Julie Lam

In order to determine if it's a product strategy problem or GTM problem, you have to look at the data. If you have great pipeline but no adoption and usage, it is likely a GTM problem. So you need to think of ways to solve for engagement and adoption and ongoing usage of the product. If you don't see pipeline, then it is likely the product strategy is not landing in the market. So you will need to revisit your strategy with your sales and exec leadership teams.

One best practice Product Management team should institute is a Product Strategy with details on how each Product team will execute against the strategy. This will allow the product teams to align their roadmaps to the strategy. Products teams should also interlock with Sales team to ensure their roadmaps also meet customer demands.

Product strategy has to align with company, sales and engineering strategies. Start with the company strategy/mission, then define product pillars to support company mission. Once you have a draft of product strategy, vet that with Sales leaders to ensure your product strategy will help them achieve their revenue goals and vet with Eng leaders to ensure they have the capacity and resource to deliver against your product strategy (this might be an iterative process). Once you align with the cross-functional leaders, snapshot it for the year and iterative quarter over quarter based on business outcomes/changes.

Roadmap items are execution against product strategy. Therefore, considerations for prioritizing roadmap items should include (1) support of the overall strategy, (2) innovation, and (3) delivering against customers' needs. One is not more important than the other; rather it's an aggregate of the these considerations.

Product team work with Product Marketing to showcase the roadmap and align the messaging. Product Marketing team should be elevating the messaging pre-launch, at launch and post-launch (to ensure the message is resonating with customers). Depending on the organization, some Product Marketing teams work with Product team on customer facing demos and vignettes.

Input from customer facing teams such as Sales, Support and CSM are helpful to the product roadmap as they represent the input/requests from customers. Additionally, getting alignment with Engineering and Design leads is important to understanding feasibility and trade-offs that will impact product roadmap. Less about stage gates, more about grooming backlog and assigning attributes to each feature to help prioritize the features. Attributes can be weighted and aggregated. For example, a feature might be assigned 3-4 attributes (e.g. customer reach, ease of implementation, adoption impact) which can roll up to a score. Then each team decides where the cutline is (i.e. which features with scores higher than X will be prioritized for upcoming releasing).

Prioritization of roadmap is not solely focused on sales' requests; though requests from Sales are important as they represent the asks from customers. In order to get autonomy on prioritizing roadmap items, one should consider interlocking w/ sales on customer requests (potential revenue) and providing Sales with visibility of innovation as well as alignment to overarching strategy.

Market trend is a key component of product strategy along with competitive analysis. In order to craft a successful product strategy, you need to understand your product strengths and where the strengths lie in the overall market and current trends. For example, mobile was a huge trend a few years ago so every company had some strategy to support omnichannels and devices. Most recently, it is all about AI.

Communication of roadmap with internal teams is important to ensure alignment of the vision and priorities. On an annual basis, Product org should share the strategy and high level roadmap. On a quarterly basis, product teams should share updates to roadmap based on what has been delivered and what is planned for upcoming quarters.

Key activities for validating problem statements: 1. Ask customers / potential buyers about the current problem they are experiencing 2. Document the problem and root causes 3. Ensure the product manager, designers and engineering teams understand the problem 4. Talk to your competitors in market on what problem they are experiencing / solving for 5. Test the current experience yourself to better understand the problem