How to tackle a situation where Product Managers can often wary when hearing that Product Marketers want to "influence the product roadmap"?

(Hot take?) I, too, am wary when product marketers' stated/primary motive is to "influence the roadmap" b/c influencing the roadmap is just a means to an end; it's not the end itself. (This is perhaps a slim bone to pick, but in my experience, genuine collaborative intent makes all the difference b/w a trusting/productive partnership vs. a guarded/challenging one.) Once there is right intent, you can influence the roadmap by becoming the absolute authority in the world (yes, I said world) in your market, customer, and story.

A few key things to get right:

(1) Aligning on success metrics. Work with your PM to define the north star vision for the product as well as the metrics that will gauge whether you're on target. You can then tie roadmap arguments to measurable business outcomes and isolate for the product team the set of features that are critical to achieving your mutually agreed-upon result.

(2) If the goal is to win net-new customers / increase market share, PMM needs to be an absolute authority on Voice of the Market. To influence the roadmap, you need to know, better than anyone in the world, where the market is commoditizing versus innovating, where your competitors are placing bets, implications on company/product strategy, why you win and why you lose, etc.. This will be key to enabling you/your PM to make strategic trade-offs.

(3) If the goal is the make the product more successful amongst current customers (increasing activation or retention, decreasing churn, etc.), PMM needs to be an authority on Voice of the Customer. You need to understand whether or not the product or proposed feature is serving customer needs and prove (or disprove) value hypotheses through betas, data, feedback, and analysis.

(4) Finally, you need to understand your positioning and story at a cellular level so that you can contribute to the longer-term vision/trajectory of your product. Some roadmap choices aren't really anchored in market or customer need, but in longer-term "vision," which is just another word for "story," which PMM (at least at Ironclad!) drives. If you intimately understand your company story and strategy, you'll be able to do more than just influence the roadmap; you'll be able to help set trajectory.

Of course Product Managers are wary. They don’t know what “influencing the product roadmap” might mean and everything about it signals a loss of their control and autonomy. It’s important to reframe the situation to minimize the ambiguity and negative stigma associated with it. Product Management and Product Marketing should not be a “them versus us” relationship. Instead, it’s a “we” relationship where we share the same goal of making sure the product roadmap meets the needs of the customer and business. By taking the focus off one function trying to control the other and putting the focus on the customer and the business, it can lead to more productive discussions and a healthier relationship across your teams. (Also, the question above "How can I gain influence with Product..." includes more recommendations on this topic.)

You need to earn your seat at the table by repeatedly bringing fresh insights and a distinct point of view to the table. To influence product strategy and the roadmap you need to take a broader view of your market and the customers than your friends on the product management team. Invest in a deep understanding of your customers, your competitors, and the market at large. If you do this well your product counterparts will start to understand and appreciate the value you bring.

This is an interesting topic since I have worn both hats - product manager and product marketing, in case of formal multi-product solutions with SKUs -- I wore all-in-one hat. Most recently at BabbleLabs as well - it was all-in-one. My learnings from these experiences if I had a product marketer -- here's what I would have appreciated 

1) Thorough research on the market /industry segment including data that helps us assess the business opportunity, pricing and packaging vis-a-vis competition or lack there off 

2) In some companies - when they have PMs with more technical background, Product Marketing has owned pricing & packaging -- so I have done that as well, you would need to be very good at data modeling to build out appropriate pricing model including margins and such. There are tools to help you online 

3) Messaging and positioning. Some PMs may not be good at "writing" so PMMs can help with filling in this role 

4) presentation skills to talk to customers. This is the most important skill and confidence building measure in order for Product leaders to trust your judgement and input. Very early in my career at Cisco, PMM & PM both shared responsibility to participate, host, present in EBCs and sales trainings. It was very important for both to be technically savvy as well as have strong understanding of customer issues to position product properly. 

Hope this helps. 

If approached with those terms, I would be wary too. For example, imagine PMs coming to you and told you that they wanted to influence the marketing roadmap. If you heard this, I’d imagine you’d tell them politely to go to hell. What do they know about marketing? What do you know about building a product? Can’t be that hard?
The core challenge denoted above is actually the relationship between PM and PMM. It’s not “not being able to influence the product roadmap."

Think about what you’re trying to achieve together. You aren’t trying to influence the product roadmap for the sake of influence or because it sounds like you should. You’re really invested in making sure that your organization is building a market-validated product. And since you own the voice of the customer, these are valuable insights that the team should consider during the planning process.

Think about how you think the product roadmap should be influenced and during which phase of the planning process. If you’re not sure, I would ask the PM group:

• Are customer insights and market trends valuable to your planning process? (Yes, this is a trick question… no-duh) Examples: 
• Aggregated customer insights, sales feedback
• Prioritized customer escalations
• Forecasted market opportunity
• When is the best time to share the latest from marketing? Examples:
• Before the product planning process starts
• During the product planning process and there's a slot for customer and market insights, great!
• After product planning (note: after the process is over means that you’ve missed this release, but you're really early for the next one)
• Would you like marketing input to help prioritize what we’re going to build? PM owns this process, you need to fit in to how your company builds product.
• Is there a time where marketing can review what we’ve decided to build?

Again, the goal is to build a market-validated product. Your job is to help make that happen with the skills and insights you have, and thus, influence the product roadmap within the existing product planning process. If the outcome isn’t a market-validated product, every group will feel this in more ways than one.

A quick win you can do, to gain trust - is ask from your PM for a list of features that are on the roadmap or consideration for the roadmap, that do not have engineers working on yet. Take those features, and use whichever your favorite feature prioritization method is, and conduct some customer/market survey based research to provide a feature importance report back to your PM. I can promise you that your PMs are hungry for as much data to make an informed decision, if you can come back with information that the market cares about "these features" the most, and that for "these features they would pay X more for the product if it had them", they'll love you - you'll help influence the roadmap, you build that trust, and you show them that you're there to help.