How can PMMs get involved in the early stages of Product development, and how much influence should a marketing strategy have on the overall vision for a product?

As a representative of the consumer voice and market demand, PMMs' involvement in product development from the early stages is critical to success. More specifically, Product Marketers can make themselves an invaluable stakeholder to the process by

1. Conducting and synthesizing early market research to identify the product's core target audience and user profiles and


2. Becoming subject matter experts on the industry landscape to identify a differentiated positioning from competitors


By doing so, PMMs can represent the consumer's needs and interests at the table and influence the overall vision for the product.

My belief is that marketing’s influence on product roadmap is equal and continuous to product’s influence on marketing's roadmap. This type of ongoing feedback loop allows product and feature development to respond quickly to evolving consumer needs.

As the PMM, you often may know more about the product that the product may know. This is due to the nature of PMM having a birds eye view across the entire company with how your features fit in with the rest of the solutions. As the eyes and ear on the market, you are also know your competitors, the market landscape, and what your customers are expecting. All of this knowledge is key to help with the early stages of product developement. A lot of times, product spends so much time focusing on the core use problem, that they sometimes forget to "zoom" out, and that's where PMM comes in. Being involved early helps influence how the product should be built and ensure it fits in with the overall marketing strategy and vision of the company.

Ideally, very early on. If your org uses an agile methodology, its best if PMMs get involved at the release planning or 'epic' phase to help shape the bigger direction. Its not ideal for PMMs to get involved at the story level because that tends to be about technical tradeoffs and can lead to PMMs stepping on PM toes for no reason.

If there is a clear hypothesis of target market/buyer/segment, then PMM can provide useful input on what capabilities and use cases should be prioritized.  

PMMs should have a strong POV on the overall vision since they can provide the voice of sales/customer success in addition to the voice of customer (which PM usually has access to). A successful product (at least in enterprise B2B) doesn't just satisfy customer use cases, but is also 'sellable', priced correctly and is easy to implement - all of which PMM can provide input on.

PMMs can get involved early by identifying patterns between feature adoption and personas/target markets and codifying that into consumables for product development. Maybe the engineering team has a hard time seeing beyond the code into who they're building for and what they want - that's where you can come in as a PMM and influence.

In terms of how much influence a marketing strategy should have...let's take a page out of 6sense's book for a second.

Their CMO now CRO Latane Conant astutely changed the name of Chief Marketing Officer to Chief Market Officer - to represent the Market - not the verb (to market). With that change, the remit is focused on what they market needs/wants and how we address them (in marketing, product solutions, gtm, etc). If we have this in mind, then the market strategy greatly influences the roadmap - otherwise, we're building for the wrong audience(s) or potentially wrong biases by department.