Lauren Culbertson

No matter how market-focused your Product Managers are, they still have to balance market needs with technical requirements. Product marketers can help by providing quantitative data around what customers and prospects are asking for across the product lifecycle, analyze the product gaps coming out of that feedback, and measure the impact to sales and retention. Here's a good resource for how product marketers can use voice of customer trends to guide and influence roadmap.

As product marketers, we can move from "tactical roadmap executers" to "strategic roadmap influencers" by leveraging the most important role we have: acting as the voice of the customer. It is our job to stay deeply in tune with what customers and prospects need, how our existing solutions meet those needs, and where we have gaps that can be filled by changes in product, pricing, positioning, or customer experience. I've found it easiest to partner with Product Management and influence real roadmap direction by bringing clear data that answers the following questions: 1. What product enhancements are customers/prospects asking for? Consolidate feedback across your channels to understand what customers want that you are not delivering. Is it ease of use? platform stability? deeper analytics? missing features? Customers give feedback daily on what they want, in places like online reviews, support tickets, and sales calls. Listen to those channels and extract the most impactful requests by frequency. 2. What would the impact be if those product enhancements were delivered? Segment feedback to understand how roadmap changes could expand your total addressable market, convert existing deals, or retain customers by providing missing value. Is there a growing competitive threat that makes delivering on the product enhancement more important? How many additional customers could be acquired if the roadmap item were built? How could improvements in overall product reliability ensure existing customers keep coming back? Quantify the asks to show the real opportunity to the company if change is made. By combining impact with insights, product marketers can move from being the executers at an organization, to being strategic influencers and drivers of company growth. Data is power!

Data is power! Feedback is everywhere, and as product marketers we can harness that voice of the customer data to influence product roadmap. Product Managers have to balance market needs with technical requirements, and you can help them immensely by providing quantitative data around what customers and prospects are asking for. Start with the places customers are giving feedback already: online reviews, sales opportunities, support tickets, NPS surveys. Analyze the product gaps coming out of that feedback, and extrapolate the impact to sales and retention. Here is a whole playbook that breaks all of this down and more, no fancy tools required: https://www.loopvoc.com/product-playbook/