer (and all of the external market concerns top of mind to a customer) to help the PM team build the best product possible.  Feedback in review cycles or direct questions in 1:1s between leads helps. But its also valuable to read the room when you sit in on meetings with your team. Are the PMs engaged? Is there a buzz in the air or does it feel flat? While a PMM is talking/presenting, are others multi-tasking or are they participating? If your PMM team is bringing value to your PM team, then your PMs will act as though they value the meeting vs acting as t...

This question is already answered here, so check that out: https://sharebird.com/what-do-you-think-the-ideal-role-of-a-product-marketing-manager-should-be-in-roadmap-planning People's responses vary based on their definition of Product Marketing at their company or in their experience. It's a fluctuating role, but my personal perspective is that Product Marketing should be part of the core team that provides inputs to help Product teams understand priorities from the market. 

A successful product roadmap is one that is developed in partnership between engineering and product marketing. This allows you to both identify the trends/opportunities that will help you to grow your business and an understanding of how to speak to the value once it is delivered. Product marketing should bring to the table customer insights, market research, analyst insights, competitive landscape and business model implications to ensure that what gets built will allow you to maximize the opportunities identified.  

Product Marketing should closely partner with product and other cross functional teams (Eng, Finance, etc.) to inform and develop the product roadmap, including:  * Insights: Provide key insights and synthesis from competitive intelligence, market trends, analyst insights, customer and Sales input, research / NPS, etc. Go beyond pulling all the information together to analyze it and provide recommendations. * Storytelling: Product Marketing brings the roadmap to life through telling the story of the Product Strategy to take it beyond just a roadmap and shipping products, b...

IMO PM creates products and PMM maps the product to the user. So I think the ideal role for PMM in shaping roadmap is to thoughtfully validate and critique the roadmap that Product creates based on your knowledge of the 1) user 2) product 3) market; with the ability to (aka having done enough homework to) defend the hypotheses you create for where your product should go. 

I love this question.  Let me start with an example. What is a demo? Is it a demonstration of a product's features and capabilities? or Is it an excuse to get on a call with a prosepct, talk about the product but spend most of call doing discovery and tailoring the features exactly to what the prospect wants?  It's both and more often the latter.  Similarly, a product roadmap maybe be helpful for the product team to stick to a schedule. But that doesn't have to be the public facing product roadmap.  The job of the public product roadmap is to paint a vision of your company's lea...

I like the idea and intent behind increasing transparency and visibility, as well as communications efficiency—but the answer to this question totally depends on your market and customers.  There may be really valid strategic reasons (you may be in a hyper-competitive market, for example, where your competitors can gain an edge looking at your roadmap) for not wanting to publish a roadmap. 

I’m generally in favor of being transparent with customers when it comes to the product roadmap. It can be a great opportunity for Account Managers to engage with customers ahead of renewals and expansion conversations. There are a few things to keep in mind when doing so: * Include a safe harbor. If you’re going to share future plans, it’s important that you include a safe harbor stating that nothing shared is 100% certain and that your product plans may change. Your friends in legal will thank you :) * No more than 6 months ahead. We all know that product roadmaps change. A ...

I dont really have a strong "pro" for why to do this, so I personally wouldnt put too much time and effort into it. But it may make sense for your business challenges. I think something to be aware of is that when you document your roadmap publicly, it puts more pressure to ensure dates dont slip. If you're trying to brand yourself as an innovator by having all these new ideas, it may help, but you run the risk of causing customer to delay their purchase until a later date until a feature they want is live--which doesnt really matter if you have a freemium GTM; so I guess that's how I'd loo...

Build strong relationships with your product team. The product plan presents strategic goals and initiatives spanning a long timeframe. The release plan tracks specific phases of work that lead to the deployment of functionality or a major launch. This is usually much shorter than the product plan, depending on the company’s release cycle. It is often 30, 60, or 90 days. So, having regular meetings with your Product lead will give you visibility on how the team is tracking and then sharing the action items and next steps for visibility across the teams helps keep everyone accountable. Raise...

A few thoughts on delivering roadmap commitments: 1. Get the product leaders involved in direct customer feedback sessions and events. Hearing customer problems and requests directly from the horses mouth requires response head on. 2. Publish your high level roadmap for customers and sales. Once you commit to a feature publically it is harder to back out of it. 3. Hold regular product review sessions with exectuive staff to ensure commitments are being met.  

We focus on specfic moments where we make product annoucements to maximize our PR/AR/customer awareness reach. We share the timelines with the product teams typically 6 months in advance and then work closely with them to both ensure we are staying on track as well as know how to effectively market the value that we are delivering. Since we don't typically do off cycle announcements this allows us to ensure that the items committed to on the product roadmap are delivered in time for our moments. 

Tracking impact of launches and defining the costs associated with roadmap slipping. Sales deals lost because a feature was promised but didnt ship. Customer trust lost because they dont have confidence in what you say is coming. The opportunity cost of internal teams working on items that didnt ship and what they couldnt do because of it. I tend to view a lot of things as a cost/benefit equation, so really get sharp at defining the costs to the organization that product is creating by not delivering on roadmap timing. 

A full stack PMM requires the perfect mix of “left brain / right brain.” But there’s a reason why “whole brain” isn’t as popular of a cliché. I believe that anyone can build on their existing skills to succeed as a full stack PMM—whether that’s a data-driven person developing their creative/storytelling muscle or vice versa. In general, the most successful PMMs I’ve seen exhibit these 4 traits; they’re: * Evidence-based: They use quantitative and qualitative insights from the market, competitors, and customers to inform their GTM strategy, segmentation, positioning, and product r...

The best full-stack marketers can go broad and deep. From a hard skills POV, you'd need to know enough to build a plan across any marketing dimension (product, social, email, web, growth, strategy, etc.) but IMO its more about the soft skills to build relationships, know when to do a task vs bring in others, brand yourself as someone who gets the job done and delivers results and the mental model to always think big picture about customer impact and usage--that will bring more opportunities which will help create a full-stack marketer. 

I like to anchor messaging to a foundational message house/messaging framework document that all other deliverables stem from.  * List out details about your core persona:what their challenges/pain points are.  * List out your market context.  * Think about your product differentiation  * What are your supporting product proof points. * Distill those down into a 50/100 word messaging statement.  * Be presecriptive about alignment and buy-on on that message house, make sure your brand team is on board, your product team and your sales team.  Then use that as the basis point for...