Madelyn Newman

We work with our Product Team in three key ways: 1. Competitive intel. PMM's own all competitive research and documentation, and we make sure the rest of the Product Team - dev's and especially PM's - are in the know whenever a competitor has changed their messaging or released a new feature. 2. Help with planning the roadmap, ensuring alignment with the needs of our customers and the market. Just because Product thinks it's cool tech and wants to build it, doesn't always mean its best for our users. We handle all feature request from the customer-facing teams, filtering through and making certain that the Product team has a sound understanding of what the use case and need is for each product. 3. Owning product launch strategy and execution. We let the Product team focusing on building what's next and getting good features out the door by taking on all of the activities surrounding feature activation. We definitely keep them involved with all of the go-to-market planning so they can feel confident, but we actually share the metric for feature usage. Our team is structured so each PMM is aligned directly with 1-2 PM's, so they can really work together to strategize about market needs as well promotion of a new product.

I've built our CI program from scratch here at CallRail, and there's definitely been some things I've learned along the way over the last two years: * Like Derek said, make sure the documents are hosted somewhere everyone can easily access. And as a follow-up to that, let EVERYONE know when you've made an update. I spent a lot of time updating documents only to find out that people had printed out older competitive battlecards and were not working off of the latest and greatest intel. We now document the date all our docs were last updated. Like Mike said as well, this should be an ongoing communal effort once you get things kicked off. * Get feedback from and align with sales. You might have gathered something from blogs, press releases, review sites, etc. but the reps might be hearing something completely different on the phones. You need to find a way to marry that information as best as possible. It's pretty awful to hear reps not trusting all your documented hard work because they hear something different from a prospect - your docs should be the living, breathing source of truth. * Slack is awesome just for ongoing updates once you've done the hard hitting research. We've got a channel with ongoing twitter feeds and google alerts from our competitors, and I encourage stakeholders from multiple departments to join and follow along so we can discuss. * Set boundaries for secret shopping. If you're not doing this the right way it can definitely err on the side of illegal, and you don't want to find people in your organization going about things in a way you aren't comfortable with. Having a document that points out what is and what isn't allowed in terms of researching competitors is extremely helpful for every department to be on board.

Respondent.io is great tool for this - you can target specific job titles in any number of industries and weed out interviewees based on a survey. We typically ask things like company size, job function, whether or not they're already using our software, etc. We just redid all of our personas and Respondent.io was amazing. I also sent out a survey via PeopleFish which is another great (and typically cheap-er) way to get intel outside of your customer base.

Public speaking. Similar to Marcus' point above, storytelling is crucial to getting buy-in from other stakeholders. Being able to tell those stories in a meaningful way to a room full of influence is a powerful skill anyone in your organization should want to master. You need to be able to tell what you're trying to achieve, why it matters to your customers and stakeholders, and how you plan to achieve it with measurable insights - as succintly as possible.

Biggest hurdle I would say is having everyone aligned around the same timeline and goals. If only marketing is onboard with your predefined launch date and success metrics, with either product or sales lagging behind, your launch will not go as intended. Getting everyone in the same room early and often helps to align on goals and timing.