Alex Lobert

The two biggest mistakes I see are (1) not having a clear goal as to what you want to learn from customers and how this will inform product / go-to-market strategy, and (2) not truly prioritizing or resourcing the effort.  With regard to (1), I find it's really important to be clear about what you are trying to learn from Voice of Customer. Don't get me wrong, it's important to have broad discussions with customers that raise topics you may not have thought... however, I suggest gathering these type of insights should be 20% of the effort not the 80%. I recommend guiding the feedback you...

I'm big on updating information based on actions that need to be taken / decision that need to be made.  When it comes to market research and personas, clarify what decisions you need to make based on the information and the cadence to which you will make them. If you use market research to inform half-by-half planning then updating the information prior to the beginning of each half is a good starting assumption.  I recommend keeping a regular pulse on the competition, though. For example, by regularly read news about your industry. If there are public announcements that necessitate ...

When gathering competitive intel, I find the most important thing is to have the goal for it clearly mapped out. Why does Sales (or product) want the competitive intel? What will they use it for? If you start from a clear understanding of how the intel will help, it is easier to provide useful information. I recommend being as prescriptive as possible with regard to how the info can be used to help your team achieve a goal. Assuming you have intelligence that achieves your stated goals, you may need to "market it". How can you drive awareness of new info? A newsletter? A webinar? Is ther...

We use voice of customer insights to inform messaging and positioning as well as our product roadmap. At Spotify, we have monthly syncs with our partnerships and sales team to just discuss feedback from customers. This helps us to understand if our product and / or go-to-market strategy is working and to prioritize changes.  Prior to formal planning (at Spotify this is quarterly), I've also found success in summarizing voice of customer insights and presenting these to product teams in order to inform roadmap development.  One last thing, I recommend using voice of customer insights t...

First, it's important to know why you need a segmentation. Is it about go-to-market and creating more effective messaging? Is it about changing your channel / sales strategy? Is it about product development? Media Targeting? Once you have an objective or objectives, a method for segmentation often becomes more obvious.  When thinking about messaging or product development, I often find it helpful to segment customers based on common needs. In B2B organizations figuring out what types of customers have common needs might mean talking to experts on your customers like sales people, doing d...

When testing messaging, I like to start simple and practical by first talking to the people closest to the customer. That could be a sales team or a partnerships team. I typically bring hypothesis messaging to these experts and evaluate if changes need to be made for a given customer segment.  After working with internal experts, it is usually time to bring messaging to customers. This often takes the form of interviews with target customer personas to get reaction to website / product copy. If your product has a B2B sales component, you can also do live testing of messaging in a set of ...

Two mistakes I've seen are: (1) Not getting on the same page as to the goals for the product. If you don't have a shared undersatnding with your PM / your product team as to what you are building and who you are buidling for you are likely going to provide insights that miss the mark. More hurtful than not providing persuasive insights is the risk that the PM / product team will not perceive you as an invested member of the product team. This doesn't mean you have to agree with everything, you may need to disagree and commit to some goals. But I suggest always persuading from a shared unde...

I find diverse experiences to be valuable to product marketing. When I think about research and influencing the roadmap, what is most important to me is: * Can this person create a data-driven argument for change? That could be getting a client to adopt a product or changing an internal process.  * Are they a strong project leader and can they organize diverse teams to get stuff done? This is a universal skill. Product Marketers often have to tackle ambigious problems and do so with a diverse, cross-functional team. Think of examples of how you've done this in the past.  * C...

I find that the key difference between influencing a 3 year product vision vs. features for the next quarter are about the precision / availability of information. The next quarter can typically be assessed pretty clearly. You can talk to customers / do research into what their needs are now and you can often make some predictions about what the benefit will be addressing that need.  When influencing a long-term product strategy, you often have to identify static needs / jobs to be done for a client and long-term trends. For example at Facebook, it's pretty clear that businesses still wan...