Angela Zhang

These four things have helped me influence the roadmap: * Quantify the impact of feedback and even better, have an understanding of PM/eng lift required to implement. If you have a strong case for the impact (doing this will generate $$$ in revenue or resolve pain points for XX% of customers… which will generate $$$ in revenue) and a sense of how much eng work it’ll take, it becomes easier for PM allocate additional points for the work. * Tie feedback to company or product vision. Sales is focused on near-term revenue and PM’s focus tend to be on multi-quarter product vision, so I find articulating the benefits of action on the sales feedback (or risks of inaction!) helpful in getting PM buy-in. The more PMM can connect how sales feedback ties to the main company objectives, the more incentives are aligned. * Institutionalize the feedback. I believe one way to scale the PMM function is to make customer and prospect feedback more visible, timely, and accessible to PM. Often times sharing sales anecdotal stories is not as powerful as seeing the numbers on a dashboard. In my current role, I lead our closed lost program. We publish reasons for every opportunity lost, layered with sales leadership voiceover and a competitive landscape, in a dashboard that everyone in product has access to. This makes “sales feedback” more integrated into the entire product planning process. * Think creatively - hackathons? If there is a piece of feedback that is relatively easy to test and can be a quick win, I’ve had good luck getting PM, engineers and designers excited enough to work on it as part of a hackathon. It’s one way of getting started, especially if the org is very eng-constrained.

That’s always a challenge in a resource-constrained world! My goal is to spend 80% of time on 1-2 big strategic projects, routine launches, process improvements, and leave 10%-20% of time for ad-hoc requests which I’ll prioritize based on some combination of interest in problem, development opportunity, and relationship-building. During planning, I'll involve my key stakeholders (PM, design, and sales) into the process and walk them through how much PMM support they can expect. Things will invariably come up through the quarter, so I keep in mind and communicate what are must-do's, and how much, and what are below the lines that can get pushed. This gives folks a chance to give input and buy in to the planning. When thinking longer-term of the remit PMM should own, I think of a 2x2 grid - work that gives energy or takes away energy along one axis, and work where PMM adds the most value or work that other functions can do just as well along the other. Projects that are in the “Gives energy”/”high PMM value” quadrant is where the focus should. The “Takes energy”/”low PMM-value” quadrant is where ideally the team will start de-emphasizing.

I’ve led pre-mortems at various stages of product - from early product concept, to alpha/beta stage, to immediately pre-launch. Pre-mortems are valuable exercises (and I think they’re fun!). They help teams examine their assumptions, surface concerns without being painted as downers, and come to a response plan as a group. For a pre-mortem, I bias on the side of including more folks than not. It’ll also depend on the nature of the product and launch. At a minimum, I always include PM, research, engineering, sales, PR, internal comms, and legal. Also add in SMEs as necessary. For example, if the product is developer-oriented, then can’t forget developer advocates. Here’s the process I like to use for a pre-launch pre-mortem: * First, outline the goals of the launch and tie key metric to each goal: in an ideal scenario, what do we want the results to be? When I ran an auction launch at Facebook, our goals are to strengthen our auction system by A, B, C, factors, understand impact to customers, develop personalized communication plan to top customers, provide messaging to rest of sales, publish on blog, manage PR reactions, etc. * Then, run through the scenarios of why we would fail. I look at two factors: how likely are the scenarios and what are the impact of those scenarios: Likely/High Impact, Likely/Low Impact, Unlikely/High Impact, Unlikely/Low Impact. This helps with prioritization of where we spend most of our time and mindspace given that both are usually in short supply. * Lastly, draft response plans to each of the scenarios, focusing on Likely/High Impact, Unlikely/High Impact, and Likely/Low Impact scenarios. What can we do to prevent - or more likely - mitigate these scenarios? PMM takes the lead in drafting sales / customer-oriented responses, working with PR in translating technical or product content for a broader audience consumption, and helping PM understand the impact of potential product responses. * Ideally, we’d iterate on this a few times to uncover new problems or dig deeper into issues that we’re not feeling 100% about. I find pre-mortems are most effective when all the stakeholders are in the same room, but that's not always realistic. I've done asynchronous pre-mortems with multiple teams, present scenarios / responses as pre-reads, and then have as many of the key stakeholders as possible to come together for review. 

I think a strong PM-PMM relationship, on an team-level or individual-level, is based on three things: 1. focus on the customer - but we'll go beyond that!, 2. respect for what each other brings to the table, and 3. goal alignment within the org. Here are the areas I focus on to build on #2 and #3 * Build PMM expertise on inbound research, around market opportunity and that overlaps with product vision and capability. This is a place where PMMs can really shine when we ask where is the market today and where do we expect it to go? What is the total opportunity and what can we expect to capture based on our product and customers? Inbound research helps establish PMM as the expert on market expansion and prospect capture. When I'm in roles that focus on 0 to 1 product concepts, inbounds help position PMM as a key to "de-risk" product innovation. * Understand PM org’s goals - and articulate how partnership with PMM can help them succeed. In a previous role the focus was on mobile monetization, and the PM org at the time has never developed in-app monetization products. In that case, PMM brought robust market research and customer interview research that helped guide what I believed we need to build. * Celebrate each others’ wins. Celebrating wins and sharing credit goes a long way in establishing trust.